1/14/2024 - Giving Up (on Linux)

Hello, Sana/Shirley here.

Thank you to those of you who played the PyNori tech demo. Hopefully you were on Windows, because for MacOS and Linux users, things didn't go so well.

The library "msvcrt" is Windows-only (I was using "msvcrt.getch()" to pause), so I had to try and find an alternative to get the script to pause on non-Windows devices. Yeah, that's right, I had to find an entirely separate library to pause a Python script. Isn't it kind-of ridiculous that this functionality isn't built into Python to begin with? Maybe programming isn't as easy as I thought it was.

I found a library called curses, which supposedly had a getch() function like msvcrt, but for MacOS and Linux. I read that, to call it, I had to use "stdcr.getch()" instead of that but with msvcrt. Turns out that, by the power of untested code for an operating system I don't use, it didn't work! Hip hip... hooray.

After a LOT of attempted troubleshooting, it was error after error, error after error, and even more errors with an error on top. So, I decided that trying to get PyNori to work properly outside of Windows was just about as doable as getting superpowers in real life: it wasn't going to happen no matter how hard I tried. So, I'm making the tough decision to just outright not support Linux.

MacOS support should be somewhat doable, as a friend of mine provided a neat bash code that should do what msvcrt.getch() was supposed to do. Shoutout to them. But, unfortunately, Linux users are gonna have to do some rocket science to get my script working properly. I'm sorry.

TL;DR Sorry Linux users, but Windows is better. All hail Microsoft.