I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .

That’s kind of an insult to the parrot, isn’t it?

Between “One too many nulls” and “The tests are larger . . .” in the beginning, then moving up one notch for each day you’ve been wrestling with it.

Eh, I’m sure we can overrun it just by gluing sufficient instances of Factory to the end of the classname.

And Perl.

Pretty sure the US allows individual states to set the ages. In Canada, it’s provinces that set it. Lowest age I’ve ever heard of was 12 (for limited permits to move farm machinery along back roads in Saskatchewan, although that was decades ago and it might not still be a thing). I had a full and unrestricted license at 16, but the rules have changed since then.

I ended up with a 103-key Unicomp New Model M (essentially the same layout as a 101-key, but with one Windows key and one context menu key stuffed into what would have been the small blank spaces in the bottom row between ctrl and alt—I really wanted a full-length spacebar). Linux is most often installed onto ex-Windows PCs, so it’s hardly surprising that it expects the Windows keyboard layout.

(I believe the current generation of Gnome devs is big on minimalism, AKA omitting or removing features. I can understand the appeal from a code maintenance point of view, but it’s never been a DE that I liked.)

You can buy keyboards with replaceable keycaps. You can also buy keycaps with Tux logos on them for at least some of those keyboards. You can decide for yourself whether your aesthetic dislike of the Windows logo is worth the rather higher price of such a keyboard.

Actually, Gentoo has no restrictions against packaging closed-source software, or even for-pay software. The net-im category is full of closed source.

Closed-source games rarely get packaged, and almost never in the main tree, in part because they all have to be fetch-restricted. The system can’t predict whether you bought from Steam or GOG or some smaller store, or whether you have a means of downloading from that store without user interaction, so it has to send you to download the package yourself and place it in the source directory. That’s considered a black mark against the package. (There was someone a few years ago who was packaging GOG games in an overlay, but they don’t seem to be doing it anymore.) In general, no distro will package this stuff—you’re better off installing Steam and having it manage your games.

As for build times, get used to letting updates involving large packages run unattended overnight. Sort out the dependencies, issue an emerge with --keep-going, and go to bed. Works for PI3s and my Athlon64x2 laptop, anyway. (If this is still intolerable for you, maybe Arch would be a better fit?)

Finally, you may not be aware that the most complete list of Gentoo-packaged software available is not on the official site, but at gpo.zugaina.org, which also indexes ebuilds in overlays and Bugzilla.

If you’re really against Pis, you could get one of the USB-controlled modules and try hooking it up to something like a LattePanda, but that’s going to be more expensive.

You could also theoretically get a cell modem chip from a company like Quectel and design the supporting add-on board yourself for any SBC of your choice, but I suspect that’s further down the rabbit hole than you want to go.

So, yeah, the Pi is probably the smartest choice if you really want to do your own hardware build instead of just buying a PinePhone.

Assuming that this is a tinkerer/hobby project and you know your odds of getting a daily-driver phone out of it aren’t good:

You can get various Pi add-ons and USB-addressable cards that supposedly have texting and/or voice call capability. Look up a company called Sixfab. How well they work in practice, I don’t know. Be prepared to immerse yourself in a large manual of AT commands and cell phone protocol stuff.

I will have to remember not to use that command anymore. 'Scuse me while I clean up the hairball . . .

Rolling release distros don’t do this. Gentoo isn’t versioned. I’d guess that Arch isn’t either. Not that you’re the first person to look at an issue that exists only with some distros and assume it extends to all of Linux (and I doubt you’ll be the last).

There are two different RDP implementations in Linux: freerdp (which is the underlying library for remmina as well) and rdesktop. Each has its own set of bugs. No idea if rdesktop offers better support for what you want to do—I use it, but I only have single-monitor setups at both ends. (It has an annoying bug that can make it require multiple attempts to establish a connection, though.)

Tried to register with gitlab three times some months back to file a bug against qemu. It rejected my registration silently every time (as in, it appeared to take it but never sent a confirmation email, not even one that got mistaken for spam). I gave up on filing the bug.

Or sed the existing config file at the end of your script.

And the issue that does exist doesn’t even require Linux to be installed, technically. Unless you’re an IT pro administering large numbers of systems that boot from a network disk image, there is nothing for you to worry about here.

Gentoo does have systemd, actually—package sys-apps/systemd—and there are optional sections in the install documents that explain how to go about using it as your primary init. It’s an officially supported configuration, just not the default.

(But yeah, as for the main problem, sounds like hardware—RAM, your primary hard disk, or the disk controller on the mobo. Start with The Bleeding Obvious and make sure all cables are solid in their sockets and all the RAM is properly inserted.)

For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia’s proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

If your GPU isn’t listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.

If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.

If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.

If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it’s a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that’s built into the kernel.

If you’re using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you’ve blacklisted Nouveau so that you’re loading the correct driver.

Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.

To set the record straight, since you apparently have no idea of the history: systemd isn’t the original Linux init system, and wasn’t foisted on the Linux community because it was technically superior for most people’s use cases. It still isn’t the only viable Linux init system, but it pulled a Microsoftian embrace-extend-extinguish on udev, which makes it more difficult to switch away. Its current popularity is still not based on technical merits. Instead, it’s political, because most people don’t care about what init they’re using and most distro-makers take the path of least resistance.

It’s true that you’re not required to use all of the individual executables that comprise systemd, but most distros will require you to install them. So they’re still present as unwanted clutter, and bugs could still pose a security risk if an attacker can run the executables. (This doesn’t mean that OpenRC or runit would necessarily be any more secure—every non-trivial piece of software has bugs, and some percentage of those are going to be security-relevant. You’re not required to care about small amounts of on-disk clutter, either, but some people choose to make their system partitions small and micromanage the contents even if they’re not working on embedded.)

Compiling your own copy of systemd without the clutter, judging from the contents of the systemd ebuild, requires setting more than 30 compiler options. And then installing the result manually without trashing your system. Not trivial, in other words.

If systemd works for you, then by all means use it, but accept that other people may choose to install something different on their own machines for what you consider to be bad reasons, or no reason at all, and arguing about it just annoys them without providing any benefit to you.