I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…

Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.

RustyTrombone: An unusual musical instrument. (Urban Dictionary)

Java class names look like German compound nouns though

I believe if the instance is still up then it will still work up until a daily limit is reached. Most of them appear to be broken because the limit is fairly low.

If you ever try it again just go for ubuntu. That distro hides a lot of the complexity from the user.

Steam runtime includes a lot of common static libraries that most games expect to be there. This means that older games will still work even though the wider OS might not have 32bit libs present.

Those quotes are heinous and I agree he sounds like a piece of shit. It’s also true that the book he wrote is worth reading.

I still read HP Lovecraft too even though he was an irredeemable racist POS.

First time hearing this and at face value he sounds like an asshole but I don’t see how it’s relevant to free software. The book itself is a classic which is still worth reading.

FOSS attracts a lot of strong personalities. Stallman is a weirdo but everyone still uses GCC and I’m still personally using emacs.

UB is only one class of error though. I get nervous when people talk about re-writing battle hardened code which has been used - and reviewed by the community - for decades because there are going to be many subtleties and edge cases which are not immediately apparent for any developer attempting a re-implementation.

Yeah the interface for it - and functionality - is more like nano than actual Emacs.

I was trying to write a custom Strategy for an objectMapper in Java. Foolishly decided to ask ChatGPT about it and got instructions which suggested an implementation that was the inverse of how Strategies actually work. Stuck for an afternoon.

Then in the evening I read the docs and put it together in half an hour from scratch. Lesson learned about the stochastic parrots.

Would 2nd this suggestion. It is also often possible to swap to using the arch repos after you’ve got the install setup and you are happy with it on these distros.

The Manjaro team have had well publicised mistakes in the past which I think the community were right to highlight. However to be fair to them it was like a decade ago they had the PGP one, and they seem to have become a more professional outfit since then.

Probably possible if you use Gentoo as the base but keep portage off your $PATH. Ultimately a setup like this will end up being dominated by one of the distros since mixing them properly will cause collisions and headaches.

Especially when Rust has limited support for less common architectures. This has been forcing distros like gentoo to drop support for more niche arches since many common packages like python-cryptography are now pulling in rust as a mandatory dep.

I wouldn’t personally use Arch on a server. The rolling release could cause a lot of problems, especially since you lack the ability to seamlessly integrate older versions of packages like with gentoo masking.

I personally like DWM and use it as my main window manager. Caveat emptor though, the suckless devs are a bit weird. Bit of a bad smell around their politics even though they claim to be apolitical.

Nice to hear from a current slackware user. Quite often these threads are populated by arch and gentoo users speculating or reminiscing about a time they used it once for a month while they were still in school.

I was talking to that guy on IRC yesterday. He was saying he still stands by his defence of Kovid in that thread. The people asking for the change were not submitting patches, just demanding that he undertake a multi-year porting effort because they wanted him to. Ultimately it did end up being ported to py3 and the process did take several years in the end.

Is Goyal still trying to maintain python 2 by himself? That thread was very funny a few years ago https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107