Have got Debian on an old thinkpad too because it is too under resourced to compile everything. I think Debian is amazing for a solid, reliable distro if you have weak hardware.

I use Gentoo and I love it. The installation process is a bit more complex than Arch but it doesn’t have to be if you choose the precompiled kernel.

The package management is extremely flexible and the community are great. I have a morning routine where I log onto my gentoo desktop before work and update everything; would compare it to raking one of those miniature buddhist sand gardens. Very theraputic!

Yeah the Manjaro devs have a long history of gaffes not to mention the infamous one with PGP keys requiring users to reset their system clock

Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.

When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.

Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.

I remember being stubborn and trying to setup eduroam at my uni library using only wpa_supplicant for a whole day. Hugely frustrating. Gave up and installed NetworkManager and it just fucking worked… my tech minimalism phase was extremely counterproductive lol

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)

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.

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.

Regardless of the drug, someone who isn’t a medical professional shouldn’t be mailing it to children.

Keffals has a bit of a bad stink around her online presence. I think she claimed to be posting sex hormones to underage people at one point, without any kind of medical license. One of the ecelebs on the weirder side of the terminally online subculture.

Obviously no one should ever be swatted. Wanted to mention that she is somewhat controversial though as opposed to a regular activist.

I mean, there were riots last month and then the last time I recall riots before then was 2019 when the journalist was shot. There might be more inbetween I’ve forgotten but a cadence of 5 years is more than the ~10 year cadence for mainland UK (which is culturally very similar). Sectarian tensions have died down in the past 20 years - my sister is currently in Belfast and loving it - but they still exist and have deep roots.

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.