Evidently I’m similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.

Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn’t eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.

Depends on what you’re beginning.

The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.

There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.

It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.

I did this for awhile…

https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next

If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.

Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.

You’re just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us…

Just a reminder people who can’t beat Lindsay Graham aren’t worth listening to electorally.

Its the same problem as standardized Unix systems in the 90s. There’s more ideas on how to implement hardware than there are hands to integrate driver software.

When it comes together it’ll be because we either make the manufacturers warp around something like POSIX, or provide a common target on phones like the steam deck.

Otherwise every hardware generation will get the undescribable misery of supporting the last one, from the one they’re on, while writing the next one. The problem tends to compound.

K, teachable moment maybe.

How complicated do you think a web browser is? Out of the box there is support for 30 years of web and file systems, support for socket types that will never be commissioned again and a pipeline to every native media format.

It’s complicated, it’s essentially an OS. with perfect backward compatability. (Mostly)

I have an increasing amount of bile for the Mozilla Corp, but if you’re on Lemmy you probably noticed corporations don’t make the best decisions for you… My question is how many of the options do you see in about:config do you think chrome and safari don’t show you?

Mostly to their benefit I’d add, except if they set them maliciously you’ll never know.

Zypper is very solid, and I can’t say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn’t the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.

They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.

Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.

All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it’s great!

On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I’ve had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.

I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn’t keep up on how that turned out.

I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.

Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.

Honestly unless you’re going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years… But I don’t want to set it up again. Not again.

It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the “core” (that stays the same everywhere and you don’t have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It’s big and complicated because you’re replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don’t like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.

From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.

So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.

Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.

I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.

Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.

This is my one of my favorites for exactly this reason. Agreed, other than the triumph of what little humanity Ted has at the end there’s not much in the story.

But despite being a famous asshole it always seemed Ellison loved this story, right down to actually re writing a happy end to the “I have no mouth…” adventure game in the early 90s.

Speculation on my part, but I always thought for a famous pessimist he thought his warning might make a difference, which is its own kind of hopeful.

Even if you’re right, those organizations still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing.

It’s not a quick solution, but the answer is more education about the space, so that there are more voices.

I ended up on a first gen dell developer xps and didn’t win the Intel nic lottery. Dell’s Ubuntu repo bricked my laptop a dozen times til I moved to arch, which actually had the decency to include the broadcom driver.

The hardware is alright, but the total lack of effort in maintaining has been from the jump.

+1 here for the arch recommendation as an ex ms sys op. Browsing their repos was outstanding for retooling, most of the config problems you hit are a great way into the ecosystem.

It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.

No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.

It’s a hurdle out of the way, and I’ve got some tempered enthusiasm as long as ComEd doesn’t touch it.

Unfortunately any construction is going to have a long enough tail the opportunity to grift off this one will outlive JB. Maybe we defy gravity for once in Illinois.