Yozul

Not counting the time a lady popped her clutch pulling out of her driveway and hit me, since I guess that’s not “almost” an accident, probably the time I got caught out by a snowstorm, and on the way home I did a 360 on the freeway before regaining control. Thankfully there was no one else around, so it didn’t hurt anything other than my pride.

Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.

One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.

There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.

I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.

This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?

Uh huh. You think that some cloud computing processor just randomly can’t run a bash script? What, does the uname command not work on their processors or something? That would cause problems a lot worse than just Neofetch not working. I obviously don’t have one laying around to check, but I find that highly unlikely.

I have a Raspberry Pi. It works just fine.

Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.

It totally does work though? Why would you say that?

Neofetch is literally a bash script. There aren’t any libraries or APIs it depends on, and there is basically no chance of it not working in the future. Some people just like to try and sound smart.

The actual problem with Neofetch is that it’s not being updated with new ASCII art for new distros, and not adding new options to show things like a line for display server or other things some people might be interested in. It’s just getting out of date in regular boring ways.

Most people aren’t going around checking the commit history on every piece of software they use. The git repository being archived made the Linux news rounds, so now a bunch of people are newly aware. It’s not complicated.

I’m not growing it for you. I’m growing it because I like it for me. If you don’t like it, that’s your loss.

Someone doesn’t know what “vendor” means.

People are creating new operating systems, but the reason they don’t catch on is hardware and software compatibility. It was hard enough to make an actual performant operating system that could work on a wide variety of hardware back in the 90s. Trying to do it for every possible hardware combination available now is just crazy. It can also be an incredibly difficult task to get even open source software working properly on a new OS. Anything else is just completely out of the question.

Eating too much of anything is bad for you. Carrots are only a problem if someone is trying to diet and allows themselves infinite vegetables because vegetables are healthy though. Which is a silly thing to do.

Well, they can’t give you superhuman night vision, but a shortage of vitamin A is actually bad for your eyes, and carrots are a good source of it.

I actually had this happen to me as a little kid. I had to go to the hospital because they needed to check if I was jaundiced. Turned out it was just that my favorite foods are carrots and squash. Eating more vegetables isn’t a bad thing.

Steam. It’s better on Linux, and GOG isn’t always DRM free anymore. Also, although most games do, Steam games don’t actually have to use any DRM.

These kinds of lists have to factor in popularity too though. Otherwise the top 1,000 would all be shovelware with 1 or 2 negative votes. It’s not interesting or useful to point out that the games no one is going to play anyway are bad. A game that’s popular enough to even make it onto the list obviously isn’t going to actually literally be the worst game on Steam. That’s just how it has to work.

Storage space mostly isn’t as bad as it is with AppImages. Each AppImage stores all the libraries it needs, even if they are shared with another one. They can’t even know if they have shared libraries. A single AppImage will probably actually use less storage than a single Flatpak if you only have one, just because the AppImage only uses exactly the libraries it needs, while Flatpaks use shared sets of them. That being said, Flatpaks generally get less bad the more of them you use, because of the shared libraries. They’re still a whole extra set of libraries on top of your system ones though, plus they put out a new set every year. Apps that are still under active development generally get updated to the latest version, but older apps that are basically finished often require older libraries, so that’s more space used. Overall for a one off program when you’re not using universal packaging systems regularly AppImages are mostly better, but if you’re going to be using them regularly Flatpak quickly becomes far better. It still uses more storage space than just using native apps though.

Another difference between Flatpak and AppImage is that it can be kind of a pain to theme Flatpaks to match the rest of your system, and I don’t know of any good way to do it with qt6 apps yet, but it’s just straight up impossible to theme AppImages. They can technically have themes built into them, but unless you’re using Adwaita, or maybe Breeze if you’re lucky, they just don’t, and having to rebuild your own custom AppImage completely defeats the main benefit of using AppImages.

On my main PC I use for gaming I run Arch and prefer native packages whenever I can use them. I’m quite happy to have this one computer by a hobby project, and native applications just make more sense on something as up to date as Arch when they’re available. I have started to prefer Flatpak over AUR packages though. The AUR is pretty overrated, in my opinion.

On my laptop and anything else I install Linux on I usually just use LMDE, and I’ll often prefer the Flatpak, just because it’s way more up to date. There are some apps that Mint keeps up to date native versions of, and there are some apps that come preinstalled that I just don’t care about having the latest version of, but for everything else I usually just download the Flatpak.