I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

PHP: You’re not a nerd. But you are at least trying.

It’s more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.

My NeoVim (which can leverage VSCodes plugins) uses about 60MB for an entire project.

And doesn’t have the stink of Microsoft and its associated user tracking.

I’ll talk nothing over a terribly implemented Electron app that devours system resources and brings every other Electron app down when it inevitably OOMs.

I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I’m trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

Hail, SATAN!

I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don’t know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.

Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can’t maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.

They’ve spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can’t even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it’s a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.

And let’s not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it’s consistently returning better results than big G.

If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.

Speaking as a non Rustacean, I’m pretty okay with it becoming more integrated.

It’s safe, performant, and isn’t any more difficult to pick up than C++. C has a weird aura about it that makes it seem intimidating despite the fact that it is the simplest language (macros notwithstanding) that I’ve ever used.

Based on Google’s recent track record of mind-boggling incompetence on all fronts, I want Go kept as far away from core functionality as humanly possible. This leaves either adding more cruft to an already ungainly C++, continuing to use Boost (another Google product) with C, or to pivot to a more modern language.

Ahh Medium. The Pinterest of articles.

I think the entire community would appreciate articles posted in an accessible manner.

An America-centric one. I’ve stopped tipping altogether. When the credit card reader at my grocery store deli suggested 15% I snapped.

I’m doing my part!

64Tib from the Tumblr and Reddit pornageddon. Most was legitimate cultural archiving, but a lot of other stuff got caught up as well.

Base 60 was good enough the Babylonians and it’s good enough for me!

From a human experience standpoint, Fahrenheit is more meaningful than Celsius.

0°F - Too damned cold 100°F - too damned hot

0°C - Jacket weather 100°C - He ded

I was sexually assaulted multiple times at multiple churches.

Fuck you and fuck your trivializing.

Depends on how you interpret the Golden Age text. But you’re correct that the former is the light bringer and the latter is adversary/legal opponent.

But the silver age crap messed with that canon.

My head canon is that Lucifer was a member of the Q Continuum while Satan was a misunderstood Time Lord.

The Pope needs to have a sit-down with the folks at Disney to learn how to properly manage a shared imaginary universe.

Oooh! Let me guess!

Every library involved in rendering the screen will now be in its own Snap?

Depends on how you “broke” it.

First step is to back up whatever data is there. Boot into a rescue distro like GRML dd the block device to an external hard drive.

If you nuked the partition table, there may be additional work to rebuild it if you used GPT rather than MBR. But gdisk should also tell you if there are backups, which would make your life way easier.

If you still have a partition (like /dev/sda1) but the mount command claims that it cannot find a valid ext signature, you might be able to simply use mkfs.ext4. It’s counterintuitive, but this isn’t destructive and will recreate the filesystem leaving the data alone. And if it does turn out to be destructive, that’s why you have your backup.

To recover from the backup, you can use scalpel or photorec from the testdisk package. Photorec holds your hand and can be run in read-only mode. Caveat: These tools work by looking for specific file headers and makes a best guess as to where it’ll end (if the format doesn’t have a defined footer).

In the car now, but I can respond with more detailed steps if your other options don’t pan out.

So Alfred Hitchcock predicted DDOS attacks decades before they were a thing?

And this hits another topic…

Emotional expression is culturally derived.

A raised eyebrow can mean very different things to different groups. Giving a thumbs up in Turkey or an okay sign in northern Africa will have radically different messages.

I seriously hate emojis.

They tell me nothing except that the sender is too lazy to give me a hint.