If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.

I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.

Agree, it’s literally all I need for my browser in terms of add-ons. NoScript is nice to have but not essential.

I used scoop as my package manager on windows. It even lets you install gnu coreutils like ls, cat and find to run in powershell.

Emacs is the only app you’ll ever need once you’ve mastered it.

Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I’ve not used much Discord but potentially the “gamer” culture might put people off.

Matrix seems good but it’s not quite there yet from what I can tell. It’s got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.

For IRC I’m on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.

*More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason

They already have lab grown chicken meat available in restaurants in Singapore

I believe the DE is packaged separately so you could install that

I love when people say they hate Hippocrates on social media

This is the main development path for most distros - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

Issues are tracked on bugzilla and then the patch is sent to the developer mailing list citing the bug ticket with git send-email. Not sure about Debian but in the case of Gentoo they accept contributions via their git mirror and email. The developers keep both in sync so that new contributors (who likely use github) are encouraged but more established users can stick to the mailing list.

I’ve had great results asking about emulators such as PPSSPP

Russell Brand is such a creep. It’s kind of mindblowing that we all took him as being just an eccentric when he was a big media personality.

Tell me you don’t know how FOSS works without telling me you don’t know how FOSS works…

To a certain extent other distros rely on more obscure distros like gentoo which uses package compilation as the default. If upstream are not publishing code which can be reproducibly built then the gentoo maintainers are the first to know and can raise an issue.

+1 for xonotic - runs on a potato, great gameplay, fairly pooulated servers

In GNU coreutils the implementation of rm doesn’t allocate memory however I believe alternative implementations do.

Here’s an example from the OpenBSD source code - https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/222e275fb89ffb67abe0726dee2b107220092dc3/bin/rm/rm.c#L335

Presumably other *BSDs use something similar? Didn’t check out FreeBSD or anything.

Edit: So I suppose if you are using a BSD-type system (maybe including macOS?), and memory safety was important to you (to the point of extreme paranoia), then you might want to look into this rust project. Or just use the GNU implementation.

I had it on an old thinkpad for years but swapped back to Debian on there recently. It’s a neat OS for hobbyists but the desktop experience is rough around the edges.

It’s similar to how linux used to be 15 years ago in terms of software compatibility.

One positive thing about it is that the source code for their corelibs is beautiful (!) GNU corelibs have been optimized to within an inch of their life to make them as fast as possible at the cost of legibility.

Things like lombok make the boilerplate less of an issue in modern Java too

Yeah I kinda agree. C# might have some nice new shiny features but Java is improving all the time and has deep roots in the open source community.

Scripting languages don’t really compete with Java because they are a different type of tool. Even when data engineers/scientists use pyspark in data pipelines it’s just a thin wrapper around JVM scala code.

Mmm yeah I’ve noticed that my retired parents keep telling me what a great summer we’re having every year and I’m completely unaware of it due to being cooped up inside.