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.

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

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.

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.

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.

I had a very similar situation.

I have to use Rhino 3D for work but refuse to give up my Arch daily driver.

I’ve been a sysadmin since Red Hat came on floppies.

And getting PCIe passthrough, accelerated network and disk drivers, and a whole plethora of other odds and ends working to the point where I could even boot Win11 took two solid days of work.

I’m still not even sure how I did it. I wouldn’t expect anybody else to figure it out.

Next time I plan on experimenting with the Photon libraries.

I’ve been using Linux as my (mostly) sole desktop since 2005. We’ve come such a long way! But CAD/CAM software has always been anemic.

Ubuntu: If it wasn’t created here, we want nothing to do with it.

If you thought you hated Ubuntu, lemme introduce you to Ubuntuce!

The same shitty, anti-FOSS hyperfocus on Snaps, but now bundled with your favorite evangelical nuttiness!

I’m guessing that zombie processes automatically get born again.

I think the Venn diagram between Christofascists and Linux OS developers is one person.

Shortened version: Snap, snap, snap. Snap snap snap. Snap. Snap.

Seriously, Canonical. Having software that automatically updates itself without user consent or the ability to opt out is so laughably against the open source ethos that it makes me sick.

Patching prod servers without the consent of an admin or following the strictures of a deployment strategy?

I genuinely, genuinely do not know why Ubuntu is even seen as an option by server admins. They try to upsell you more than a fast food mobile app and suffer from NIH to an absurd degree.

Off the top of my head…

Late 90s moved from Motorola 68k to Power PC.

Early aughts moved from PowerPC to Intel x86.

2020’s moved from Intel x86 to ARMv8.

It feels like 10 years is a good prediction for when they’ll shift everything again.

I’m no fan of Apple, but without a behemoth to force adoption of new architectures, we’d be stuck in the x86 duopoly for the indefinite future.

Blacklist the Nvidia driver and un-blacklist nouveau. I’m going from memory, but I think if you can get to GRUB, you can append ‘single’ to your kernel parameters. That should get you into a system with minimal drivers loaded.

Maybe I was wrong? Gonna check again. Alacritty was my fave. Hopefully I misread something.

Vifm is ridiculously customizable but also assumes that you’re competent with the modal paradigm of Vim.

If you’re in a WM, you can use a terminal emulator with SIXEL support (Alacritty is no longer maintained but Wezterm is great) and you can get image previews as well.

Even on a headless server, I love being able to predefine bookmarks.

A simple workflow would be, 'e goes to ‘/etc/’. HJKL to whatever directory I want, ZZ, then there I am.

There’s so much more that can be done, though.

Edit: It looks like alacritty is alive! No idea why I had thought that it had been abandoned. Apologies for the accidental gaslighting.

Plus, if you’re planning on using Wayland with any wlroots compositor, Nvidia is essentially a non-starter.

https://github.com/koepnick/dotfiles cloned into ~/.config

I typically start with a restrictive .gitignore and add directories as needed.

A ton of stuff that I always forget like mpv, vifm, and whatnot always slipped through the cracks before. Now I can clone to practically anywhere and have everything just work.