Half of the linux ecosystem is personal projects.
Linux itself started as

just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu

It’s not useless as you can learn from it.

Almost. It doesn’t try to solve all the problems, though. I’d say it’s a passion project like Haiku and TempleOS.

From interview: it started as a research project. The author wanted a distribution that uses the least system resources with maximum performance.
He started with archlinux, moved on to gentoo and to go even deeper - found the infamous “linux from scratch” and started to shape his own distro.

Ok, because of this post - I decided to bite the bullet and try wayland again. And it was much better experience this time:

I’ve installed sway “pattern” on OpenSuse-Tumbleweed and:

• Previous time I had some issues with lightdm not supporting sway, now - it just works.
• I still use xdotool and i3-msg in my custom scratchpad script and yet everything is working.

waybar absolutely supports clicking tray icons.

I confused it with swaybar, that’s installed with sway by default and should be an i3bar-compatible. Waybar doesn’t seem to support i3bar protocol, but anyway, after I configured it - it’s like 95% there from what I want.

• I had to force xcb platform for appimage of nekoray (qt VPN gui), because it’s complaining about missing wayland-egl plugin. But it’s a small problem with straightforward fix, so not that bad.

I could switch tomorrow if I could do my current setup:

• Tiling Window manager (sway?)
• simple status bar to output text from a script with clickable applet icons (waybar?)
• the way to show/hide windows on a button press - I have a script that I use to quickly toggle 3 dropdown terminal windows

Last time I tried Wayland in December, I had issues with waybar not supporting clicking tray applet icons. Also I’ve ported my dropdown terminals script to support sway - and it worked half the time, like, literally every second key press was ignored.

On one hand I have X session that currently has no downsides for me, on other - wayland that has no upsides. Tell me, why would I switch?

If it was near the shore - they might’ve stole the section of wire. Copper is really expensive.

Sorry, I meant to write that Github is not a software distribution, but a code distribution platform.

And ‘mostly harmless’ as in it’s not inherently malicious - you can use it for harmless stuff. It’s merely a tool.

Github is not a software distribution platform, it was never meant to be one. It’s a developer platform for code distribution and collaboration. And UI is designed around that.

A lot of projects use it as a distribution platform, but they’re wrong - it’s always better to have a web page with simple download button for casual “ordinary” people.

But, this case is special: this mostly harmless tool is designed and almost exclusively used to stalk / doxx / hack people =|. So, it’s not in developers interest to make it widely available and easy to install.

For one - the error handling. Every codebase is filled with messy, hard to type:

if err != nil {
    ...
}

And it doesn’t even give you a stack trace to debug the problem when an error happens, apparently.

Second reason - it lacks many features that are generally available in most other languages. Generics is the big one, but thankfully they added them in last half a year or so. In general Golang’s design principle is to implement only the required minimum.

And probably most important - Go is owned by Google, aka the “all seeing eye of Sauron”. There was recently a big controversy with them proposing adding an on-by-default telemetry to the compiler. And with the recent trend of enshittification, I wouldn’t trust google or any other mega-corporation.

I have all apps I use daily in the appimage format. Yesterday I decided to try btrfs for my root partition and did my annual Linux reinstall. All my apps were already there and ready for work from the start.
I also have a usb flashdrive always on me with the same appimages. Just in case I’d wipe a hard drive by accident and wouldn’t have an internet connection or something like that (in case of emergencies). You can’t do this with flatpaks or snaps.

IMO, go’s gopher is ugly, not cute. But, anyway, there are better reasons not to learn Go.

1 - bloat
2 - click-bait title

Just tell me actual errors like a professional OS would.

Professional OS:

Flatpaks and Snaps become more efficient in terms of storage usage the more you use them…

I’m not disagreeing with that, but how many apps an average user requires that he can’t find in the distro’s repository? And how many snaps he should have installed, so it’d be more space-efficient than appimages, 10? 20? 30?

hint: for me - one is too many.

Flatpak and Snap share dependencies while Appimage doublicates all of them…

On the other hand, appimage only includes the libraries actually required by an app. Where Snap/Flatpack install big fat runtimes.
I’ve recently made a very simple gtk4 app and packaged it with all dependencies into a 10mb appimage you can just download and run. The very same app would rely on 250+ mb gtk4 runtime with snap.
And I could be fine with that; but no, it’s not that simple, you’ll have x3 gtk4 runtimes on your system. Because snap keeps 3 last versions of every snap pkg and it’s dependencies. I don’t know what flatpack installs, but it’s not efficient in that regard either.

2-3 gigs of libraries a program might not even need. It’s just wasted space for an average linux user. And if I was fine with that, I would be using Windows right now.

Yes… kinda!?
First point is space requirement, second one is a design issue. They are directly connected, I’m not arguing that.

Unless you trying to replace half your system with appimages, appimages take less space in practice .

Yes, sizes might be inaccurate - it’s been about a year last time I tried snap or flatpak. All I remember is that snap installs around 300 mb gtk3 runtime and it’s often 2 or more of them, because different snaps might rely on different gtk versions + other dependencies.
And I remember that when snap and flatpak compared, allegedly flatpak requires more storage space.

I am aware that runtime sizes doesn’t scale with number of packages past maybe 3-4, but I have only 4 appimages on my system right now and they take ~200 mb, it is absurd that I’d need 10 times more space allocated for the same (or worse) functionality.

Appimages cant be easily ran from terminal, you need to link them to your Path.

On many distros “~/.local/bin” is already in PATH, that’s where I put my appimages, then make them executable and it just works.

Why I hate snaps/flatpak:

• 1
  • package/appimage ~80mb
  • snap/flatpak >500mb
• 2
  • p/a - app + dependencies
  • s/f - app + minimal linux distribution
• 3
  • p/a - can be easily run from terminal
  • s/f - flatpak run com.very.easy.to.remember.and.type.name

A somewhat frowned upon use case is to use it to run “background” processes on a remote server

in most cases screen/tmux is an overkill, I prefer using setsid for quick and dirty scripts, it just starts a process in a new session, detached from parent terminal. Or nohup when I need to check the output. Both available on most linux systems by default.