I’ve never talked to an Arch user about Linux, so I dunno how toxic their community is. But I do read Arch documentation, and it’s fantastic. Arch’s documentation has (for me, anyway) taken the place that used to be held by the old HOWTOs back in the early days.

The kind of cooperation required to accomplish this doesn’t speak of a toxic community to me. I didn’t watch the video since I don’t watch YouTube on my phone, but I’m guessing it’s not the Arch community that has issues but annoying teenage “I’m more 1337 than you” jackwads that are the turd in the Linux punchbowl. Those little cretins are drawn to distros like Arch because they like feeling superior to the “normie” users.

I should know, I used to be like that thirty years ago. Most of us grow out of it after we start getting laid.

Install xterm. Bam, you’ve got sixel support.

So it did. That’s interesting.

It was the fact that they used RPMs that made me think they were a Red Hat derivative. I didn’t care for Red Hat (I ran Slackware back then, switching to Debian around Hamm) so I never gave them a chance. Pity.

It never caught on in the states.

IIRC it was originally based on Red Hat (back when Red Hat Linux was a thing), wasn’t it?

Except the ones that aren’t.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

That’s true. Without economic pressure it’s a lot harder to get governments to cooperate, though. If economics favor you it’s easier to get the right laws passed.

Economic reasons are the best reasons. They’re the reasons that work.

I don’t think it matters why we move away from oil, as long as we do.

There is a shortage of cheap oil.

Time was you could find it bubbling up on the surface. Then you had to dig for it. Then you had to frack. Then oil was expensive enough to justify going back to the old oilfields and pumping water down some of them to push it into the others.

Sure, there’s oil there, but it’s harder and harder to get. That’s why protected areas that still have easy oil are a target for the oil companies.

I had a guy from Florida tell me that the oil wells just fill up again after you empty them, so the whole oil shortage is a scam.

I mean, they do, for a while anyway… but it’s like that last little bit of a milkshake that you never quite get through a straw. There’s no new oil - it’s just the stuff that is just now making it into the well. He thought you just waited a handful of years and you’d have another gusher.

I Love Lucy started in '51. Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home started in '54 (shorts, music & skits). The Honeymooners started in '56. The Donna Reed Show started in '58. Dobie Gillis started in '59.

Bear in mind that TV shows in that period usually displayed a highly idealized way of life (The Honeymooners less than the others). If you want to know what life was like in that period, Leave it to Beaver isn’t going to help you. Books are your friend there.

I miss Wordperfect, although I don’t miss the templates everyone had on their keyboards.

I mostly wish Word had “show codes.”

That’s why I use it too. Netscape was hopelessly outdated and Internet Explorer didn’t run on Linux. Once Mozilla was stable enough to use, I switched. I’ve never had a reason to change.

The description makes me think of The Great Lebowski.

Lennart Poettering has entered the chat

Did he say that because the answer to IF it worked was no?

Pulseaudio was always buggy for me. I’ve only tried pipewire recently and so far I’ve had no issues.

The only downside is that (from having to do so much troubleshooting) I know more or less how to configure and tweak pulseaudio. If I ever decide to do weird sound things with pipewire, I’m starting from scratch.

jwz addressed this, actually, by responding, “Who hurt you?”

Other than rumors that HiDPI stuff works better on Wayland (which only affects me on my laptop since I was stupid enough to buy a 4k one), I’ve seen no real reason to switch away from X. It’s always just worked for me, and has since the 90s.

Maybe I’ll reevaluate again in another decade. Perhaps Wayland will be finished by then.