Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).

(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)

I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.

Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)

So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.

Were I buy bread it is on a rack, and you use tongs to put it into a paper bag. You can also put it into a slicer first and then in the bag, but I rather slice it myself at home.

Or I buy it a a bakery, where some employee packs it for me, you can ask them to put it into your cotton bag, if they only have plastic bags.

I don’t buy prepackaged bread.

I don’t throw away the plastic bag, because I don’t have the plastic bag. Because the bread I bought was in a paper bag.

I you live in a country where you don’t get bread in paper bags and you want to avoid plastic waste, you can put the bread in a cotton bag in the store, which you can wash and reuse.

Well, you can always bring your own cotton bag…

Isn’t all of it evil, because they bought bread in a plastic bag? Use a paper bag. And if the bread gets hard, steam it, bake it, and its fresh again.

So similar to kakoune? I tried that for a while, but it was missing some features so I went back to vim/neovim.

I need to know vi anyway, because that is available everywhere (as part of busybox), so using vim/nvim for bigger systems just fits.

Or you get a message at 3 am the next day, where they apologize that they didn’t made it, but that they will deliver sometime between 8 and 22 that day.

What about Lua/Luajit?

In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.

E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.

Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.

I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.

“Some firefox users like firefox” vs “many chrome users enjoy what they have” sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.

• Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.

Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?

So generally the pro of coreboot is that it is open source, but the con is that it is open source.

What I mean by that, you can fix any issues yourself, however, if you are unable to do it yourself, you have to wait until someone does it for you and often what features are available and stable are a hit and miss.

Compared to proprietary bioses, the company has some kind of standardized process for developing the bios. So you often get want you would expect. However, if the money flow from the pc vendor to the bios vendor drys up, you, or the community of owners. will not be able to fix any issues.

Linux support should be the same, regardless if you choose proprietary or open source bios. But that depends on how well the coreboot was ported to the platform. So officially supported coreboot bioses are likely better than others.

Personally, if all other attributes are equal, would go with coreboot, because I like to support vendors that offer that choice, and IMO a open source solution, that you can review and build yourself is intrinsically more secure than a binary blob, where you have to blindly trust some corporation. But other security minded people might disagree, which is fine.

IT guys will stop using it…

No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.

The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.

They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.

They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.

But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.

So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.

Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!

That is how capitalism works, privatize earning and nationalize losses.

Capitalism needs the deep pockets of the government to not collapse into itself.

Well… cults with an exit are just groups of people.

Apple looks more like a cult, similar to Scientology. Linux user as well.

I would be careful about assuming knowledge based on age. Young people might use technology without understanding it, and old people might understand it and don’t want to use it.

Technology needs to be regulated, and I would not trust people with profit incentives to do so.

IMO, it is always important to investigate if a regulation wants to prevent a real issue or if they just mention some populist reasons for doing whatever they want.