Awesome. Thanks!

It’s the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I’m going to buy a SteamDeck.

Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn’t a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a “portable app” either doesn’t use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there’s a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There’s lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

.RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point…

Source: I’ve built installer packages for various operating systems.

Same here. I daresay my phone is now finally again as nice as in the early days of smart phones.

That’s the most evil thing I’ve heard in awhile, and I would absolutely make use of it anyway.

You’re right on all points.

I hope we at least get lots of lazy news reporting that refers to the lead actor as playing the part of “Zelda” - ideally live streamed and in-person, in front of the actress who plays “Zelda”.

“Well sorrrrryyyy, Princess.”

Some amusing context (as a big Mercurial fan, myself):

According to the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Mercurial is the 4th most popular response, beaten only by Git, Subversion, and “I don’t use version control”.

Git was roughly 94x as popular as Mercurial.

“I don’t use version control.” was a bit more than 4x as popular as Mercurial.

I’m confused. Google Services normally reach my news feed when they’re being abruptly discontinued. The headline doesn’t read like anything is being discontinued. I’m unsure what to make of this.

I guess I might check it out, if it’s still around in a few more years.

Edit: I wouldn’t be posting this cranky comment if I was still posting on Google Wave. Google Wave was pretty great.

As someone knowledgeable on the subject, this was my journey:

Mozilla: “While HTTPS encryts web page contents, many middlemen can still see the URL of the sites you visit.”

Me: “Yes, we know this is a problem. It has been for a long time. But if you’re adding some kind of complex new solution, it’s going to cause issues for…”

Mozilla: “We added public key encryption to DNS.”

Me: “Oh shit, that’s really smart, and it’ll just work.”

The brilliance of this move is public key encryption is old and widely supported and DNS is old and universally supported. I think we will see broad support roll out quickly on this one (at least compared to glacial scale of changes across the Internet.)

I’m excited to give it a try.

That’s right.

But only because “Vim vs Emacs” is a technically a religious holy war.

why must they all be foreign memes from the Americas?

We have the best memes. We are a meme force to be reckoned with.

Also, we’re desperate for some mirth to lighten the burden of how horrible some of our politicians are.

Nice. Your excellent suggestion probably belongs in a meta-package somewhere so that users get it for free when appropriate.

I learned that lesson on a Snorlax, and so I have not thrown a Masterball since. Sure, I’ve got a complete Pokedex, and this appears to be a perfect stats shiny legendary, but that’s no reason for me to waste a Masterball.

I have a Snorlax in a Masterball somewhere, and I can attest - it also felt bad to get to Zapdos and try to use “REST” to make up for not having a Masterball. Lol.

The Ctrl+W salute!

You might find good resources at https://carpentries.org/community-lessons

First: Linux is the street racing scene of the PC world. You can customize everything, and it’s going to be faster and more responsive. Also if someone just wants to build a really cool custom experience, there’s very cool stuff possibld do on Windows, but that road eventually leads to Linux.

Second: Linux is the long haul huge truck engine of the Internet. Big data processing only runs on Linux*. I’ve met one Windows supercomputer and one Mac supercomputer. Both are long retired now.

*The interesting exception to this is payments processing, which has a lot of Windows and Mainframe still. But while that workload is big, it’s dwarfed by the Internet backbone and supercomputer jobs that run on Linux.

Something like 99.9% of the Internet now runs on Linux.**

**Please no one reply to me about your .Net shop. I’ve worked at them too, but they’re a substantial minority now, and they still mostly deploy to Azure which is mostly running Linux.

Third: Free stuff. Most open source software is written for Linux, and only ported to Windows after it gets really popular. So on Linux, your options for good free software are much nicer.

I feel seen.