Yozul

Hey, if you don’t think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don’t notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do myself.

It would be nice, but they gotta eat.

Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.

Amazon is super evil, but it mostly comes from the way they treat their employees and sellers. The customer service is… okayish, mostly. They certainly have problems there as well, but it’s not the real issue.

Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

If you think China is any better than the US, then you’ve just switched flavors.

Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.

One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.

There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.

I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.

This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?

Uh huh. You think that some cloud computing processor just randomly can’t run a bash script? What, does the uname command not work on their processors or something? That would cause problems a lot worse than just Neofetch not working. I obviously don’t have one laying around to check, but I find that highly unlikely.

I have a Raspberry Pi. It works just fine.

Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.

It totally does work though? Why would you say that?

Neofetch is literally a bash script. There aren’t any libraries or APIs it depends on, and there is basically no chance of it not working in the future. Some people just like to try and sound smart.

The actual problem with Neofetch is that it’s not being updated with new ASCII art for new distros, and not adding new options to show things like a line for display server or other things some people might be interested in. It’s just getting out of date in regular boring ways.

Most people aren’t going around checking the commit history on every piece of software they use. The git repository being archived made the Linux news rounds, so now a bunch of people are newly aware. It’s not complicated.

Someone doesn’t know what “vendor” means.

I call a spade a spade. If you can’t handle two binary compatible versions of BSD being called distros just because it’s a Linux term even though by every possible definition of that term that doesn’t include the word “Linux” they absolutely are distros, that’s your problem.

You mean like where immediately on the front page of the GhostBSD website it says that it’s built on top of FreeBSD code? Just because they don’t use the term distro doesn’t mean they’re anything different.

BSD totally has distributions. Some versions of BSD are separate operating systems from each other, not distros, but things like GhostBSD or MidnightBSD are absolutely FreeBSD based distros.

Every single distro maintaining their own version of every single Linux app is just a lot of work that wouldn’t need to be done if there was a way of making a version that worked on every distro out of the box. Plus that way app devs don’t have to worry about trying to hunt down every weird bug that only comes up occasionally while doing a specific thing using a specific version of a specific library that only one distro uses.

None of them are better than a well maintained native app from your distro. In fact, realistically they kinda have to be at least a little worse than an actually well maintained one. If you include all the time spent maintaining native apps, universal formats are potentially orders of magnitude less work to maintain if they become the default though, and that is valuable. Valuable enough that a lot of the people doing that work are pushing for them pretty hard.