Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.

Not so! General binary support was added quite recently.

I like that more behaves like cat when there’s less than a page of output rather than requiring you to press q to get back to the prompt even when it would just fit.

There’s probably a way to make less do that too, but more already does it without configuration. Overall I use less most of the time but I like having the option.

I just the other day edited a Steam config file with some wacky file extension by cracking it open in notepad. Bless plain text.

I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.

More open strictly in that it allows free software to be rolled up into proprietary software.

Just because competition can be suppressed temporarily within a discrete system doesn’t mean it has ceased to exist. Exactly why ideologies that demand the absence of competition will eventually be outcompeted from the outside.

The health of the current system is undenianly declining, absolutely. But competition is eternal and non-optional, so systems that seek to eliminate it are intrinsically doomed.

Well, competition has been going pretty strong for the last four billion years; time will tell.

Yes, exactly! For all the noxious effects of greed, it drives competition which drives evolution.

Even if a utopian communist/anarchist society were able to stabilize on its own, it would inevitably be overcome at some point in the future by a more competitive society that had martially evolved beyond the utopia’s understanding.

Whether its right or wrong has no bearing on the entropy of it.

What a goofy take. “Having trouble with self control? Have you tried having self control?” Obviously there’s something more going on or life would be a whole lot simpler. Sometimes externalizing a decision through a tool like a timer is part of how a person indirectly exerts self control.

A friend gave me the 6-CD “power pack” of Mandrake 10 that could install a quite wide range of optional software completely offline. Hooked me too.

That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.

Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.

Captures from an Internet Archive sweep of the web. There are so many captures since the domain has been active since the 90s and was part of a great many scans.

Browse the captures for yourself if you like

Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn’t mean it has no practical benefit. It’s nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn’t require a graphical environment.

Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.

Binary speed is really the least reason to do it. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to the individual, but there are a lot of little reasons Gentoo is uniquely powerful.

Benefits specific to compiling:

• fine-grained control of features and dependencies with USE flags
• very easy package maintenance (writing ebuilds)
  • much simpler to add your own custom local packages when you need them
  • less workload on the gentoo team which is good for repository health and breadth
• control of compile flags (yes speed, but more practically hardening for secure systems)
• the same gentoo is available on way more platforms and architectures than any binary distro

Who said anything about capitalism? I’m talking about centralization. Expecting countless individuals to be able to do something as well as specialists can do it just doesn’t make sense to me.

“Personal responsibility” is a red herring used by those in power to try and shift the blame off of institutions with real power. We need institutional change first and foremost.

Off-gridders are primarily dilettantes who have the money to pretend they’re disconnected from the system.

I see what you’re saying. I find it hard to believe vanlifers and offgridders are the vanguard of a more sustainable future though.

I don’t see how all the world’s people individually handling waste can work better than centralized expert processing, especially in more dense areas.

Off-grid living more environmental than proper municipal water treatment? How do you figure?