A human who has opinions

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’m a guy who prefers community based distros. They don’t have business decisions get in the way of the needs of the community. It ain’t perfect, but it’s worth the tradeoffs for me. Debian for stuff I don’t want to constantly mess with. Arch for the express purpose of constantly messing with (and sometimes messing up).




  • Helping a strategic trade ally and making it clear that they have the backing of the US in more than just words seems to me like something that would make invading Taiwan even more risky than an amphibious invasion would already be. It’s not like Taiwan (or the US) is going to invade the mainland, so I can see why this is, and has been, the foreign policy of the US. The US aircraft carrier group that’s patroling the area and the commitment to defend Taiwan in the TRA are already a thing. This is just following through on commitments already announced. I don’t see a way that this transfer of weapons could be used as a pretense for an attack where the international response wouldn’t be extremely negative towards mainline China. I don’t agree with a lot of the foreign policy of the US, but I can see how they justify it with their own interests.







  • For general gaming news, I go with Jeff Gerstmann and the Nextlander guys. For more technically focused stuff, it’s hard to beat Digital Foundry and their methodology of focusing on the user experience over benchmark numbers. I think all of those folks have been around long enough to be above chasing the hype cycle for traffic and they all have context from decades of being in the industry. Rich from DF started working in games media in 1990 and Jeff started working at Gamespot in 1996. It’s hard to find other folks who have been in the industry that long and still working in games coverage.



  • It’s an immutable filesystem fork of Arch, not vanilla Arch. It’s as stable as any operating system is, doesn’t update in the same way Arch does, and doesn’t even allow the user sudo privilege. Also, you don’t even need to interface with Linux. The front end is extremely intuitive, but you also have the option of a pretty great KDE Plasma desktop mode if you switch over. Fortunately, it has no Candy Crush, Teams, or Cortana in the Start Menu.


  • They switched from a Debian based OS to an Arch based immutable fork for the Deck. There are folks who have built a close version to SteamOS 3, but there would be no need if Valve would just release the official OS. I can’t imagine why they haven’t. It would only make it cheaper for other hardware manufacturers to release a product. I don’t know how much of the Ally’s price is just covering the Windows license, but it has to be a substantial percentage of the overall retail price.





  • While Arch does allow a user to do a lot, including breaking their system, I would note that it’s not a herculean task to build and run a stable machine. I broke my Arch system a few times by going against best-practices and it did teach me about some risks, but I knew exactly what I did and why it broke every time. It taught me how to quickly recover, which is good to know for any OS.

    I’d call myself an intermediate enthusiast and I don’t have a career that uses Linux, but I have never found Arch “hard”. It just takes some reading and a little patience. The Arch Wiki has a majority of the answers, but if you have tried and failed to find the answer you need, the community is extremely savvy and are there to help you. They just prefer you to dig into the wiki and try for yourself before asking for help.