I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

Ahh Medium. The Pinterest of articles.

I think the entire community would appreciate articles posted in an accessible manner.

Depends on how you interpret the Golden Age text. But you’re correct that the former is the light bringer and the latter is adversary/legal opponent.

But the silver age crap messed with that canon.

My head canon is that Lucifer was a member of the Q Continuum while Satan was a misunderstood Time Lord.

The Pope needs to have a sit-down with the folks at Disney to learn how to properly manage a shared imaginary universe.

My wife got prescribed Ambien a few weeks ago. She took one, completely forgot about it, and 45 minutes later had a glass of wine with me while watching Taskmaster.

She then became convinced that she was actually on the show and went around the house asking me to time her doing random stuff. Th next morning she had zero memory and was floored when I showed her the video.

Oooh! Let me guess!

Every library involved in rendering the screen will now be in its own Snap?

Depends on how you “broke” it.

First step is to back up whatever data is there. Boot into a rescue distro like GRML dd the block device to an external hard drive.

If you nuked the partition table, there may be additional work to rebuild it if you used GPT rather than MBR. But gdisk should also tell you if there are backups, which would make your life way easier.

If you still have a partition (like /dev/sda1) but the mount command claims that it cannot find a valid ext signature, you might be able to simply use mkfs.ext4. It’s counterintuitive, but this isn’t destructive and will recreate the filesystem leaving the data alone. And if it does turn out to be destructive, that’s why you have your backup.

To recover from the backup, you can use scalpel or photorec from the testdisk package. Photorec holds your hand and can be run in read-only mode. Caveat: These tools work by looking for specific file headers and makes a best guess as to where it’ll end (if the format doesn’t have a defined footer).

In the car now, but I can respond with more detailed steps if your other options don’t pan out.

So Alfred Hitchcock predicted DDOS attacks decades before they were a thing?

And this hits another topic…

Emotional expression is culturally derived.

A raised eyebrow can mean very different things to different groups. Giving a thumbs up in Turkey or an okay sign in northern Africa will have radically different messages.

I seriously hate emojis.

They tell me nothing except that the sender is too lazy to give me a hint.

I had a very similar situation.

I have to use Rhino 3D for work but refuse to give up my Arch daily driver.

I’ve been a sysadmin since Red Hat came on floppies.

And getting PCIe passthrough, accelerated network and disk drivers, and a whole plethora of other odds and ends working to the point where I could even boot Win11 took two solid days of work.

I’m still not even sure how I did it. I wouldn’t expect anybody else to figure it out.

Next time I plan on experimenting with the Photon libraries.

I’ve been using Linux as my (mostly) sole desktop since 2005. We’ve come such a long way! But CAD/CAM software has always been anemic.

Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.

I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.

Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.

Ubuntu: If it wasn’t created here, we want nothing to do with it.

Don’t lump them in with us! I’m a proud member of the Satanic Temple, and I wouldn’t touch PHP on my most hedonistic night.

There’s the Devil, and there’s the Devil.

Hey! Soydevs are people too.

If you thought you hated Ubuntu, lemme introduce you to Ubuntuce!

The same shitty, anti-FOSS hyperfocus on Snaps, but now bundled with your favorite evangelical nuttiness!

I’m guessing that zombie processes automatically get born again.

I think the Venn diagram between Christofascists and Linux OS developers is one person.

Shortened version: Snap, snap, snap. Snap snap snap. Snap. Snap.

Seriously, Canonical. Having software that automatically updates itself without user consent or the ability to opt out is so laughably against the open source ethos that it makes me sick.

Patching prod servers without the consent of an admin or following the strictures of a deployment strategy?

I genuinely, genuinely do not know why Ubuntu is even seen as an option by server admins. They try to upsell you more than a fast food mobile app and suffer from NIH to an absurd degree.

Bonus for Librewolf!

I love Firefox… But the listicle ads are seriously tacky and annoying. I do not want Pocket. And I do not want Pocket randomly re-enabled after a set of updates.

Except that you are literally saying that Chrome/Firefox doesn’t have the ability to stream HD when, in fact, they are. It’s just the shitty antics of one of the sleaziest companies in existence.

People still buy Lenovo laptops, Sony music, use Microsoft products and Google services.

No matter how loathsome and evil a company has acted towards their oysters, there will always be people who lined up to get shucked.

Which makes my incomprehensible notes to my future self an elaborate form of masturbation.

Off the top of my head…

Late 90s moved from Motorola 68k to Power PC.

Early aughts moved from PowerPC to Intel x86.

2020’s moved from Intel x86 to ARMv8.

It feels like 10 years is a good prediction for when they’ll shift everything again.

I’m no fan of Apple, but without a behemoth to force adoption of new architectures, we’d be stuck in the x86 duopoly for the indefinite future.