Nah, some of us land on Gentoo from the beginning, and then watch the Arch people act like teens who think they’re edgy. 😜

Which likely require very specific conditions to trigger and are not being actively exploited by anyone. “A potential issue exists” and “I have no issues (because my use case does not overlap with that potential issue and so the code involved is never called)” are not mutually exclusive. I’ve had no issues personally with X either, even though I know it has bugs—it’s non-trivial software, so of course it does. Wayland does too. It’s just that there are fewer people who get their jollies from pointing them out.

If Wayland works for you, go ahead and use it, but kindly don’t spend your time calling out people who don’t share your preferences. It’s both offensive and tiresome.

My point was that even if the water use of data centers is less than that of almonds, it does not justify the existence of the data centers because the water use of the almonds is also grossly inflated. You don’t waste 999 million dollars just because someone else is wasting a billion.

The issue with the almonds is that there are a bunch of dumbasses growing them in an area that, left to itself, would be a desert. They shouldn’t be doing that, either.

The first two were patched last year sometime. Not sure about the third, but it’s the least dangerous (local data corruption only, like the flaky RAM I really ought to replace one of these days).

So . . . maybe it’s a good thing that Gentoo with GNU Hurd exists? Does Hurd even have an AI policy?

I think you’ll find that even distros that are generally anti-AI and don’t allow its use in their own projects are pragmatic about not being able to influence other people’s software (for instance, Gentoo’s AI policy flat-out states that it doesn’t prohibit packaging AI-coded or AI-related software, although there’s been some discussion about marking it so that the user can make an informed decision).

There are so many of them to choose from, aren’t there?

The additional threat models Wayland guards against have never, to my knowledge, been seen in the wild (and may never be). So any improvement in security is hypothetical, and there are some tradeoffs in areas like accessibility. It’s fine to make your own decision of which stack to use on the basis of hypothetical security improvements, but saying that X is insecure because it doesn’t protect against something that never happens is dubious.

There are, I think, two mutually exclusive XDG APIs for systray icons. They probably implemented the newer one, which should work for most people.

Why can’t Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so

It’s the kind of work that can be automated. Most of the Gentoo tinderbox build-everything-in-the-tree-and-file-bugs-on-failure projects (there have been several over the years) have been run by a single dev. I’d assume that Nix could do the same.

Issues with Gentoo? The only one I’ve encountered that I didn’t sign up for is the occasional difficulty finding documentation for some obscure and unpopular option, like downgrading the freetype interpreter to make it render pixel-aligned fonts the way I want it to, or bridging networks in qemu to allow a VM to address other machines on the LAN without systemd or NetworkManager (still trying to figure that one out). With Gentoo, unlike some other distros, you really need documentation—it isn’t going to enumerate the possibilities in a dropdown.

You’d also have to express all the feature and dependency information. Some packages have a lot of compile flags, some of which may be mutually exclusive. Was this package compiled against, say, gnutls or openssl, if it supports either but not both at once? What if something in a package depending on it works only if it was compiled against openssl?

You can handle this by ensuring everything in the tree expects the same features (what most distros do) or recompiling the offending dependency with different switches if necessary (what Gentoo does). What you’re describing here sounds like a variant DLL-hell recipe.

Discourse is kind of a moving target at the best of times, and I wouldn’t bet on any precanned command older than a couple of months working properly.

The server may have flagged your wget command as an unacceptable bot—as written, it’s ID’ing itself as a bot, can pull a new page every half a second if you get unlucky with --random-wait, and isn’t respecting robots.txt

The thing with the local index page pointing to the forum threads on the server matches what the wget man page says about --convert-links where the target file wasn’t actually downloaded. Is it pulling any files at all other than the index? Do the files’ names and extensions match what shows up in the index if you don’t pass --convert-links?

Also, I’m pretty sure there’s no way to get those images if they aren’t hosted on the same server. (This is just common sense, or an offsite link could result in wget trying to mirror the entire Internet.)

“Looking at browser headers” usually means they’re parsing the User-Agent string, which all kind of people (and bots) spoof for all kinds of reasons. There even used to (and might still) be a Firefox extension that would generate random ones.

I can offer some distro-agnostic observations . . .

Having swapped from one to the other some time ago on Gentoo, what I had to (re)install was the kernel (since I’d built it without those drivers), mesa, and some xorg-drivers stuff (which may not be relevant to you). Also, LLVM (ugh), because the AMD drivers compile stuff on the fly somehow and gcc doesn’t have a usable AMDGPU backend. Or something like that. At that point, the system should boot well enough to bring up the GUI, and you can worry about vulkan and such after that. If you have an initrd, that may need to be rebuilt or replaced. Bootloader should be fine if it’s the same kernel version.

Having the kernel drivers for AMD present in a system with an nvidia card shouldn’t present any problems—without the hardware, the kernel won’t even try to load them. In theory, you should even be able to have both cards in there at once (if your mobo has the slots) and blacklist the drivers for the card you don’t want to use, but it isn’t the safest thing to try.

Just an extra piece of software of no real benefit to me. I’m only interested in single-player offline games, and I prefer to organize what I have using a directory structure rather than someone else’s GUI. I try to avoid installing anything I don’t have any use for to avoid unnecessary disk bloat and just in case it drags along some daemon with a nasty security bug. If you actually want the features Galaxy offers, I’m not aware of anything evil about it.

No thanks . . . but I’m glad that those of you who want it will be able to have it.

Depends on how long and hard you want to run it.

A Pi5 uses a 5V 3A charger. Four AA batteries in series should give you 4-6V (the voltage changes as they discharge) and around 2A (going by the labelling on my rechargeables). So you might be able to run a Pi5 at full throttle for an hour or so given 8 AAs. There would be some loss at the buck-boost converter you’d need to guarantee an output of exactly 5V.

Using four Ds instead would simplify the wiring a bit and keep it running longer.

Might be usable as a compose key for typing accented characters and such. It wouldn’t need to be held for that.

Probably better just to run the original Masters Of Orion in dosbox, if that’s what you’re looking for. GOG will quite happily sell you both MoO 1 and 2 at a reasonable price.