During this admin, no doubt about it. Previous ones at least had competent leadership that were hired for their expertise instead of loyalty, however.

I think most (all?) linux distros could learn a lot from ACTUALLY showing the error when the machine dies a horrible death

Linux recently DRM (Direct Rendering Manager, not copyright protection garbage) subsystem recently gained the ability to do something even better.

It can render a QR code containing debug information and kernel logs.

That’s JIF, thank you very much.

No, that is clearly a JPEG.

The goal of the healthcare system should be to treat people.

The goal of a good healthcare system is to treat people. The goal of ours is to treat the rich to another yacht. Healthcare providers bill far above cost for profit, knowing that either the insurance or the patient will have no choice but to eat the cost. Insurance providers use high healthcare costs to justify high policy prices and then do unethical shit to avoid paying out.

The hospitals make money. The insurance company makes money. The shareholders and corporate owners make money. The people needing healthcare get screwed.

The system is, unfortunately, working as intended for those who benefit from it being the way it is.

That’s new. Always good to see them add more ways to customize it.

Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?

Steam Deck has a custom solution involving an A/B partition scheme of immutable btrfs filesystems and overlayfs for layering changes on top of that.

Also, what about distrobox?

If there’s a way to install containerization software with Flatpak, maybe. Docker isn’t available out of the box, though.

I haven’t really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I’m going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).

You can use pacman, but it’s volatile and requires making intentional changes to restore its functionality.

The first option is to disable the read-only flag on the root filesystem, then set pacman back up so it can pull packages. Whenever the root filesystem image is updated, you’ll lose the changes, though.

The second option is to add an overlayfs to persist the changes in a different partition or inside a disk image on the writable storage. There was a tool called “rwfus” that did this, and it worked well enough if you were careful. If you ended up upgrading a package that came installed on the base image, though, it would end up breaking the install when the next update came around.

With all the caveats, when Valve made /nix available as a persistent overlay a couple of years ago, I just bit the bullet and learned how to use Nix to install packages with nix-env -i.

Don’t forget the Mach heritage! Darwin is the mutt of kernels.

Fun fact: if you have a Steam Deck, Nix (the package manager) is pretty much the only vendor-approved way to safely install extra packages that aren’t otherwise available as a flatpak.

Trying to screw with overlayfs to make pacman usable is/was a thing, and it was a very good way to break the OS install despite it having atomic updates.

Somehow I feel like mentioning Nix and NixOS is the new ‘I use arch btw’.

“I use Nix btw”

Rolls off the tongue in the same way. And, honestly, “I use Arch btw” just isn’t the same hipster know-it-all contrarian meme that it used to be. It has a graphical installer now, and a popular retail device (the Steam Deck) comes with a user-friendly derivative of it installed out of the box.

Meanwhile, NixOS has a huge learning curve that’s off-putting to most non-technical users and even Linux hobbiests. I mean, really—having to configure everything through a functional programming language masquerading as a configuration file format? That’s just the kind of thing that would attract masochists and pedants!

I use Nix btw.

It’s hard to not despise Collective Shout. On top of the morality policing, they’re unapologetically arrogant about it in the most regressive ways possible.

“it is clear many of the men defending their r*pe games perpetrate crimes of violence against women, because they are doing it to us right now.”

Conservatives already tried that line in the 90s, claiming violent games cause violent children. Guess what— it’s now a trillion-dollar industry.

Our objection has always been clearly stated - rpe, incst, and child sexual abuse.

“Oh, won’t somebody think of the children!”

Roper stated, "If Steam and itch.io had been moderating their platforms as they should have, there would have been no need to temporarily delist games to ensure they were not in violation of their policies.

Oh, look, DARVO. Let’s blame the platforms that temporarily lost their ability to take credit card payments for developers losing money, not the people bitching to Visa and Mastercard.

Removed by mod

Or if you decided to take too long for your morning coffee break. Or if the planets enter retrograde. Or when it’s the 12th millisecond past every third minute since the creation of the universe.

Sure, but knowing ICE took your kid doesn’t really do much to help get them back.

ICE is now an extrajudicial secret police with even less oversight than the actual police. Even if someone knows ICE kidnapped their relative, nobody in the current administration is going to hold them accountable if they decide to lie and say “no we didn’t”. It took months to get back Abrego Garcia, and that was with the public eye on the situation and the entire Democratic Party pressuring them. For every one Abrego Garcia, there are thousands of people who are still unjustly locked up in a concentration camp.

A bit of a cynical take, but it wouldn’t surprise me if ICE started throwing away shoes and phones onto the roadside.

Or maybe a Phoronix commenter?

Look, I’m not saying the wheel is wrong. It rotates, but what if two people try to turn the wheel at the same time, in opposite directions?

What if—instead of risking misuse of the wheel—we have a my_wheel::Wheel, which only one person can rotate at any given time? The multiverse could enforce this safety at compile time by making it impossible for there to exist a universe where two people both think they own the right to rotate the wheel. In fact, it could even make it impossible for me to lend out the wheel to more than one person at a time.

And, maybe… we could make the wheel even better. Cars rest on top of wheels, sure. But what if I wanted to make a car that rests on top of other cars? If we rotate the super-car’s wheels, we don’t want to make the sub-cars flap around—we want the sub-car wheels to rotate. It would be more future-proof to make a Wheel trait, then to make RubberTyre implement Wheel. Then, if we ever needed to make cars into wheels, we could have them also implement Wheel—but delegate the responsibility of rotating to their own wheels.

In fact, we should make it into a whole library. Our other projects could need wheels. Mr. Mittens might need them eventually!

He lost me at that part, too.

Okay, Valve has a DRM API, their client doesn’t support old operating systems, and they hook system APIs in dumb ways. The first and last points—sure, that I agree with. Not indefinitely supporting EOL operating systems, I don’t, but whatever.

But to then go on and recommend Epic Games Store and Microsoft Game Pass? Buddy, you’re deranged.

EGS is consumer hostile and a side project for a company whose main revenue comes from Fortnite and Unreal Engine. Steam is a side project-turned-cash-cow for a former game development studio and makes up 99% of their revenue. If either of these is going to be shuttered and end up as a waste of my hypothetical money with nothing to show for it, it ain’t going to be Steam.

And then Game Pass… If you’re resigned to being a pessimist and accepting that you’ll never own anything, fine. That’s your choice. But to recommend it to others as a better alternative to Steam? Steam has its problems, but it’s not vendor-locked to its own operating system or a recurring monthly subscription. And if a game gets delisted, you at least still get to keep it on Steam.

They could (and probably have) tried to get to where apple is with its app store on macos/ios.

They did.

The Windows 10/11 “S Mode” only allows installing software through the Windows store. It was mostly relegated to OEM installs for cheap x86 and ARM laptops, thankfully.

I mean, hey: it worked to make Apple finally drop their proprietary charging connector. As long as the cost of losing business in the EU is higher than designing an EOL transition for games and hiring developers to actually do it, it’s in their best interests.