Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

What about Mouser?

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

OTOH, it is a very effective product distinguisher. They don’t have to deal with the “Apple makes the best touchpad” meme by offering something else.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)

Why would you want to turn back?

I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.

Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.

GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.

But now it’s one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can’t break the world for no reason.

I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won’t theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it’s become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)

Lies!

I see wi-fi antennae. What gamer settles for that?

I want to go to an estate agent and say “I want a house so wired that if I down 82 redbulls and punch through the drywall after losing a round of Call of Skyrim, anywhere in the house, I should be able to reach in the hole and pull out a bale of Cat 6.”