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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • Depends on your use case. Manjaro is in the unique position of having such a poor management track record, that almost any other Arch derivative (or, you know… Arch) is preferable. They’ve let their SSL certificate expire for the 7th time just last week I think? I honestly haven’t kept count, but it happened at least a few times. If it works for you, that’s fine. I imagine most reasonable people don’t really care. I personally dislike Manjaro for their poor track record managing their repositories or SSL certificates, their historically stupid approach to the AUR and the generally negative effect it had on Arch linux (tech support). Honestly I think Manjaro benefits most from its popularity in the tech influencer spheres and the fact that most of its userbase doesn’t seem to question if a rolling release model actually makes sense for their use case.


  • I mean, yeah that would be my solution. I get that the AUR is attractive, precisely because it has a low barrier for anyone to submit their PKGBUILD. The level of oversight and verification is just a bit too low to recommend it to an average user, without a lot of caution. You’ve mentioned some alternatives that fall on different points along the spectrum of delivering software. Something like flatpak is a much more reliable tool in the hands of someone who just wants a GUI app and not think about how it gets to their desktop. For everything else that isn’t part of your distros repositories, there’s really not a good noob-friendly solution that doesn’t carry a big potential risk. Most distros have third-party repositories that use the same underlying tools to deliver software, but are less strict about QA and stuff. This is kind of a bad fit for rolling release distros in my opinion and is probably one of the reasons the AUR is so hands-off and DIY oriented.

    There’s probably a better way to handle this, but I don’t think it’s an easy thing to solve (especially for the rolling release model) and the AUR isn’t really appropriate for mass-consumption by average users. Also, there will always be a certain point beyond which you’re on your own, it’s just not feasible to have reliable, safe, distro-agnostic packaging for every piece of software out there.


  • All official resources, Arch maintainers and high quality guides have been putting a ton of effort into teaching people how to use the AUR safely. That hasn’t stopped some people, even back before Arch got really popular, but you can’t reach everyone. Alternative package managers and pacman wrappers made the AUR a lot more accessible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are good reasons for all the caution. Combine that with Arch increasing in popularity and getting picked up by all the shitty influencers and you get a lot of people ,who don’t know what they’re doing, installing everything from the AUR with their CLI/GUI of choice. Then you’ve got Arch derivatives making AUR packages easily accessible from the start, bad advice on places like reddit etc.

    Long story short: it seems that over the years whenever I check in, users that barely know how it works are happily installing random shit from random people on the AUR because they saw it in a YT video or something.




  • I’d be fine with it, but I had to pin the flatpak to an old release for now, because the redesign fucked up the migration, deleted all my presets and also caused issues with voice chat apps not getting any audio input. The new UI is also unquestionably a downgrade and less accessible when it comes to setting slider values, but I hope that can be fixed with time. I certainly don’t blame FOSS devs for their work.

    Btw. seeing some of the comments in here: is it the fate of all Linux shitposting forums to be filled with hardliners who really care what software you install on you Linux system? Let me use my GTK apps in peace. I don’t need opinions on UI cleanliness and density from people who don’t even use easyeffects, because my god, is it a mess currently.





  • Mozilla, where Rust was originally conceived, have already talked about this risk factor ages ago when they were still working on Servo. Reimplementing battle-tested software in a different language can result in logic bugs being introduced, which no programming language can really prevent. Many times they will actually reintroduce bugs that have already been historically fixed in the original implementation. This doesn’t invalidate the benefits of moving to a very memory safe language, it just needs to be taken into consideration when determining whether it’s worth the risk or the effort.

    Honestly I have no idea whether sudo-rs is a good idea or not, but I have my doubts that any of the other people (especially the very vocal kind) chiming in on this do. Any time Rust is involved in the Linux community, a lot of vocal critics with very little knowledge of the language or programming in general seem to appear.


  • I think you’re just being contrarian for no reason. The market for specialty input devices is much smaller compared to “normal” keyboards but it still exists and has become much more diverse over the past decade, with many new niche products being launched. This isn’t even the first commercially available chorded keyboard. From the video, this particular iteration seems to be marketed towards mute people and I’m sure that they or people with other kinds of disabilities are probably glad to have any products at all available to aid them in daily tasks. Not every product or company needs to participate in a high volume market. Apparently, the chorded inputs can also be reprogrammed and it can work in a normal keyboard mode, which should make it more flexible than something designed purely for stenography.