Libre (from French) is sometimes used to solve the ambiguity of the word free in the English language, but it sounds kinda awkward in English and there’s certainly no consensus that this should be the official replacement, or that the term free even needs replacement.

Furthermore, the FSF who originally came up with the idea of “free software” still exists and is still called the Free Software Foundation, though Stallman uses both terms interchangeably.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

That’s not necessarily the fault of systemd.

No, but the error being hard to debug, and not being able to cancel the timeout as it’s occurring, is though.

Anyway that is been fixed on modern systems

No, I’ve had it happen more recently (I wanna say less than a month ago) with network mounts and random systemd controlled desktop processes that refuse to die.

Everybody gangsta until A stop job is running for…

As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?

Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?

Let’s say you want to start ssh-agent when you login to your desktop environment. Well, there’s a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you’d have to do it another way (autostart script or something).

Counterpoint: To install this program curl ... | sudo bash

Just run DDU bro.

Just run scansfx /now bro.

Just run oobe\bypassnro bro.

Just run Chris Titus Tech Tool bro.

No Linux is too hard bro.

the installer completely shit itself and the screen went black, could not recover from it

I don’t think that this is the standard experience people have. I’ve installed Windows 11 more than a few times for family members and for my gaming pc, and while I find Windows insufferably annoying, black screens were not part of the experience.

weird issues with my rgb and fan control software

That’s the motherboard manufacturers, that’s not on Windows.

All motherboard manufacturer software plain sucks. MSI, Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte … the lot of them. Just don’t install that garbage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM

That’s not really the point. The point this post is making is that third party software is often not available as a package for your distro. It’s been a minute since I used Slackware, but I doubt you can find neatly built tgz slackware packages of Steam or the Nvidia drivers.

I know Slackware has slackbuilds and you can install sbopkg to search for packages and automatically build them, but that goes a bit beyond “just use your package manager”.

So you can’t become root on your system unless you switch to that tty? That sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.

Me use apt. Why use many letter when few letter do trick?

I … have no problems with that. I wouldn’t do what you do, but it’s your server and kate’s a good GUI editor. I use it too when I’m in a GUI workflow. The only issue I have with kate is that it hangs if a mountpoint (NFS or Samba share) is temporarily unavailable.

Personally I am of the nonanoist denomination. I will curse all the demons of hell when on a new system I type vipw or systemctl edit some.service and I am unexpectedly faced with the demon called nano. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this pityful excuse for an editor, this usurper of editing powers, this illegitimate occupier of the editor symlink. How dare you insult me, the omnipotent god called root, by presenting me with a training tool for novices?!

Fortunately, there are ancient spells that can nullify its powers. ‘I command you: be gone Satan’, I will utter under my breath as I carefully type in the magic incantation to cast it back into the fiery chasm from whence it came:

apt -y purge nano

The thing is, simple can mean two things, and they are quite often at odds with each other.

It can mean simple to understand, or simple to use.

For example, a piece of software that’s just a binary, a config file and a man page describing the config file and the software’s behavior is generally quite easy to understand. Like, you can fit the idea of the program entirely into your mind and “comprehend” it, though it may not be easy to use for a novice.

By contrast, a piece of software that contains additional layers for easy of use, like a GUI to edit options, may be simple to use, but not necessarily simple to understand. The additional layers add more complexity that does not contribute to core functionality of the program, it can become unclear what gets changed where when you click on buttons, the config file is likely not documented, human readable or editable, or it may even be a completely opaque configuration database (the registry), … So making the software more simple to use, often makes it harder to comprehend.

I, and I think many other nerds, like software that is simple in the “comprehensible” sense, we want to be able to wrap our head around it completely and we don’t mind putting in a little bit of effort to achieve that comprehension, whereas other people prefer to hit the ground running.

LOL yes, I had a look at those too when I was looking for a more minimal terminal. Noped the fuck out when I read you had to recompile the tools to configure them.

It’s not that this is beyond my skill level, but that is just so … why would I want to do that?

I installed Debian Buster and ran Firefox on my Pentium 3 750 a couple of years ago. It wasn’t very fast or very usable, but I ran it.

I mostly use that system for retro games in DOS 6.2 and Windows 98. The Debian installation is my utility OS for when I want to transfer new stuff to the DOS partitions, because it’s way easier to connect it to the network.

That reminds me … another annoying thing Google did was list my private jellyfin instance as a “deceptive site”, after it had uninvitedly crawled it.

A common issue it seems.

cgnat

Ew

What I used to do was: I put jellyfin behind an nginx reverse proxy, on a separate vhost (so on a unique domain). Then I added basic authentication (a htpasswd file) with an unguessable password on the whole domain. Then I added geoip firewall rules so that port 443 was only reachable from the country I was in. I live in small country, so this significantly limits exposure.

Downside of this approach: basic auth is annoying. The jellyfin client doesn’t like it … so I had to use a browser to stream.

Nowadays, I put all my services behind a wireguard VPN and I expose nothing else. Only issue I’ve had is when I was on vacation in a bnb and they used the same IP range as my home network :-|