I dislike having top-level directories in $HOME that aren’t storing media or documents. Some linux ports of games are awful for littering your homedir or Documents. Just lazy devs. Put it all in ~/.local please folks!

I’m mainly basing my opinion on my experiences living in the UK where everyone complains about “right-wing tabloids” but these newspapers enjoy huge sales figures.

From an outsider’s perspective it seems like the Democrats behave like that because the US electorate is genuinely right-wing and need pandered to.

I believe you can install the Arch package manager on gentoo

There is a common denominator

There is a separate kernel which is being written entirely in rust from scratch that might interest you. I’m not sure if this is the main one https://github.com/asterinas/asterinas but it is the first one that came up when I searched.

By the tone of your post you might just want to watch the world burn in which case I’d raise an issue in that repo saying “Rewrite in C++ for compatibility with wider variety of CPU archs” ;)

OpenRC works just fine on my PC

I find the Darwin approach to dynamic linking too restrictive. Sometimes there needs to be a new release which is not backwards compatible or you end up with Windows weirdness. It is also too restrictive on volunteer developers giving their time to open source.

At the same time, containerization where we throw every library - and the kitchen sink - at an executable to get it to run does not seem like progress to me. It’s like the meme where the dude is standing on a huge horizontal pile of ladders to look over a small wall.

At the moment you can choose to use a distro which follows a particular approach to this problem; one which enthuses its developers, giving some guarantee of long term support. This free market of distros that we have at the moment is ideal in my opinion.

Rule #1 never trust your users

Yes, I find that dude to be very disagreeable. He’s like everything that haters claim Linus Torvalds is - but manifested IRL.

XFCE would be my choice too

Ok going to try Thunderbird tomorrow and if it works then I’ll see if I can reverse engineer whatever it does into gnus

Has anyone got gmail or outlook working via SMTP in the past couple years? I was using the former with emacs gnus and then it started demanding additional auth that I couldn’t provide via a simple file, then in the past 6 months the latter stopped letting me log in.

My ~/.gnus file was like this -

setq user-mail-address "my.name@hotmail.co.uk"
      user-full-name "My Name")

(setq gnus-select-method
      '(nnimap "outlook"
           (nnimap-address "imap-mail.outlook.com")
           (nnimap-server-port 993)
           (nnimap-stream ssl)))

(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp-mail.outlook.com"
      smtpmail-smtp-service 587
      gnus-ignored-newsgroups "^to\\.\\|^[0-9. ]+\\( \\|$\\)\\|^[\"]\"[#'()]")

~/.authinfo (encrypted with gpg) -

machine imap-mail.outlook.com login my.name@hotmail.co.uk password **** port 993
machine smtp-mail.outlook.com login my.name@hotmail.co.uk password **** port 587

I think I might need to start hosting my own email server because every authentication option on these services requires some extra step or fingerprinting that gnus can’t provide. Maybe I should give up and try Thunderbird to see if that would work.

:grimace:

Use whatever works for you!

One thing I like about knowing find (and grep for that matter) is that you know it will be installed everywhere. It makes working on remote servers so much easier, especially if you can’t install any new packages with your user permissions.

The compiled distros should be easy instead of nightmare tbh

It is quite easy to go slackware -> gentoo from what I remember but minimalist distros might be cheating

Novels

Stephen King is very hit and miss but I loved Salem’s Lot.

Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series is kind of alternative universe history themed where the premise is that the events of Bram Stokers Dracula actually happened but the main characters failed to kill Dracula so he takes over Victorian Britain. Popcorn stuff but fun if you like hypotheticals like “what if Oscar Wilde was a vampire?”

Short stories

Classics like Borges and Poe have a few existential horror stories like The Aleph by Borges. Borges is more consistent than Poe. Lovecraft is similar to Poe but not quite as good for me.

More modern short stories I’d definitely recommend some Ted Chiang for sci-fi horror (some lean more towards pure sci-fi but many are horror). It’s a shame Neil Gaiman is allegedly such a monster because he had some good horror short story collections.

Manga

Junji Ito manga are well worth reading. Often you can find scanlations of the best stories through web searching but the books are also cheap on kindle; and look good with e-ink since it’s all black and white.