Copying from a reply to another comment:

I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.

If you’re interested in it, just try it out in a VM.

I didn’t—I like to pick up old second-hand laptops that are selling for cheap and tinker with them (install different OSes, coreboot them, etc). One of the machines I regularly use is OpenBSD, but it’s not my sole OS. My gaming machine is Linux—afaik you’re gonna have a tough time trying to play AAA games on any other (FOSS) OS, but I’ve not tried, because the laptop I run OpenBSD on is an old underpowered Thinkpad anyway.

I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.

As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.

I know people with degrees in software engineering. CS is not the same thing as software engineering. CS includes more theoretical and mathematical stuff whereas software eng is about the practice.

It wouldn’t permanently lock you out if it failed because you can boot into a live ISO to change your password back if it fails to change it back to your original password.

Have you tried disabling the AI in Zed? There’s a toggle in the settings to disable all AI features. I’ve disabled the AI and it’s actually a really nice, responsive, clean editor. Just one toggle, and it doesn’t re-enable itself. The whole “AI-native” marketing really put me off trying it, but it’s now become my go-to IDE for when I’m working on a project where I want a more fully-featured IDE than Vim (my go-to for just editing text files eg standalone scripts, small projects).

If you don’t want to do that, or if you try it and still don’t like Zed, maybe Kate?

Semantics are defined by how a term is used, and people use the term to refer to AI generation of code in any capacity, as well as stricter definitions. The first commit is not just “evidence of AI”, it’s no code and just a markdown file instructing an LLM, which meets at least some definitions of vibe-coding.

Insisting “a word doesn’t mean X, it means Y” doesn’t make it so. Arguing about definitions can be on one of two premises: the word is in practice used to mean Y and not X, or it’s useful to define the word to mean Y and not X. You’ve argued neither, just made an assertion.

I didn’t say it did, but also “vibe coding” is a fairly new term that does not have a strict consistent definition anyway.

If you view the first commit, you can see the CLAUDE.md, so at least in part vibe-coded.

Tbh all the vibe-coded apps look the same, and the UI has that vibe-coded style, so I’m not surprised.

Open source benefits big tech too. Eg see all the huge corpos who donate to the Linux Foundation, because Linux is necessary to their work. Google gets good PR from summer of code, and students will be recommending summer of code to each other. It gives Google a good amount of cultural capital among engineers. It’s not like Google has no cash to spare for a couple projects to make them look good and secure their role as one of the most dominant tech companies across the field.

Yes it is.

I think if you’re at the point of poweruser where you’re deciding an init system, you probably should just try them out in VMs. It doesn’t have to take loads of time. Install an OS, try writing some basic services, try doing some basic config for your use-case.

For the vast majority of users, they’ll never have this problem, because they’ll just use whatever init system comes with their OS. I know some distros give init freedom, but most are locked in to one or another init. The fact that you have this problem suggests that either you’re using the wrong distro and should switch to one that chooses for you (or just pick based on one-line descriptions), or it’d be worth your time to spend a day or two poking around with the init systems under consideration in VMs.

You can just try them out in a VM if you’re interested. Systemd can become quite a deep rabbit hole, but most of the others are quite simple and best learnt by doing.

Better software availability/support than BSDs. Refuse to use proprietary software. Plus, there’s a lot of software I use that isn’t available on Windows or macOS. I’ve tried to dual boot Windows for gaming before and I just couldn’t install most of my usual software on Windows.

preparation for systemd compatibility

To be clear, they’re not switching to systemd; they’re just reportedly (I can’t find primary sources on this, only secondary) working on compatibility with programs that expect systemd to be there.

I’m just confused as some comments seem to suggest it’s not possible. There are already idle daemons like swayidle, so you just need to have an idle daemon execute a program that plays an animation and exits when it receives any input? I don’t know of any such programs, but I don’t see how it’d be impossible.

There’s screen lockers. Is there a reason why programs like swaylock couldn’t play an animation instead of showing a static image? Am I missing a reason why it’s structurally impossible?

I also used to use the same thing. Been a long time since I’ve had to remote access someone else’s PC for troubleshooting but I think I also used TeamViewer back in the day (which I assume might not work as well on Linux anymore now that Wayland is the norm?). Perhaps you could write a quick script to get your public ip address by curling some web service that tells you your public ip address, add a desktop shortcut to that script, and over the phone tell the person to double click that desktop shortcut and read out the number they see. It’d still trip up the most tech illiterate but hopefully if they’re at the “can follow clear and basic instructions” level they can manage that. And possibly there are still dyndns clients that do that; I’ve just not messed with any of that for a long time, but you can set that up on their PC if that stuff is still around.

Whichever distro you choose, you could set up SSH access for yourself to do things for them (apart from fixing most networking issues if they can’t connect to the internet ofc).

I agree about the risks in terms of the way some sources present the AUR as just extra packages. But I don’t think you can object to the AUR more than any other place on the internet where anyone can upload software; unfortunately, the onus is going to be on the user to verify what they install. The AUR is moderated by volunteers and it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to vet all of the high volume of commits to the AUR. Possibly they could vet new maintainers or new packages or newly adopted packages, but nothing would stop someone from initially uploading a genuine package and then replacing it with something malicious. Or they could require identity verification to be an AUR maintainer but then far fewer genuine packages would be on there because people don’t want to give their real identity to contribute (I maintain some AUR packages, and would stop if required to verify my IRL identity).

I can totally understand if the AUR is not for you; it’s more time-consuming as you have to read PKGBUILDs (I always do). But that doesn’t make it bad that it exists at all. I think there should be more warnings about it for new users, and possibly some more moderation, though like I said above there’s no perfect moderation solution that would simultaneously forgo users’ responsibility to check and keep the AUR as large as it is today. Ultimately the option should still exist for users who want it. If it didn’t exist, I’d have to hand-package every program that’s not in the official repos, and that’s even more time-consuming than pulling and reading through a PKGBUILD that someone else already wrote and shared.