Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

That has been my experience recently. I had the same mindset as you until a critical piece of software I use shat the bed on Arch (LiveCaptions) that affected my being able to watch training videos for work.

Because it was time critical and I didn’t feel like possibly breaking other things for one package, I grabbed the flatpak. It came with its own nvidia driver package (mine was newer) and it worked out of the box without having to mess with anything and that was enough to change my hardline view on that.

Now it’s just another tool to use in an emergency when important things randomly break.

No matter what you do, crying is inevitable.

Bitlocker.

I’ll decrypt it one day…

Piggybacking onto this, MenuLibre also works and the “hide from menus” setting does exactly that if a GUI is preferable. I used it to hide a bunch of VSTs a while back.

Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Broken in iOs 16.7.2 using whatever built in viewer comes with Safari.

Bitlocker.

I’m a fan of hellpotting them.