Sometimes I think “if debian had a flashy website and a few tweaks for user friendliness, then it would be just as attractive as linux mint or ubuntu for new users”, and other times I think “isn’t this exactly what most debian based distros are already?” Would there be a benefit if those projects worked under the debian name, something like debian workstation pure blend, or debian corporate pure blend? I don’t know.

Expanding on this, we could make it so that root must use ed(1) to edit files?

For JavaFX I ended up putting both JDK and JavaFX in my home dir and pointed vscodium to the right paths, I could get programs to compile but for some reason it would not let me open windows from inside, complaining that DISPLAY was not set or available iirc, even though I did set the env variable inside. Either way, I’m not ready for this container work-flow. Though I suspect that I could get used to better practices. Do you install git and your editor of choice separately in all dev containers? Like, how much of the tooling should be inside or on host?

About a year ago I started experimenting with the whole container-based workflow thing. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent on setting up various programming environments, and there’s always hurdles like getting a flatpak editor have access to java and actually be able to run javafx programs. And with distroboxes, what if my code needs access to a database that is started in a docker container on the host system, do I install docker inside the distrobox? I’ve had so many configuration issues. Every time I try I come back to debian stable and it feels like home.

I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.

I like it this way. When you say old, I hear “the environment is predictable”. What works today won’t break in a week because an update changed functionality of something. As long as I have hardware support, I don’t need the latest packages for what I do.

Ugh, I’ve been down the same rabbit hole, but gave up and just downloaded the jdk to my home directory and set the java path in vscodium to point to it. Same with maven.

Good points. I’ll have to ponder this for a while.

Dilemma: Fedora has introduced and worked on a lot of things that make “Year of Linux on the Desktop” more likely. Even if UNIX purists disagree with the direction, Fedora is what Ubuntu used to be back in the day. Linux for humans.

At the same time, it’s possible due to corporate backing. American corporate backing even. A part of me thinks that if we can’t get there as a community without corporate influence, then it’s all for nothing. I want the community model to not just be an ethical alternative, but that this model of cooperation also produces the best results.

(PS. I’m open for having my view changed, maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way.)

Found it in the classic The UNIX Programming Environment from 1984:

But then, this is for return, which technically isn’t “enter”, but nowadays they are sort of interpreted the same by programs?

Isn’t ctrl-m the “enter” equivalent?

I have never owned a computer with more than 8gb RAM.

does that mean that pipes will work backwards?

You know how the ending of LOST or Game of Thrones can bring up feelings in people? That’s how it was for me when Gnome 3 first came out. I had been using Gnome 2 for a few years and had a good workflow, and then suddenly, everything changed. Back then Gnome 3 was buggy and lacked a lot of things, which didn’t help. It also didn’t help that the devs took a “the problem is you” stance to all feedback. That said, I use Gnome now, and I like it, it took some years to mature and become good. But the feeling is still there sometimes.

Regular release distros do security updates, backported if needed. Rolling release means introducing unknown security bugs until they are found and fixed. To me, the whole dilemma between regular and rolling is do I want old bugs or new bugs? But the security bugs get fixed on both.

Open source is free for everyone, I think the objection is more about an american company being able to directly influence the decisions, operating under US jurisdiction, etc.

Kernel yes, but coreutils? It’s ls, sleep, who, pwd, and so on.

I know, but do they? Has big tech contributed to the code base significantly for coreutils specifically? sed and awk or ls has been the same as long as I remember, utf8 support has been added, but I doubt apple or google was behind that.

Do large tech companies contribute a lot to the GPL coreutils?

The way I understand it is that the security team supports releases for 5 years. If you are running an older version of ubuntu than that and want security backports, you need to get the extended support. The difference in Debian is that when a release is too old, the security team simply doesn’t backport security fixes. You can pay someone to do it, but it’s not a part of what Debian as a project does.