Yozul

Well, go away was maybe not exactly the correct term, but come on. You know what I meant.

I dunno, people have been saying Rust will go away in a year or two for, like, five years now. This feels different to me. I could easily be wrong, but I don’t think it’s just another fad language.

BSD was the main open source option for a little while, but got into a big legal battle that dragged out for years, and Linux came out during that time and took over. BSD never made a major comeback because no one really needed it anymore after Linux came along. It’s still around because it was already done, so people have just had to maintain and update it since then. Hurd is non-existent for reasons that are contentious, but everyone agrees that at least one of them is that a lot of people got excited about the Linux kernel and lost interest in Hurd and switched to Linux development instead. It is possible that if more people had stuck with it there would have been a real, useful Hurd instead. These aren’t even the only alternatives that were being worked on at the time.

The idea that any one person could will an entire operating system into existence by making a hobby kernel that fit a useful niche at the right time is just patently absurd. Linux is great, and Linus Torvalds is a good steward of it, but no, he is not the only reason why open source operating systems are popular.

They were trying to merge rust code into the dma subsystem, because what they were working on needed to talk to it, and it would be easier to do that with rust code in the dma subsystem. He said no specifically to that part. Just the stuff in the dma subsystem. That’s all. It can be worked around.

It wasn’t actually a big deal until Martin stuck his nose into a discussion that was none of his business and then cried about it on social media. I get being frustrated. The old guys are weirdly hostile sometimes, but creating drama is not the solution.

The lone dma maintainer isn’t in charge of the code in the dma subsystem? What do you even mean by that?

The dma maintainer wants all the code he’s in charge of to be stuff he likes to work with. Whether you agree with that or not, that has absolutely nothing to do with Linus Torvalds allowing more rust code in the kernel.

Well, I certainly don’t want to minimize what Linus Torvalds has done. No one has done more for open source software than him, but if he hadn’t come along with his kernel when he did there were other options. BSD did eventually get out of the legal purgatory that Linux gave an alternative to, or heck, maybe if Linux hadn’t come along Gnu Hurd could have even been a real thing.

I’m happy with Linus being in charge of the biggest open source project in the world. I agree with him more often than not. He’s not the only reason open source operating systems exist though.

I don’t know how “whether more rust code should be allowed” is even a question. What, do you think they’re going to just cut all the rust developers off or something? Linus has always been a move slow and don’t break things kinda guy. Why should allowing rust into the kernel suddenly change that now? What is there to even answer?

This isn’t really an important point or anything, but I always find it odd when people bring up sysv init when talking about systemd. That’s kind of like arguing that people should switch to Linux because Windows Vista was bad. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a very weird thing to bring up in 2025.

I’ve been using mailbox.org, and it’s pretty great. It’s cheap, it’s private, and it works well.

I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it’s pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It’s just not worth the trade off for something I’d basically never get any use out of anyway.

Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they’ve also come a long way since systemd first came around. It’s also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn’t all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they’re all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.

That’s kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don’t care about that, you probably don’t need to worry about systemd.

It’s not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn’t get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It’s not bad, but it’s a testing branch. It’s not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.

The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto, you’re better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.

My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven’t changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn’t always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I’ve never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

It’s true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the “last” version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they’re still in the “oh, this is what we’ll probably do when we release GTK5” phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don’t have good Wayland support. I wouldn’t stress out about it too much.

XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.

For my laptop, yeah. I rarely actually use it though. For my desktop not so much. I really don’t keep that much personal information on it to begin with, and if someone breaks into my house they could probably get more by stealing the desk my computer is sitting on then by stealing the computer. It just feels like a silly thing to waste my time with.

Call it hate if you want, but it is an intentional design decision to break compatibility with other DEs. That is a choice they consciously made and have been very clear in communicating. There are trade offs involved. I’m not saying it’s a completely irrational choice or anything, but it is aggravating for those of us that don’t use Gnome when we have to deal with libadwaita apps. Libadwaita is designed from the ground up to be a Gnome exclusive thing. It is not for Linux. It is just for Gnome. That is the developers’ stated intention.

You sure did. Maybe libadwaita even includes tools to make it easier or something, I don’t know. I just think maybe the toolkit that breaks everything all the time isn’t the best example.

You don’t need libadwaita to do that. Lots of KDE apps are designed to work on mobile. Libadwaita just makes everything broken outside of Gnome.