Does RustDesk run on Wayland? I’ve had a good experience with it.

I’ve done the Arch to Artix. It wasn’t hard, per se, but it took a while. I think that should be Medium, because Artix isn’t just an Arch derivative.

In fact, might I suggest a different way of looking at the difficulties?

• Replacing the package manager: Hard.
• Replacing the package manager without a live USB: Extreme.
• Going from a basic systemd-based distro (init, log, cron) to anything else: Hard
• Going from a systemd distro that’s bought into the entire systemd stack, including home and boot: Extreme
• Going from one init to another: Medium
• Changing boot systems: grub to UEFI, for example: Easy.
• Replacing all GNU tools with other things: Extreme (mainly because of script expectations).

And so on. You get 1 point for Easy, 2 for Medium, 4 for Hard, and 8 for Extreme. Add 'em up, go for a high score.

I don’t think rolling your own is that hard, TBH, unless you’re expected to also build a package manager. If maintaining it would be harder than building it.

If you can boot from USB, I’d look at Ventoy, which will let you put multiple distro ISOs on a single USB stick and then pick one of them to boot from when you boot up. I linked to a tutorial rather than the project page for a quick review.

It could be that OpenSUSE is contributing to your boot issues, and that one of the other distros may have a kernel and configuration that plays more nicely; Ventoy will help you determine this. It’ll also let you play with several distros without having to install all of them, and see if you like one more than another.

If your boot problem is hardware related - either an issue with the hardware itself, or just Linux compatability, then you should stay away from rolling release distros like Arch; while you can configure them to minimize reboots, they’re managed in such a way as to expect people to upgrade frequently, including the kernel, which requires reboots. For example, I run Arch and I love it, but I also tend to not upgrade it very often and the longer between upgrades, the greater the chance of something going wrong during an update. It’s absolutely the least dependency-hellish distro I’ve used if you update frequently, but something like Debian is better if you’re looking for long uptimes.

TL;DR: use Ventoy and try several distros. If you find that your boot problems persist through several distros, ignore rolling-release distros like Arch, Alpine, and Void, and focus on Debian-derived distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint. Or you can try a Redhat derivative, but I hate RPM with the fire of a thousand suns so I’d recommend that last - still, some obviously insane people like it, and it’s an option.

And it’s pretty typical of Dick. He often wrote surreal stuff.

I get what you were asking; I just don’t know how to answer the question. Mind-bending, byzantine stories are a matter of taste, just as gritty grimdark is.

The first time I read Ubik, I was younger and the plot device hadn’t yet been endlessly copied in other books; it wasn’t obvious to me what was going on, and I enjoyed the voyage of discovery, and the novelty of the style. It sounds like you figured it out early, and that reduced your enjoyment of it. You can only experience that once, though, and now when I re-read it knowing how it ends, and what’s happening, I can still recall how great it was the first time, and that makes up for the spoiler effect.

Taste?

I loved it; it’s in my “classics” list. But I loathe Game of Thrones - both the novels and the TV series, and those were wildly popular with a lot of people.

It’s just personal taste; I’m not sure there’s an explanation.

Yeah, that’d do it. Although, again, it looks like the restriction wasn’t in the NVIDIA licensing wording until recently. IANAL, but you it both parties are required to agree to contract changes; if AMD’s contributions were all pre-wording change, they merely need to dust their hands; it’s OSS. Why are they doing NVIDIA’s dirty work for them?

I’m not convinced.

Didn’t the author confirm the takedown came from AMD and not NVidia? AMD isn’t responsible for third party software running on their hardware.

Although, IIRC they either sanctioned it or provided some initial funding, which might have put them in a more culpable position. Still, I’m pretty sure the takedown came from AMD, and it doesn’t make sense that they’re doing NVidia’s policing for then.

Except the AMD exploit requires ring 0 access and is almost irrelevant to most users, whereas the Intel issues are physically destroying people’s computers. The scale of the issues are utterly incomparable.

I’m much more angry with whatever dipshit at AMD decided to revoke permission for ZLUDA, and that they haven’t yet been fired.

This is in c/technology because Zuckerberg said it? That’s a pretty slender topical connection.

Badger Badger was 2003, and it was the first thing I saw escape the confines of internet nerd-dom and go viral in office spaces. Dancing Baby was mid-90’s, so several years earlier, but I never saw it referenced out of the community of the terminally online. Heck, the web was still in it’s infancy in the mid-90’s.

Related, but just hanging this on here. As the default (as installed) security of distributions has improved, so have the amount of headaches when trying to use tools like this increased. For decades, when I’ve had issues like this is not been because of a LAN firewall issue, and so now my first thought is never been, “I should check the firewall,” when it should.

Sadly, firewall info is almost always locked down so that apps can’t even check by themselves and provide helpful hints to users.

Anyway, it’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, for some reason. I need to practice my mantra: it’s always the firewall.

Creative Commons is exactly the tool you need for licensing; they even have a “build-your-own” customized license tool. The tool will generate an icon, text, and a link to easily understandable legalese for your license.

CC is like GPL (but more flexible) for art, and it’s an awesome service.

Flatpack puts all app data in ~/.var?? Ewww! No thanks.

Your point is a very important one. The numbers have to come up so that manufacturers notice. It might make the difference in a laptop designer choosing a well-Linux-supported wifi chip, instead of a shitty, closed chipset like Broadcom. When the price-per-unit difference is pennies, knowing that you’re potentially losing some thousands of customers in exchange for saving a few cents per unit can make the difference in how you choose.

It also matters in user choice in the workplace. The more normalized Linux is, the more likely there will be skills in IT support, more mass-management tools, and more willingness to allow employees to choose their OS.

But where it really matters is in standards. Diversity puts pressure on software developers to use standardized and open data exchange standards. I can’t emphasize enough how important diversity in OSes is to driving creation of, and conformance to, standards, and how much of an anathema to standards monocultures are.

Even within OSS this is true: github and git have become monocultures; they aren’t standards, they’re tools developers are forced to use if they want to interact with the wider development world in any meaningful way. They’re not bad; git became dominant largely because github used to be so fantastically better than anything else available at the time; but now, their very dominance stiffles diversity and innovation. Want to try the rather exciting pijul, the patch-based spiritual successor to darcs? Fuck you, because you won’t be able to collaborate with anyone, and you repos won’t work with any proglang module systems like cargo or Go modules, because it isn’t git[1]. Monocultures are bad, whether they’re evil corporation software, or FOSS.

Higher Linux use increases diversity, encourages data format standards, and creates a healthier ecosystem. That’s why these numbers are important.

[1] Go and Rust’s cargo support more VCSes than git, but they could easily not, and I’m sure the maintainer’s of the vcs code wish they could drop support for some of the long tails - and everything that isn’t git is on the long tail at this point. There are attempts at creating some standards around this; ActivityPub has tossed around ideas, forgefriends has been trying for a breakthrough for years - none of them address the root issue of how tools can access sourcecode efficiently in a way abstracted from the underlying vcs. Any such tool currently must have some bespoke code to speak the network language of the vcs, for every vcs. And since git is the most popular, when faced with the daunting task of supporting N vcses, when N-1 of them are in toto used by a small percent of users, it’s just easier to support only git.

I think at 25 in a row it’s a silver jubilee.

Sure. My point is that it’s trivial to make and test packages for many distributions; it is harder to do so for Nix. It tends to get your software out there and used faster if you bootstrap the packaging - immediately, if you have an AUR account.

IMHO, Nix is unreasonably harder. There are frequently small projects that don’t get packaged for most distros. When I encounter these, I have a couple of options:

• Submit a packaging request. Hope someone is willing to accept it. Wait until it is packaged.
• Install it from source and let it pollute the core system. Hope this causes no issues. Manually track and maintain the installation. If lucky, the software lets itself be installed somewhere non-standard, in which case I can use stow and keep things a bit cleaner.
• Throw together a package for it and let my distro manage the installation.

The third option is preferrable to the others, for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy on most distros. On Arch, I might submit the package to AUR, but I’ll often just make a -git package and install it locally.

Arch. Or, rather EndeavourOS. I’ve lived with several distros (daily driver desktops, laptops, servers) for years: debian, Ubuntu, Gobo, gentoo, Redhat, CentOS, Arch, Artix, and EndeavourOS. Redhat was my least favorite, and EndeavourOS probably my most.

I’m currently running Endeavour on my desktop, Artix on my laptop, and vanilla Arch on several servers and ancillary devices. All of the Arches are basically the same day-to-day, except Artix; Artix is the lightest, but also the most work, and I probably wouldn’t choose it again.

I like Arch because - for me - it’s been stable and pain-free from dependency-hell, of which Redhat distros were the worst. I will not go back to any point release distro - rolling release has been so much better for me. The Arch wiki is the best source of Linux information on the internet, and the AUR has almost everything in it, and is easy to contribute to. PKGBUILDs are easy to write; it’s hardly any more work to put one together to install something and have it managed by the package manager, than to not.

I’m interested in playing more with some of the source-based distros like void, alpine, tinycore, venom, and kiss; my experience with gentoo leads me to believe I won’t be happy with any as daily drivers.

However, I’m very interested in Chimera.

I maintain some software, and Nix is by far the hardest to deal with. To package config files are relatively complex, and to submit a package you have to download the entire Nix repo, which is huge. Getting a package to build correctly can be a challenge.

It’s a pretty large ask for software contributors, who may have to iteract with a half dozen different distros. Now, you could say, leave it to the distro people to do the packaging, but it remains a barrier for entry and is by nature exclusive.

I don’t use NixOS, so I have little motivation to stay conversant with Nix and, frankly, it’s so demanding I don’t bother anymore. I can make RPM, deb, and aur packages trivially, and without having to hold Gb of some package repo (which I otherwise don’t use) on my disk.

I was going to suggest the opposite. I have nothing but problems with fractional scaling on Wayland, which is one of the main reasons I still run X. My main workstation has 3 monitors, and X’s fractional scaling works smoothly.

With a lot of distros defaulting to Wayland, it’d be interesting to know which OP is running, and causing them grief. Does Pop!OS use X only for now?

So, CUDA is SIMD for (or backed by) GPUs?