Homebrew eats shit. It is easily the slowest and least effective package manager I have ever used on the command line. It feels like software that was great in 2006, but hasn't changed since then.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

It's ironic that posts asking for upvotes are a frequent source of upvotes for the people who reply, saying, "don't ask for upvotes."

The person who invented battery powered faucets that turn off automatically needs to be strung up by his toes.

When I was 23 or so, I worked nights in a tier-1 control room. Each workstation had a win98 desktop, and two HPUX workstations running CDE. I read all of the lord of the rings in text files on the HPUX machines, and since it was in an xterm window, my supervisor thought I was just tailing logs.

Vivaldi released a beta for mobile yesterday! I'm enjoying it very much, so far. Anybody else played with it?

I'm gona get fired and lose my wife and kids because all I can think about is 7 Days to Die.

"sudo apt remove nano" is easier than "update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.basic" so I just do that.

People need to throw away their manufactured outrage about the gimp fork, glimpse. Aside from the fact that there are people who are genuinely offended by the term, it also just makes FOSS look unprofessional and foolish, that such a capable piece of software is named so crudely. If we want to be taken seriously, then something easy like changing crude and offensive names is a no-brainer.

Alt-right, 4chan, edgy defenders of the right to offend need to step aside, because they're in the way of progress.

My Google fiber machine is down, so I have to proxy at work at Comcast speeds today.

A YouTuber posted a video today about how Linux users' bad attitudes account in some part for the fact that AAA games are not getting released as much on Linux as on Windows.

Here's my bad attitude: Fuck AAA games. I don't want them on linux. I don't want them to exist. The AAA studios are colluding to change the market to be less about selling games and more about leasing access to them, and prioritizing revenues based on mictrotransactions and gambling-- with a pursuant focus on exploiting addictive personalities for profit. We don't need that on linux, and frankly, I don't think EA, Ubi, Activision, Bethesda, and Epic do either. Linux is an environment of choices, where the inner workings of any particular piece of software are far more exposed than they are in closed systems like windows, mac, and consoles. That exposure breeds understanding, and the last thing the AAA studios want is a knowledgeable, informed customer base. They want naive children with access to their parents' bank accounts, and they want to eliminate all means to access games other than themselves. This is not behavior we should be rewarding by asking them to expand into our space.

Our PM hears us talking about git repos, and responds by referring to it as, "get," as if she was correcting our bad pronunciation.

"We could be the Vikings of our time."

If you want to install, configure, and dedicate resources to fail2ban, knock yourself out, but putting these options in your sshd_config alone will save you mountains of headache:

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, without whom there would be no C or Unix. Titans. Fountainheads of technology.

Power outage. Our wifi dropped about 35 minutes in. God bless the UPS.

Just pulled the trigger on a Librem 5 pre-order. I'm super excited. Android was getting shittier with every release, and ios is even worse(to me), so I was getting distraught about my next phone.

Having fantasies about braining the couple two rows in front of me on the train, watching cooking shows at full blast on their laptop.

Slack's latest update just broke the darkify hack. It's 2019, right? It is unbelievable that there is no built-in dark mode for Linux, Mac, or even windows. I mean, they are aware of dark mode. It is available on mobile without trouble. Get it together, slack!

To run X11 apps I have to install xcode? Not gonna happen. I'll just VNC to a real computer.

What popular tooth grinder are you happy you don't use? I have a couple, so I will start.

javascript or a js framework
windows
a desktop IDE
google chrome

Start at the scheduled time. Don't, "give everybody a little time to join." You're just enabling shit behavior.

Never, ever ask, "who just joined?" when the join tone sounds on the call. If you need someone on the call, invite them, and address them directly by name. If you need to take roll, then call out names, one at a time. But don't do that either. Just do your meeting.

A meeting has a direct cost of the lost time of everyone on the call. Artificial delays for small talk or petty admin are a total waste of time and money. Keep it simple, on task, and as fast as possible.

I opened a ticket earlier with my automated ticket script, and saw its number, so I couldn't resist.

Have you ever replaced the rubber non-slip feet on your keyboard? If so, can you make a recommendation?

More excited about this screenshot than most.

I understand the desire people have to use an open source driver for their graphics card, but it feels like that's not the only reason people seem averse to using nvidia's closed-source driver on linux. I have used it for years, and never had a problem, and though I have an admittedly specific use scope, I would like to know what it is that people dislike about it. What problems do you have with it?

I couldn't resist the built-in dual displayport connectors, so I brought my laptop into the office to see the dual 4k displays on it. I will never be this productive again.

The new Mac Pro looks great, but if we're stargazing, I'm still far more interested in a decked out Thelio.

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

I have never encountered a better wrapper for graphical remote access than remmina. I have yet to find one for Mac that I really like, and I haven't found one for Windows that I like at all.

I have used chicken and finder's built-in client, but neither particularly impress me. Do you have one for Mac that you swear by?