Had to search for a bit, too, but finally found the relevant keyword: Delta RPMs
(Which also explains why it’s a Red Hat / SUSE thing. 😅)

Here’s a decent article, which links to some more in-depth explanations: https://www.certdepot.net/rhel7-get-started-delta-rpms/

This doesn’t work too well for rolling releases, because users will quickly get several version jumps behind.

For example, let’s say libbanana is currently at version 1.2.1, but then releases 1.2.2, which you ship as a distro right away, but then a few days later, they’ve already released 1.2.3, which you ship, too.
Now Agnes comes home at the weekend and runs package updates on her system, which is still on libbanana v1.2.1. At that point, she would need the diffs 1.2.1→1.2.2 and then 1.2.2→1.2.3 separately, which may have overlaps in which files changed.

In principle, you could additionally provide the diff 1.2.1→1.2.3, but if Greg updates only every other weekend, and libbanana celebrates the 1.3.0 release by then, then you will also need the diffs 1.2.1→1.3.0, 1.2.2→1.3.0 and 1.2.3→1.3.0. So, this strategy quickly explodes with the number of different diffs you might need.

At that point, just not bothering with diffs and making users always download the new package version in full is generally preferred.

openSUSE Leap does have differential package updates. Pretty sure, I once saw it on one of the Red-Hat-likes, too.

But yeah, it makes most sense on slow-moving, versioned releases with corporate backing.

The thing to me is always that, yeah, you need a huge commit for a breaking change in an internal library inside a monorepo, but you will still need to do the same work in a polyrepo eventually, too.

Especially since “eventually” really means “ASAP” here. Without going through the breaking change, you can’t benefit from non-breaking changes either and the complexity of your codebase increases the longer you defer the upgrade, because different parts of your application have different behavior then. So, even in a polyrepo, you ideally upgrade all library consumers right away, like you’re forced to in a monorepo.

It shows up as “Terminal” in the search results, so I imagine that’s what it matches against, even if it is colloquially referred to as “Windows Terminal”…

On KDE, it’s just one of the suggestions, I believe, that you could search this term on the web. If you trigger that suggestion, it then opens the web browser to do the search.

As such, searching “terminal” wouldn’t yield a suggestion from a web result that matches, but I’m pretty sure applications are prioritized above other results either way.

A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.

So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can’t even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:

And yeah, I’ve got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don’t even need an SD card in my case.)

Presumably, that ampersand needs to be replaced with &…

Their primary purpose certainly isn’t the same, but with JavaScript being used to implement text editors, it’s in a playing field where many would argue that Rust is better suited.

Well, and Rust can play in JavaScript’s playing field, too: You can implement webpages in HTML+CSS+Rust by going through WebAssembly.

The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:

allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.

I mean, modern package managers generally now come with lock files, which effectively auto-pin your dependencies, until you trigger a dependency update.

And while it isn’t bullet-proof, it does result in you effectively having a dependency cooldown most of the time. You’re only vulnerable, if you trigger the dependency update while the compromised dependency release is public.

Obviously, this can be bad enough, but it does also mean that an ecosystem with lock files is far less attractive to target with a supply-chain attack, since far fewer hosts will get compromised on average.

Bash fucks me up so much, too. You just put the parentheses there to say that something is a function, not for actually declaring the parameters that can be passed in…

Waterfox. It started out as a 64-bit build of Firefox for Windows, back when Mozilla didn’t offer that yet. These days, I believe, it just offers a few different defaults…

I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Sure, but as it happens with multiplayer games, you typically have a friend group that plays a certain game. Getting all of them to switch to another game can definitely be a problem.

Eh, it’s gonna depend on your taste in games. If competitive multiplayer games are your thing, then it is a problem. But sure, there’s lots of people who have zero interest in competitive multiplayer.

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.