Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.

Not so! General binary support was added quite recently.

I like that more behaves like cat when there’s less than a page of output rather than requiring you to press q to get back to the prompt even when it would just fit.

There’s probably a way to make less do that too, but more already does it without configuration. Overall I use less most of the time but I like having the option.

I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.

More open strictly in that it allows free software to be rolled up into proprietary software.

A friend gave me the 6-CD “power pack” of Mandrake 10 that could install a quite wide range of optional software completely offline. Hooked me too.

That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.

Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.

You’re absolutely right, you could take any binary that runs under an OS and set up a bootloader to execute it directly without an OS.

The problem is that all programs, even ones in C, rely invisibly and enormously on the OS abstracting away hardware for them. The python interpreter doesn’t know the first thing about how to parse the raw bytes on a hard drive to find the location of the bytes that belong to a given file path. Files and filesystems are ‘fake’ when you get down to it, and the OS creates that fiction so each program doesn’t have to be customized per PC setup.

So, ironically, to be able to truly kernel hack in python like you want would require writing tons of C to replace all OS hooks (like fopen to interact with a file, e.g.) with code that knows how to directly manipulate your hardware (speaking PCIe/NVMe to get to the disk, speaking GPT to find the partition on the disk, speaking ext4 to find the file in the partition, e.g.).

OSes are complex as hell for a reason, and by retrofitting python to run on bare metal like that would require recreating that complexity in the interpreter.

Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn’t mean it has no practical benefit. It’s nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn’t require a graphical environment.

Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.

Bone skribis!

A strange choice. You’ve got most people who will be confused by the odd spelling, and then you’ve got esperantists like me who get confused by the missing accent mark. Until now, just seeing it in passing I assumed it was a password manager or something because of ‘forgesi’.

I am glad to see more Esperanto in the wild, though.

If you’ve got a complex and potentially nested object, what does the body of this simple function look like? That’s what they mean.

‘Toy’ feels strange to me here. It’s more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it’s not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.

You’re absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.

This is one of the little things I love about Gentoo. It’s rolling, but not bleeding edge.

Plus, you can opt into bleeding edge either per package or for all packages. It’s honestly a flexibility that doesn’t even require a source-based distro, so Arch could do it too.

Plus you can plug the mac into itself for free charging.

What reputable VPNs these days offer port forwarding? That’s a big part of what keeps me on a seedbox.

Plus having any rendering engine have a monopoly is terrible for the web long term.

This is the exact hole that had me quit Gentoo so many times over the years. When I stopped trying to be cool and just set my system up with KDE it finally stuck and I’ve been happily using it ever since.

Once you’re past setup and understand package management, what is a distro but a desktop environment, after all?

And the whole human body, brain and all, can run on ~100 watts. Truly astounding.