You are technically correct: Slint is free software. You can get Slint as GPL or commercial terms -- or the royalty free license. The latter lets you do whatever you want anywhere with the exception of "embedded" (this exception makes is not open source).

When you contribute to any MIT license project you are in the same situation: Your code will be redistributed by some company under different license terms. That's the point of MIT & Co. You contribute MIT code to a project, the project releases its code under MIT, and a company consumes the project and restricts its use. Slint is just cutting out the middle step here.

Disclaimer: I work for Slint and appreciate being paid for contributing to open source software. I also appreciate Slint being free software.

Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, ... . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.

Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.

Any of the many immutable distros (vanilla os, fedora silverblue, bluefin, aeon, endless os, pure os, ...) will all obviously work.

Most of your customizations will live in your home directory anyway, so the details of the host OS do not matter too much. As long as it comes with the UI you like, you will be mostly fine. And yku said you like gnome, that installs many apps from flathub anyway and they work just fine from there.

For development work you just set up a distrobox/toolbox container and are ready to go with everything you need. I much prefer that over working on the "real system" as I can have different environments for different projects and do not have to polute my system with all kinds of dependencies that are useless to the functionality of my system.

NixOS is ofmcourse also an option and is quasi-immutable, but it is also much more complicated to manage.

When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu -- while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.

So you see C programmers as sabotaging public infrastructure?

Oh, come on... all C++ devs know C well enough. Nobody assumes C is bad because it is more insane than C++.

C is just awfully repetitive as you have to spell out all the cleanup code all time -- and you are likely to have a security issue when you forget it just once.

It is all about whos freedom you care for: GPL protects the freedom of end users, MIT and other permissive licenses focus on the freedoms of developers instead.

GPL defines freedoms end users of software have. It has to limit the freedoms of developers between the GPL project and the end user so that those developers can not strip out any of the freedoms the GPL wants end users to have. The hope is to build a better society by enabling everybody to understand the machines they own.

MIT and other permissive license care for the freedoms of people using the project directly, granting freedoms to those users only. Those people are free to forward the same rights to their own users or to remove them as they see fit. Thatbis way simpler for developers to work with: Basically do whatever you want.

Guess which option is more popular with developers and the companies that employ many of those developers?

Last time I tried it was an apt install followed by a reboot. If your distribution claims to support several inits and it is harder than that: Your distribution did a poor job.

Where are those "many of us"?

It is what the CI uses for testing. If several layers of people decide to not do their job and you have no hardware in your network that announces the DNS servers to use like basically everybody has, then those CI settings might leak through to the occassional user. Even then, at least there is network: Somebody that can't be arsed to configure their network or pick any semi-private distribution will probably prefer that.

Absolutely no issue here, nothing to see.

Why would he? It never was an issue.

You are not done one the config is written: A configuration requires maintenance effort: New plugins get released, others stop getting developed, APIs change. You constantly need to adapt your configuration.

That is why I recommend using a distribution like astonvim. A distribution takes care of keeping the basics going and gives a well msintained base and thus gives you more time to fiddle with the interesting bits of the configuration.

Astronvim in particular is "just" a lazy nvim config and very easy to customize, filtering the standard override process defined by the lazy plugin manager.

I actually got rid of most custom config I had on top of astronvim by using its community repository: It contains easy to add config snippets that fully integrate other plugins with all the plugins in the astronvim config (lsp setup, treesitter, snippets, completion, ...). This ranges from adding one plugin to entire language packs with all the recommended bells and whistles to work with some programming language.

What do you mean by "system support"? The system is mostly pushing bytes along, the programming languages/UI ovaries tend to do all the hard work. So it is usually more interesting to see what those support.