I mean all entertainment is really there to kill time. Thats really the main point of having fun. I would say things are worse then that. They (at least tripple-A games) are designed to extract as much cash as they can and get you addicted.

Debian has two main versions, stable - which is released every two years and supported for a long time. And unstable which is basically a rolling release and constantly changes adopting things to test them before the next stable release. There is also testing, but that is just to place thing in before promoting them to stable so has the same release cadence as stable.

Two years of fixed versions on a desktop is a very long time to be stuck on some packages - epically ones you use regularly. Most people want to use things that are newer then that, either new applications released or new features for apps they use in the past two years.

Ubuntu also has two release versions (that not really the right term though). They have a LTS version which is released every two years much like Debian is. But they also have a interim release that is released every 6 months. This gives users access to a lot newer versions of software and stuff that has been released more recently. Note that the LTS versions are just the same as the interim versions, its just that LTS versions are supported for a longer period of time, so you can use it for longer.

For the Ubuntu releases they basically take a snapshot of the Debian unstable version, and from that point on they maintain their own security patches for the versions they picked. They can share some of this work with Debians patches and backports, but since Debian stable and Ubuntu are based off different versions Ubuntu still needs to do a lot of work with figuring out which ones they need to apply to their stuff as well as ensuring things work on the versions they picked. Both distros do a lot of work in this regard and do work with each other where it makes sense.

Ubuntu also adds a few things on top of Debian. Some extra packages, does a few things that make the disto a bit more user friendly etc.

Any other distro that wants to base off one of these has to make the choice

• Do they want a very slow release cadence matching Debian (or Ubuntu LTS).
• Or do they want a faster release cadence of Ubuntu without doing much extra work as they can build off the work that Ubuntu is doing on top of Debian.
• Or do they want to take on all that extra work themselves and have more control over the versions included in their repos.

For a lot of distro maintainers basing off Ubuntu gives them a newer set of packages to work with while doing a lot less work doing all that work themselves. Then they can focus on the value adds they want to add ontop of the distro rather then redoing the work Ubuntu already does or sticking with much older versions.

The value add work that needs to be done on either base I dont think is hugely different. You can take the core packages you want and change a few settings, or remake a few meta packages that you dont want from Ubuntu. This is really all stuff you will be doing which ever one you pick. It is a lot more work keeping up with security patching everything.

You have picked some weird hills to die on there.

for x in list:

This is fine. Many languages now do it. The extra brackets around a for or if dont really add any clarity or make things easier or harder to read. This is the type of thing you just get used to and prefer what you are used to. You get over it quickly.

Why would you provide a way to type parameters but don’t enforce it at runtime?

This is a bit stupid, but really is legacy reasons for it. Since it didnt use to have static type declarations and wants to remain somewhat backwards compatible it needs to ignore them at runtime. But as a JS and PHP developer you should be used to this. Both do the same thing as python here with types (well, TS for JS and the many other attempts at getting types into JS). So it is weird that you are singling out python for this behavior.

Why so many different ways to declare an array-like structure? Tuples, Sets, Dicts, Lists?

DIcts are not array like here. Tuples sets and lists are all common is many languages as well. PHP is a real weird case here given everything, even arrays are effectively a dict - that is a strange language design feature. But Java is way worst for different types of array types in the language.

I’m mainly using it because of interoperability, easy to setup, i

What? I hate setting up python projects. Each one wants to use a different dependency or version manager. Yeah you might have python on most systems but they are all different versions and python is famously terrible at backwards compatibility. It seems every few versions they throw something in the breaks some existing scripts so you really need a version manager for things. Which is more complex setup and management of things. There are far too many different tools to help you with this and fetching dependencies which means if you work on lots of different projects by different people you have a hodge podge of diffing tools you need. It is a complete mess.

Personally I hate python as a language, but you have picked some minor points that IMO dont really matter or that the other languages you use also suffer from. There are far better things to pick from that are far more annoying in the language.

Coreutils has little commercial value to take can create a proprietary fork of. There is little value that can be added to it to make it worthwhile. The same is for sudo - which has had a permissive licence from the start. In all that time no one has cared enough to fork it for profit.

Not saying that is true of every project. But at the same time even GPL software has issues with large companies profiting off it and not contributing back. Since unless you are distributing binaries the GPL does not force you to do anything really. See mongodb and their move to even more restrictive licences.

The GPL is not the only thing that stops companies from taking open software. Nor does it fully protect against that.

Not does everything need to be GPL. It makes sense for some projects and less sense for others. Especially libraries as that basically forces no company from using them for anything. Which is also not what you want from a library.

XBPS-SRC does not look like an alternative to AUR at all. It looks like Voids alternative to https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages - where Arch maintains all its packages. Nor is comparing the number of packages in AUR to Void main repos a good idea - Arch has its own main repos that are a better equivalent. The Void templates do not look dissimilar form what a PKGBUILD file is either and you can do the same things with writing your own PKGBUILD or pulling them from repos if you really want to. I don't see how void is any better then Arch in anything you have described here. IMO it just looks like it does more of the same things with a bit difference in syntax/commands you run. Nothing you have said here is really a solid argument for using Void or Arch at all.

The AUR is not even that great. I think most people seem to get confused between what is in the AUR and the main packages since they just use tools like yay that install from both. But most people only use a couple of packages from the AUR - it is the package selection in the main repos which is what is so nice about Arch. The AUR is just nice for more niche things that have not made it into the main repos yet.

I hope u don’t use AUR blindly and just do yay -S something without looking what pkgbuild is doing, it might be dangerous not knowing what program can do and what script that is downloading it too right?

Same goes for Void? Most people wont read the source of third party packages they install. No matter what distro they are on. AUR tooling does try to help with this but most people ignore it. Same will go for Void. It is not a distro problem - just a humans are lazy problem. Plus even if people did read them there is only a small subset of people that actually understand them enough to spot obviously malicious packages - though that can spot hidden malicious packages are vastly smaller.

I believe that VKD3D can give you directx support. Proton should be able to run most games these days, which is essentially a bundle of wine + vkd3d and other things. This is what valve created to run games on steam on linux/steamdeck. https://www.protondb.com/ shows what is able to run on it and it is most things that do not have some form of incompatible anticheat.

You might have more luck not using wine directly (if that is what you are doing) and using things like steam (you can add external games to it to run them in a proton context) or lutris or heroic games launcher.

Have not used it myself, but having a quick look at it I don't think I likely ever will. Mostly for personal preferences with the projects goals and design than anything else.

I don't like large do everything frameworks. They are ok when you want to do what they were designed for. But as soon as you step outside that they become a nightmare to deal with. They also tend to grow more complex over time as more of what everyone wants gets added to them. A framework author's case against frameworks is a great talk on the matter. Instead I prefer simpler smaller focused libraries that I can pick and choose from that best suit the application I want to build.

Also it seems like the MVC pattern, which I dislike. Personally I like to group code that changes together next to each other. Where as MVC groups code that has the same function together and splits up code that tends to change together. This means for any change or feature you are editing many files across many folders which gets tedious rather than just co-locating all the related code in one directory or file.

Because they include all dependencies for everything you might want they often lag behind upstream projects. This was a huge issue for me years ago when I tried out the Rocket framework. I wanted to use a hosted postgres DB that only supported https connections but the version of the library it was using did not yet include that feature - basically killing the project there.

They can be great if they do everything you want in the way you want and loco looks to be well built and maintained overall. But I find far too often that they don't, if not at the start of a project then eventually as my projects evolve (which is far worst). I would also question its staying power though (we have seen popular and promising frameworks before that suddenly stop development) but only time will answer that.

Sockets are just streams of bytes - no defined structure to them at all. Dbus is about defining a common interface that everything can talk. That means when writing a program you don't need to learn how every program you want to talk to talks over its own socket - just can just use a dbus library and query what is available on the system.

At least that is the idea - IMO its implementation has a lot to be desired but a central event bus IMO is a good idea. Just needs to be easy to integrate with which I think is what dbus fails at.

A great example is music player software - rather than every music player software creating its own socket and each having its own API to basically all do the same operations. So anything that want to just play/pause some music would need to understand all the differences between all the various different music applications. Instead with a central event bus system each music app could integrate with that and each application that wants to talk to a music app would just need to talk to the event bus and not need to understand every single music app out there.

Cannot read the full article due to paywall... but what is up with that tagline:

China is building (fission) nuclear reactors faster than any other country

Can its scientists solve the fusion problem?

What does the fusion problem have to do with fission reactors? They are completely opposite things and fission reactors cannot be converted to fusion ones nor any other way I can see helps with fusion at all... Like the tag line seems to be heavily implying. I don't see how these two things are related, and I bet the article does not explain, does it?

Apple does force all web browsers on their devices to use the safari engine. Which is what the lawsuit is about:

Apple is now obliged to ensure that Safari adheres to the DMA's requirements, such as by allowing non-WebKit-based browsers on iOS and iPadOS.

It is not at all coincidental. The graph is a total percentage graph. All the lines affect all other lines on the graph. If one rises then others must drop to maintain 100% total. What this does not tell you is if the total windows users dropped, or stayed the same or even if they also grew. Only that relative to Linux the total percentage of windows users dropped.

This could be because a lot of people use Windows and the few niches that do use Linux were less affected by events then the total population. Or that there was a sudden influx of requests from Linux systems for some abnormal reason (like an automated ddos attack).

The Algorithm is such a nebulous term. All programs are algorithms, all it means is a set of unambitious instructions. I don't think half the people that use it even really know what they mean by it except whatever big tech are doing.

I am kinda sad that the word has now been tainted this way and wish there was another word for a content recommender that's only goal it to keep users on the platform for as long as possible so as much money as possible can be made from them.