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.

I just learned that W.E.B. Du Bois pointed this out in 1935 in terms of why poor whites in the Reconstruction-era South preferred to side with the white landowners who exploited them rather than their fellow workers who happened to be black. People would rather feel superior than actually pursue a better life for everyone. It’s come to be called The Wages of Whiteness.

The BDFL model, as it’s called, is what allows large projects to continue to have focused vision rather than devolving into design-by-committee. The kernel is actually already well beyond pure BDFL, but my point is having a single point of overall leadership can be a huge boon for the organization of large and complex projects. FOSS philosophy has literally nothing to do with management structure; it’s entirely about the rights of the end user.

BDFL is not without its own risks. WordPress is a good counterexample these days. But, when someone originates a project and sticks around to steer it, it would be silly to reject their proven successful leadership for such a vague reason as you have presented.

When things do go sideways, people are free to fork the project. That is what FOSS is.

It’s redundant but it still works; doing it that way does not imply they haven’t actually used it.

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.

The networking aspect will likely be the trickiest, but if you’re already interested in administrating a VPS you can absolutely do it.

1. Have an ISP that doesn’t block inbound connections. So far both Comcast and Verizon have been cool to me in that regard.
2. Configure your router to always give your host machine the same internal-network IP address.
3. Configure your router to forward any relevant ports (TCP/80 for insecure HTTP, e.g.) to the internal address you assigned to your host.
4. Go to ifconfig.me or similar to ascertain your public Internet IP address.
5. Buy a domain (Namecheap has been good to me for a decade) and change its A record to point to that address!

Not hard, but not exactly uncomplicated either.

How do you mean in terms of Unreal?

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.

‘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.

Ugh and that happens a lot if your email domain has an even slightly unusual TLD too.

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

RIP xtranormal

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

C is a little older than namespacing and object orientation. C++ wasn’t even a glimmer in Bjarne’s eye when these conventions were laid down.

And yes, having to google it is part of the design. Originally C programmers would have had to read actual manuals about this stuff. Once you learn the names you don’t really forget so it works well enough even now for ubiquitous standard library functions.

And yet, C was an ergonomic revelation to programmers of the time. Now it’s the arcane grandpa that most youngsters don’t put up with.

Gentoo or Manjaro are to Arch? What do you mean? Those two are very different from each other especially in their relationships to Arch.