Zero-setup snapshotting, GUIs for system settings, more sophisticated repo management, less custom-patching of software, more utilitarian than minimalist.

Well, they’re similar in the widest sense, that they’re both strategy games, you have to produce resources and fight battles to capture land.

But within the strategy genre, they’re actually pretty different. Civilization is turn-based, Widelands/Settlers is real-time strategy. I guess, the latter is at least still relatively slow-paced.
Widelands/Settlers puts a lot more focus on managing supply chains. To produce bread, you’ll need a baker, which needs flour and water, and possibly coal, so you need a mill and a farm and a well and a coal mine, and then you need people to actually carry the resources between the buildings, and yeah, it starts to become pretty busy pretty quickly.
If you ask fans of these games, that’s kind of what they love the most, that your settlement starts to look like an anthill buzzing with activity in no time.

Another great RTS is 0 A.D.. It’s more or less Age of Empires meets Empire Earth.

Fair warning, the AI is brutal. You probably want to set that to the easiest difficulty, and maybe even get an AI ally for your first game…

To me, it’s just death by a thousand papercuts. It doesn’t have any unique selling points that I’m aware of, and it’s slightly worse than my preferred distro in every way that the two differ, at least as far as I can think of.

I know that QMMP has a built-in visualizer, and the webpage says that the visualizer is call projectM, which you can apparently also run standalone: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

I would be surprised, if you couldn’t also sell an account with a bunch of stars on the black market to bot farm operators…

It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

I’ve seen doormats that look more alive than this lawn…

I mean, different regions have different plants which they call “grass”, not to mention different climates. It is genuinely possible that even grass in the wild goes brown in that region…

There’s Endless OS, which goes in that sort of direction. It includes even a good chunk of Wikipedia, so you can just install it on PCs and ship those PCs into regions where they don’t have internet.

Thanks. 🙂

Interesting, I always assumed they would be using a pretty optimal algorithm with their .tar.bz2 format, because they obviously benefit quite a bit from smaller downloads. Good to know that .tar.xz is actually better.

Yeah, particularly for downloading Firefox Nightly, these self-contained archives are extremely helpful.

I think, you’ve answered your own question? There’s a lot of different formats for Linux. Getting them all correct and working on the different distributions is significantly trickier than just bundling a self-contained archive.

Having said that, they do actually provide a DEB repo since a few months ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended

On distros like Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, you need to enable a separate repository, if you want icky software, like proprietary drivers or patented codecs. In particular, you can’t watch MP4 videos. So, PeerTube and YouTube work, but if a webpage is hosting its own videos, or you happen to acquire a video file in some other fashion, there’s a good chance that it’s an MP4 file and you can’t look at it.

I’m hoping that when these patents expire, that it’s possible to ship the MP4 codecs directly, and then at least for me, that would currently result in not needing to deal with these separate repos.

Hmm, sounds like it doesn’t repaint the browser contents then. Could be something to do with your graphics driver.
Could also be that a profile refresh happens to fix it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_5-refresh-firefox

I gave it an extended look a few years ago, and I don’t remember much of the details, but I found the workflow not terribly intuitive, it had some unusual defaults and was relatively limited in features.

If I remember correctly, it did save in the ODF formats, so for just writing out a letter, it’s definitely fine.
There’s just not really a reason to use it over LibreOffice, except for it being somewhat more lightweight.

I mean, as someone who hasn’t encountered these same issues as you, I found btrfs really useful for home use. The snapshotting functionality is what gives me a safe feeling that I’ll be able to boot my system. On ext4, any OS update could break your system and you’d have to resort to backups or a reinstall to fix it.

But yeah, it’s quite possible that my hard drives were never old/bad enough that I ran into major issues…

My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.

But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.

It’s been a hot minute, since I’ve been to the GTK side of town, but I’m aware of Geany and GNOME Builder (I believe, the latter is focused on developing GNOME apps, but not sure to what degree).

Well, and I guess, there’s also gVim and Emacs, if you’re into very keyboard-driven editors…