I could see not caring. but actively being proud of it is weird. And asmongold has a lot in common with pewdiepie in that his fans skew heavily towards being morons who will just follow what he says.
And there are plenty of people who are well known who are terrible people. Knowledge isn’t a limited resource, you don’t have to forget something to know that a person is awful. So there is no value in not knowing it.
With the “general public” yes. Within the computing and gaming space, he’s pretty influential. I realize that “linuxmemes” isn’t about gaming, so there are a lot of non-gamers here but he is a well known name in his niche, which is PC gaming, which is a very relevant niche. It’s not like he’s one of the 1000 youtubers and runs a makeup channel.
Yes, he isn’t universally well known. But given how well known he is in the niche, and how relevant the niche is, and therefore how likely his niche is to translate into linux users or linux haters, it’s extremely relevant to the discussion.
And I’m not saying “everyone should know who Asmongold is!” anyway. I’m merely saying “he’s not irrelevant, and bragging about being out of touch doesn’t make you cool”.
no. but asmongold, even if you dont like him is one of the larger, more influential people out there. Should he be? Is his content that good? Doesn’t matter.
“Who even is that” heavily implies “why should I care” and the answer is: because he has a fanbase of rabid morons incapable of independent thought who will do whatever he says to do. So linux spaces are very likely about to be bombarded with people who hate linux without having ever tried it because asmongold said he didn’t like it, or a bunch of people adopting linux.
It also heavily implies “Im proud of the fact that I dont know who this person is.” Which is just not impressive. “Taylor Swift? Who is that?” indicates you are living under a rock, not that you are cool. And aside from pewdiepie, asmongold is probably one of the youtube gamer names people know.
A youtuber with 5 million followers and 5 billion views, and has won “Streamer of the Year” at the streamer awards in the past.
If you’re asking out of genuine curiosity: a youtuber with a lot of influence.
If you’re asking to brag how out of touch you are: someone with more influence than you.
Yep! All those things are true, but it’s due to the hard work of the archlinux team and not discord doing anything valuable. The debian/ubuntu/etc team could probably repackage the tar.xz or include the deb file in their official repos if they wanted. They just don’t. And given how simple the workaround is, i don’t really blame them. Debian isn’t going to ship something that will require constant updating to work with remote servers, and ubuntu probably just wants you to use a snap anyway.
The archlinux team is just pretty cool.
An “official” arch package? The arch package is packaged by the arch maintainers. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/discord
The maintainers of the PKGBUILD are all arch maintainers, which just downloads the generic .tar.gz file discord provides and puts it in all the places you need for you.
The “official” arch packages are just PKGBUILDs like the AUR, except prebuilt, managed (and signed) by the arch team.
My arch install is 10 years old at this point.
I would be interested to know what inspired the need to “feel fresh” from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can’t handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as “needing a cleanup” ?
If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).
Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands.
“Qdtq” means “Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet” (“quiet” makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them
“Rns” means “Remove, no backup, recursively” . and the - at the end means “Use the values from the first half of the pipe”… This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.
For this command, a “dependency” is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn’t been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.
This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.
But overall, there’s very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.
But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.
Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”
One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).
It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.
Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.
So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.
It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.
SteamOS has a web browser.
It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.
In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.
But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?
The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.
I’m hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don’t have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don’t mess with the formula I have.
IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you’re home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you’re self-hosting.
tl;dr - experimentation vs utility
It isn’t just about ungoogling things though. Having a monoculture in the browser space means that if Google makes a push to favor ads, say by removing certain extension support from their browser engine that everyone uses, then the entire internet suffers. It is effectively a monopoly.
Mozilla tries really hard sometimes to be unappealing, but there is value in not just letting Google have full control over the internet.
“This hardware works fine and even has compatible software that it works great with. But I’m going to prefer the broken software for other reasons. And that means it’s the hardware’s fault.”
Software that is built to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware should be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.
If software can’t handle a 16.5:16 aspect ratio, then that’s bad software. I don’t care how weird of a niche thing that is… just make your software abstract enough to handle those cases.
It’s 2024, any resolution/aspect ratio/DPI combo should be supportable. There’s enough variety of monitors out there that we should have a solution for handling things on the fly without needing to have a predefined solution.
Should they? Yes. They should also be searching for previous bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people do. But if you have enough users, even if 1% of people don’t use good reporting behaviors, you wind up with a lot of duplicate or bad reports.
There are plenty of blog posts out there that basically can be summarized as talking about how grueling open source work can be because users are often aggressive in their demands.
But this is a prime example of debian “stable” doesn’t mean “no crashes” but instead it means “unchanging, which means any bugs and crashes will remain for the whole release”
Except this isn’t true at all.
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-6387
Regresshion impacted bookworm and trixie both. Buster was too old.
With the downside of me doing an apt update and seeing that openssh-server was on 1:9.2p1-2+deb12u3 and I had no idea at a glance if this included the fix or not (qualys’s page states version 8.5p1-9.8p1 were vulnerable).
If you are running debian bookworm or trixie, you absolutely should update your openssh-server package.
Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.
They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying “this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year”. Debian didn’t want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.
According to Debian users, “stable” means “unchanging” and not “doesn’t crash or have bugs” … If you still ship 100% of the changes but just delay them by 2 weeks, you have the same number of changes. So by the Debian definition of “stable”, no, it is the exact same as arch.
By the everyone else definition where “stable” means “doesn’t crash or have bugs”, then also no. Shipping buggy code 2 weeks later doesn’t reduce bugs. And if you use the AUR at all, then things get worse, I’ve found, as the AUR pkgbuilds expect dependencies to match current up to date Arch repos.
tl;dr - no