The handbook is outstanding. Read as much of it as you can. Even if you’re not a Void user, you’ll learn so much!

https://docs.voidlinux.org/

It’s really annoying. It no different from people who go into Linux forums and talk about how much they love Windows.

Void Linux uses runit, for example. Here’s the documentation they provide on how to use it: https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/services/index.html

It only takes 5-10 minutes to read and understand how to manage all your services and write your own. Simple and fast. If only systemd were this easy!

Ubuntu is doing stupid things with packages, replacing them with their proprietary packaging system (called Snap). It has been controversial, the way that they are pushing it, especially since the Snap server is proprietary and non-open source.

A lot of people won’t consider using Ubuntu at all for this reason alone, and it makes sense - when you consider that there are so many other distros to choose from these days, Ubuntu just doesn’t really provide a whole lot of added value anymore.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.

If you ever feel useless, don’t forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

Looks like there’s been plenty of recent updates to me: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commits/master/

Sorry to hear about the network manager issues! I could be wrong on this, but I think Gnome is not the best supported DE in void - possibly because of how heavily tied it is to systemd. I wish I could help, but I still configure my wifi using wpa_supplicant.conf. Maybe dbus wasn’t setup properly?

Regarding audio, the pipewire documentation for Void is pretty good. It’s pretty thematic of the whole Void linux experience: you have to read the handbook and follow its steps closely, but it’s very well written and easy to understand. It can definitely be time-consuming as well though.

Void is definitely all the things you mentioned. I installed it on a few machines, the first in early 2020 and it has never given me an issue. Extremely stable and boring. I’m impressed that it has so many packages in its repository, but that’s a testament to how well xbps is written. But there are a few things missing since it’s fair from the mainstream, including packagekit. I had never heard of it before you mentioned it - I found a fork on github to support it, but it doesn’t look very well maintained.

As one of the dozens of Void Linux users, I too find this very offensive!

(But hey, at least we’re getting some attention, which is nice…)

Yes, the install process is difficult to perform. But once you do it, you’ll feel like a wizard. You learn so much from the process if you do a manual chroot install. It helps you understand how the installation process for other distros like Debian works. If you have some free time, I would recommend trying it in a virtual machine.

The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.

Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.

You’re right, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.

The comic states that Firefox is a crown jewel of open source, not the crown jewel.

That said, I agree that if I had to pick only one, it would definitely be Linux over Firefox.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably