There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.

I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works.

Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.

Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy.

Try LXQT :)

As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.

I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.

That was years ago and I'm still on it.

Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.

Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall

> For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch.

Probably from people who have never used it.

What do you like better than debian?

I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.

Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.

Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.

Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.

I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .

That is both neat and surprising.

That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.

Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.

> It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.

That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.

Debian is awesome for servers or systems that you just want to keep running without messing with it. On desktop though it’s nice to have, for example, Neovim is that is not 3 major versions behind.

Good salad is delicious. I think more people would realize that if they weren't exposed to nothing but iceberg, cheddar, and ranch monstrosities during childhood.

Standing up here for iceberg, I think a proper wedge with blue cheese and bacon is delicious. The crispness is refreshing. Not as nutritional as other salads, but sure goes well with a steak and a martini.

I took that comment to refer to "iceberg, cheeese, and ranch" as a unit. Iceberg is great, the official lettuce of the greatest sandwich in the world.

The greatest, and the most American sandwich in the world. The BLT is incredibly balanced, I feel like all three elements are stars in their own right.

Often eating a chunk of iceberg is like gnawing on the demon spawn of table legs and styrofoam. Gimme those dark leafy greens.

The iceberger?

>You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

Makes sense. If castle doctrine applied to the skies, people could take potshots at low flying aircraft above their house. I guess that's one way to prevent becoming a flyover state...

Then the ideal armor must be sea snail teeth woven together with spider silk. This advancement could save millions in mythril and adamantine.

Finally the Druids get a viable endgame armour set!

But how much time to grind is needed and is there close by spawn point for sea snails and spiders or do you have to first get loot from snails and then travel to farm spiders.

So many questions and quests.

If you’re into this kind of fantasy bioengineering I highly recommend reading The Tainted Cup and the sequel, A Drop of Corruption. And if anyone has read these, please tell me about any other books in this similar bioengineering genre, or even just highly unique fantasy worlds (I’m just so sick of books about dragons and boring magic).

Tress of the Emerald Sea is set on quite a unique world. The planet is covered by oceans of magical "spores" which react violently to water.

For example the spores in the Emerald Sea, where the hero is from, instantly grow into massive vines that destroy everything in their path. That makes sailing rather dangerous.

The story is whimsical, perhaps an adult fairy tale (or just a fairy tale?), so I don't know if it fits your taste.

You might like some of the Paolo Bacigalupi windup world stuff. Some great belivable ideas, some that go too far beyond belivability for my taste, but I enjoyed it a lot. The basic idea is that there's an advanced society where for some reason electricity & electronics tech was never developed, so mechanical mechanism technology progressed instead.

This was an excellent suggestion. Just got to the chapter where Isaac accidentally takes dream shit. Fun book! Thanks!

A long time ago, Harry Harrison wrote a series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden) where dinosaurs weren't wiped out, evolving for millions of years before primates showed up. The dinosaurs have a genetic-engineering based industry.

Try the children of time it's a great scifi book about a spider civilization evolving with all the different tech they create

I second the recommendation of Children of Time! A cracking fun novel that goes in some weird directions. Very well realized "aliens" that have their own culture and technology.

I haven't read it yet, but I keep seeing it recommended on this website again and again, so something about it must be good.

And I think there is one more similar spider civilization book that's also popular – A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

Tangential, but which of the 7 ended up being the best experience?

It's a tossup between Dart and Bun: Dart has better language features but Bun has better APIs. Since Bun is first and foremost a Javascript runtime, it inherits its annoyances and issues, like the complete lack of pattern matching, or switch expressions at all, or decent enums, etc. That said, Bun includes SQLite support and encryption out of the box, whereas Dart is heavily compartmentalised (https://pub.dev/publishers/dart.dev/packages). Imagine if, in Bun, importing "node:crypto" meant needing a "node:crypto" npm dependency. Dart ekes out the win though, I think.

>now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

I do judge people who post thought leadership on LinkedIn about the same as people who are really into pro wrestling.

I mean.. if you go into with the right frame of mind, it is harmless. It is starts being an issue when you take it seriously and someone ends up with back broken in someone's backyard.

I bet you also tell the Mormons to take a hike when they come visit.

Honestly, I'm really nice to the LDS when they drop by.

My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation.

In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.

It's not because "nerd stuff that's beneath them" but because to a significant portion of the middle management class, the bullshit IS reality. The bullshit is how they get their job, how they function day to day, how they explain themselves to others, how they THINK about themselves etc.

It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.

It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.

yup, and some people are very insecure about this, and will try to destroy you if you ruin the illusion.

Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything.

Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.