no love for RISC-V?

it was clearly a feature

• repeat the “Don’t sweat it.”
• Ubuntu is a perfectly fine starting point (the other “beginner distro” that’s commonly recommended is LinuxMint)
• »AFTER« you become comfortable with what you have:
  • try familiarizing yourself with the command line
    • far more competent than Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell
    • !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev
  • get overwhelmed with all the distro choices available
    • get bitten by the distro-hopping bug (“Gotta try them all!”)
      • and then try Distrobox (“ALL the distros at once!”)
• »THEN« take a look at immutable distros
  • “immutable distro” is a catch-all term that embraces several concepts
    • immutable – the root filesystem is set to read-only – makes it harder to mess up your system
    • declarative – your hardware and packages and configs are declared in a master configuration file
    • atomic / transactional – updates are checked as they’re applied, if it fails, it gets rolled back to a previous “safe state”
    • container / sandbox – ex. Flatpak or Docker or OCI – apps are isolated in their own sandbox and not allowed to mess up anything else

this explains caution, wariness, concern, unfamiliarity with the terminal – it doesn’t explain the revulsion people show to even the thought of the terminal as a partner to a GUI

• you have to figure out what the icons are and which menu holds which command
• in a GUI, only the basic options are laid out for you – newcomers regularly assume something can’t be done because the option isn’t there rather trying to find out if the option has just been moved to a completely different area of the UI
• GUIs regularly freeze up with even less indication of what’s going on (do you wait a few seconds or half an hour when the beach ball isn’t spinning)
• (on a side note, GUIs are generally a nightmare for accessibility options)

why are people so terrified of the terminal?

sorry, best I can do is Glorious Eggroll Linux

the graph (not the popularity)

• only works for something like water that can evaporate (or be absorbed) without leaving anything behind (plain tea, black coffee maybe) – if there’s any sugar or anything fatty (ex. cream), then that all has to be cleaned out otherwise it leaves a sticky mess that attracts even more dirt
• make sure it’s off and unplug the battery until everything is dry (and clean)

a name that evokes “facehugger” wouldn’t have been my first choice …

• Windows 11 getting Copilot+ Recall

(Google recently laid off parts of the Flutter team)

and Raylib has a LOT of bindings (ie. not just Zig)

(NeXT is something completely different)

anyways … the problem isn’t with Arch itself, it’s users randomly dipping into AUR thinking that the same level of safety checks that apply to the official repository also apply to the user repository – if you stick with the official repository or doublecheck an AUR package before running some random script off StackExchange, you’ll be fine

and if you want Arch with a little more polish, start off with EndeavourOS to get your feet wet and decide if you want to move to a pure Arch system at that point …

(on the Linux side, I »think« only tiling window managers have really experimented with and taking advantage of this sort of thing)

needs more samba

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sparky (for anyone wondering)

(go old school, curl and wget)

(as a side note, Lix (and Aux and whatever else) is going to need an easy, clear, DOCUMENTED (and preferably automated) migration path)

*sigh*