Best way to figure out which one you’re happiest with is to try them out yourself, or look at an existing comparison list. Or else pare things down to a more specific question, because I doubt anyone is going to do a lengthy comparison here.

Or, you could just use Gentoo, which offers you an even wider array of possibilities for getting into trouble on the command line.

Easier ≠ better. Granted, most amateur-written UIs aren’t that great, but I find anything created specifically for the web is almost always worse. They’re massively bloated, they reinvent wheels all the time (and ship them out while they’re still egg-shaped with off-centre axles), and they don’t adapt well to systems with non-default settings.

As for Java UI coding, well, I did enough of it, back in the day. Tedious, sometimes nitpicky, but far from the worst thing I’ve ever done, codewise.

There are other options for that, though, and I’d rather have Java, with all its issues, any day.

I think it’s more “people who trained only in web development can produce what they fondly think is a desktop application”.

Still using Aqualung. However, my only requirements for a player are that it handle local files, handle m3u playlists, and not try to force a “music library” system on me (Aqualung offers it as an option only, which I’ve been ignoring for something like a decade and a half).

The TDE version of amarok still has vizualizer support. Not sure how it is on modern streaming, though.

. . . and it all boils down to “Canonical being into rent-seeking and having weird NIH issues that make it push low-quality own software (snaps in the current iteration, but there have been others) over better solutions used by other distros.”

If most people don’t want it enough to opt in, then it belongs in an extension, not the base browser. Then it’s still there for the ones who actually do want it, but won’t bother anyone else.

Pretty much, or any other fork that didn’t add this garbage in the first place.

Certainly whoever wrote that didn’t do a lot of distro-hopping. As far as I can tell, Gentoo still includes sys-apps/net-tools in the @system set, meaning that it’s not only installed by default, but it’s quite difficult to remove.

That’s because someone took the time to pull out the minimum required interface code from systemd to make elogind after gnome made such a mess of things. It’s a band-aid. More band-aids will no doubt be created to deal with this. It’s just that the necessity is annoying.

It isn’t really so strange that they aren’t used, if you think about it. Floating point is subject to fuzziness in the last several digits, and you can’t guarantee that a given value is going to round the same way when you’re dealing with multiple arches (or even multiple versions of what’s nominally the same arch, since optimizations change over time). Undefined behaviour is nasty. Floating point is useful for many things, but I’d keep it out of a cross-platform system kernel unless I liked hard-to-diagnose bugs.

Personally, I favour Aqualung. But really, it’s all a matter of taste.

Remember, Windows will install updates without user intervention. If you remove things, it just puts them back.

Gentoo is volunteer-run. The people doing all this work don’t expect any money. Rare in this day and age, I know. If you check the actual report, it’ll tell you where the money went (mostly hosting).

Dude, all Rockchip had to do to avoid this was a bit of license-related bookkeeping. They’re a corporation, so they’re used to dealing in bookkeeping and contracts. Someone at their end whose job it is to track this stuff either screwed up or let this through on purpose, assuming they wouldn’t be caught (more likely the latter, because China).

SD card readers that plug into your USB port are still quite cheap, even if you have the misfortune of being in the US.

It’s possible—I’ve used Perl scripts to pull data automatically out of email attachments stored in a maildir setup, and you should be able to pick commands out of a plain-text email body with a scripting language even more easily—but I will add my voice to the chorus that’s saying you should look into any other method you can find before settling on this. If it turns out you must proceed along these lines, think long and hard about security.

You should be able to set up the system to autologin on startup and then run commands from the auto-logged-in user’s .bash_profile, if you can reduce what you want to do to a script. You’d probably want to specially set up a user for this, to reduce security risks.

(I just stood up a weird little Gentoo media PC that does approximately this—logs a user in on startup and then runs startx from .bash_profile to make it easier to use with no keyboard attached and no DM. You’d just want to put a different command in instead.)

It’s been available in Gentoo since late 2022 (Project:LoongArch at the Gentoo wiki). And in some other distros.