Usually your distro’s forums are good enough, and even searching not your distro’s forums can lead to some insights into your issues/questions.

Otherwise Arch Wiki, Gentoo Wiki, Arch Forums, Gentoo Forums, Debian User Forums, Ask Ubuntu, Linux Questions, Linux Mint Forums, even Manjaro Forums can be helpful. Always do as much search and research you can before asking your question on a forum and mention what you’ve done already. A lot of the times, your issue has already been raised and already has an answer. If not, ask away and mention what you’ve done already.

For cases where you just want to install it once and then update only once a month or even a couple months, and not worry about the distro not being maintained, I’d highly recommend installing Debian. You will eventually have to reinstall years down the line when a new major release happens, but it is many many years down the line and even that can be put off for quite a long time. The only drawback is that the latest releases of the software you like aren’t always available in the official repos, as Debian’s MO is to vet every package for stability before releasing it via their repos.

If you want a slightly less stable distro that has almost all the packages in the world and is up to date and is going to be around for a long time, go with Arch Linux. It’s a rolling release model so packages are updated as soon as they are made available by the distribution maintainers. Things do break occassionally on Arch and a familiarity with the command line and where to go research/ask questions (the Arch Wiki and Arch Linux Forums) is very much needed in those situations. But Arch is very widely used and established nowadays and is a fine option if you’re okay with the rare package that breaks.

Gentoo is a great option if you simply want to customize every aspect of your system, but it’s considered an “advanced” distro and usually some familiarity with a different distro is recommended before using Gentoo, though some do end up using Gentoo as their first and only Linux distro. Gentoo, like Arch, is rolling release. Unlike Arch and Debian, packages are compiled from source, giving you granular control over which features of every piece of software you want to have and the ability to omit those features you don’t want/need. Gentoo is as stable as you make it. Like Arch and Debian, Gentoo isn’t going anywhere. That said, imho, Gentoo requires more maintenance than Arch or Debian, and potentially a little bit more knowledge of Operating Systems.

Other distributions like OpenSuse and Slackware are fine options as well as they have a very long established history in the Linux Distro ecosystem, but I am unfamiliar with them, so will leave it to others to make their comments/recommendations regarding them.

Microsoft generally doesn’t worry about losing market share to Linux over games. They don’t even worry about losing desktop share for the public sector. Only businesses matter, and they have heavy vendor lock in there as Microsoft Office, Teams, and to a lesser extent, Azure, keep them subscribed/enslaved.

Microsoft also gives a shit ton of money to the Linux Foundation,along with the rest of MMAANG and many other companies. All these companies know Linux runs the back end servers, and its free for them to use however they want, and they have a vested interest in Linux being around for servers as even they are aware it’s superior for that specific purpose.

Microsoft runs the Desktop, Apple runs the phone, Google and Amazon compete for cloud, and Meta owns marketing. Sure, they sometimes compete in other spaces like Android and Azure, but those are generally the established fiefdoms.

And Linux is all of their removed, but also all of their main support beam without which nothing works.

The true underdog is BSD.

Veritasium: A Story Of YouTube Propaganda

Fuck past me! That guy has fucked me over in more ways than I can count. And Fuck future me too! That guy is pissed at me for reasons I can’t possibly fathom. And fuck present me! That guy be lazy AF.

The AUR is the Arch User Repository. All it is is User uploaded software packages with a script that Arch Linux and its many derivatives recognize and know how to utilize to install a piece of software and the necessary libraries/dependencies on your system.

It is similar to Debian based systems when you install software that’s not in the officially repos by appending an unofficial mirror to :

/etc/sources.list.d

Take installing Mullvad VPN on Debian for example. It’s not in the official repos, so you have to tell apt where to go get it.

Paru and Yay are what are known as AUR Helpers. All they are doing is automating the update process of the packages you installed from the AUR, which normally you’d have to update one by one manually. They also can help you easily search the AUR from the command line.

In essence, they are wrappers around pacman and makepkg.

Flatpak is different in that it is an OS agnostic package manager that sandboxes applications away from the main OS and essentially downloads/installs all its libraries and dependencies into ~/.local/share/flatpak instead of /usr/lib, though this is a vast oversimplification.

Very basically, paru/yay says “We install stuff on Arch and Arch based distros from unofficial, user maintained sources and keep them up to date so you don’t have to update them one by one once installed. When possible, you should probably default to just installing with pacman and using the official repos though.”

Very basically Flatpak says “I don’t care if I’m run on Debian, Arch, Gentoo, whatever, I’m bringing all my system libraries with me cuz I don’t know what version of what is on here, and I just need this app to run right the fuck now. So even though it’s heavier and less efficient, here’s plumbing and the kitchen sink so you have running water right fucking now. BTW, you probably shouldn’t run anything installed with me as root.”

This is a very oversimplified explanation, but hopefully that helps clear things up for you.

I’ve been using Links for years. I rarely meet another Links user, as TUI web browser use is rare in and of itself, and most go to w3m or lynx from what I’ve seen.

TUI browsers are surprisingly capable of getting you around the web even with more limited features, as long as you mainly are focused on accessing public text documents and communications.

I know one of the main uses I saw some utilizing Links for was when it was recommended during the Gentoo installation process when you had to download a stage 3 tarball. Most just had another browser or used a different Linux iso during installation, but if you were installing via the tty, and had no other device with a web browser on it, that was (and still is) a solid choice for finding and downloading the needed tarball.

Anyways, just a bit of lore. My only complaint with Links is it doesn’t let you change the keybindings and they default to emacs. No shade to emacs, but I am and probably always will be a vim user, so there’s that. Other than that I’ll always be a big fan of Links.

I was not aware of these. Thank you for making me aware of them.

I haven’t used spreadsheet software in decades, but I have helped some convert to Windows to Linux. Some of them did use Excel, and therefore had to learn to use LibreOffice Calc, and while they had some expected difficulties during the initial learning curve, they did say a few months later to me that they were eventually satisfied with the software.

Nevertheless, I’m sure much like the GIMP/Photoshop comparison, Excel simply has features that Calc doesn’t.

I am mildly curious. Could you give an example of a feature that its likely many businesses and/or individuals use in Excel that simply doesn’t exist in, or is too difficult to implement in Calc?

Most of the Anubis encounters I have are to redlib instances that are shuffled around, go down all the time, and generally are more ephemeral than other sites. Because I use another extension called Libredirect to shuffle which redlib instance I visit when clicking on a reddit link, I don’t bother whitelisting them permanently.

I already have solved this on my desktop by self hosting my own redlib instance via localhost and using libredirect to just point there, but on my phone I still do the whole nojs temp unblock random redlib instance. Eventually I plan on using wireguard to host a private redlib instance on a vps so I can just not deal with this.

This is a weird case I know, but its honestly not that bad.

Yeah I actually use the noscript extension and i refuse to just whitelist certain sites unless I’m very certain I trust them.

I run into Anubis checks all the time and while I appreciate the software, having to consistently temporarily whitelist these sites does get cumbersome at times. I hope they make this noJS implementation the default soon.

Glad to help. If you’re able, post your findings.

I’ve never done this mind you, but some quick searching yields this.

And if that link doesn’t work (it’s a redlib fork), here is the original reddit link.

Either way, read through the comments as well as there’s some good insights there.

Ultimately the post points to a guide.

Hopefully this helps.

Subscribed, top 6 hours.

Becoming familiar with the essentials, grep, awk, sed is a good start. Manual pages can of course be accessed using man followed by the command/program you want to know more about. Understanding operators like |, >, >>, etc. can help as well. And reading the entirety of man bash is a good way to dive in further.

Yeah, Gates never was a good guy, not then and not now. Evil is a spectrum and all that, but Bill Gates’s philanthropy is a scam, and Bill Gates fucked over the US Education system.

So yeah, nah, fuck Bill Gates.

Nice! 👍

I’ve used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven’t encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it’s daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.

Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.

Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.

I’ve been using Artix Linux for 5 years. Its great, minimal, and does everything I need for my day to day tasks.

If I were to ever change, it’d probably be because the devs could no longer maintain it. In which case I’d probably just hop to Gentoo.