So, hey, Americans, your president is openly threatening genocide. You might uh, want to do something about that. Just a thought.

It may be a lot to take in at first, but seems to me you’ve got it!

A repository (or repo) is a server that hosts program files for your distribution. Distributions host their own repositories from which you can install software with your package manager, like APT or DNF or others. If you only install software from your distribution’s repository, there’s likely no clashes with software versioning and dependencies, and the packages are about as reliable as they can be (which doesn’t mean there’s never malware). If you add third party repositories for software not available from your distribution’s repository, it’s more likely there will be issues, because the distribution doesn’t guarantee the packages work well together.

For example, Debian and Arch don’t retrieve and install their software from the same source. They have their own servers (repositories) hosting software compiled to work with their particular distro and to be used by their chosen package manager.

Flatpak (or Snap or Guix) is a separate package manager that handles it’s own dependencies and doesn’t clash with your distribution’s own software manager.

Does this help?

Well that’s a depressing read. The American rot runs deep. It’s frankly disturbing how accurate that article still is.

The writer drops some great lines though.

Thanks.

I am reminded of two quotes from Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

How low? Now, I guess we know. Voting for the lesser evil for 50 years has got you Trump. Twice. How much lower are you going to go?

I have no solutions. Things will probably have to break completely before the mending can begin.

It’s an old Czechoslovakian show called Pat & Mat. Took me a while to remember the name, it’s been a long time since I last saw them on TV. Really good and universal slapstick humor.

Hah, the kids are alright.

One of the reasons I feel Debian isn’t quite new user friendly is definitely having to manually modify your sources list when there’s a new version release. It’s not exactly hard, but for a new user it can be intimidating. I do find it weird that Debian hasn’t created an automatic tool for that, unlike practically every other distro out there.

Debian is good, but sometimes its age shows.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

I may have won the George Game, but in doing so I lost the Game. Now I know how Pyrrhus felt.

I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.

I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.

On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.

Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!

Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.

There’s this neat life hack where you drink enough and forget all about the taste - and most of the previous night, to boot!

I don’t actually drink though, tastes like shit.

In this economy?

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson and A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold. Hell, I’ll also throw in Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks by Mick Foley. I should reread that.

I basically jumped from XP to 8.1 and I was amazed at how much of an improvement 8.1 was on a technical level. Yes, the UI was horrendous, and any usability expert should have been able to tell you it was a terrible idea, but apparently they weren’t listened to. Luckily there was Classic Shell that restored a proper Start Menu, so I never had to use the horrible touch interface.

8.1 was the last good Windows (with caveats). When support ended I went back to Linux, because 10 and 11 are enshittified to all hell.

This should get him the coveted NHL and WNBA peace prizes too!

So this is how 2026 starts.

Oh boy.

This is going to be a decade of a year, isn’t it?

Wait, is it 2006 already?