I have this exact same USB drive, 4GB also bought around 15 years ago it still works like a charm

Everyone who claims this is a hypocrite, you absolutely have limits on the freedom of speech and expression, and no one can limit your thoughts with the current technology so that’s irrelevant to the discussion. You don’t believe me? Ok, in that case I think you should be okay with my freedom to express myself by dismembering you slowly while streaming it online, oh, I shouldn’t be allowed to legally do that? How DARE you limit my freedom of expression.

So, now that we’ve established freedom of expression is already limited by other laws we should focus on which laws should be allowed to surpass the freedom of expression, and the answer is essentially all of them, otherwise “I was expressing myself” would be a valid legal defense. The whole point of a law is to prevent people from expressing something, be it murder intent or unwillingness to pay taxes. We must watch our government so that laws are not oppressive and that they’re used to protect the people and not to abuse power. But laws against racism and homofobia are not abuse of power and serve to protect people from other people.

I think the question everyone is asking themselves is whether you want your inverted penis covered by health insurance?

Reference in case you don’t know where this is from: https://youtu.be/ibQ9r_C5UBc

That is sound advice, the AUR is most definitely not a trusted source though. For the normal arch repos the people who put the stuff there are known, they work for the project, you’re as likely to get malware from one of those as you are to read an article bashing gamespot in gamespot, the people in charge of putting the packages there are the ones with more vested interest in things working so they won’t knowingly introduce malicious code (plus it’s a handful of people who know each other by first name).

The AUR is a different story, because anyone can put stuff there it’s very easy to have malicious code end up there. It doesn’t happen that often because most of the time it’s fairly obvious and it gets flagged straight away, plus if people start doing that people will migrate away from the AUR, so it’s a high risk low reward situation. But as more and more people start to use Arch derivatives that come with the AUR enabled without understanding any of this it becomes a more rewarding thing to exploit.

Lots of answers touched the correct answer, which is that in reality things don’t follow parabolas on earth, a parabola is just close enough to the actual thing the object is doing to be indistinguishable. In reality everything follows elliptical orbits, but the top of an ellipsis with a Major axis of 6378 km and a few meters in the minor axis looks the same as a parabola, especially when you don’t see the full orbit because the object hits the ground. If you were to throw a rock and suddenly the entire earth besides that rock collapsed to a single point, your rock will orbit earth in an elliptical orbit.

What are you talking about? KSP 1 has been 64 bits since forever, or was that only on Linux?

https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/boltzmann

Yes, that’s what I said, but AFAIK the only way to achieve that is to make it a mandatory dependency.

I was going to say that Manjaro will have the same issue in a short while because they delay the updates a little bit but follow them, so VLC will get split in Manjaro too, but someone already commented that it has already happened

I had the same issue, hadn’t found the solution yet (also didn’t looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it’s not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.

This might be the answer really, Gentoo is my favorite distro in theory. In practice I’m a lazy ass that just ends up installing binary packages for everything and missing the AUR.

Most of the internet in the 90s was either that or the complete opposite, i.e. a bare text with links. Tell me since you said you actually remember the internet back then, what did you used to do in it? What websites did you frequent?

As for the cars I never said they were worse than before, my point with the purely mechanical cars from the 60s or before is that people still keep them because they’re fully mechanic, but that cars from the 90s don’t have that appeal. Everything that made the cars from the 90s better than the ones from the 80s was improved upon since then, realistically today’s cars are much better in any metric you want to compare.

30 years ago we had a future to look to

You were less cynical, I remember people in the 90s saying the world was shit and getting worse, that there was no future.

the unshittified internet

Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.

I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.

great music

That is relative, I bet young people today feel 90s music was good and old people feel it was bad, because it depends on the age you had at the time. Generally we tend to think that the music that was popular in our group when we were around 14 to be good, so I bet that 14 YO today love today’s music, and telling them their music is bad sounds exactly the same as when old people used to tell us that the music was better in their times.

affordable land/housing

Was it though? Let’s pick a place, let’s say NY since it’s a well known city worldwide, minimum wage was apparently $4.25 and an apartment in NY costed $328 per sqft (as best as I can find out), this means that you had to work 30 years with all your money going into an apartment to afford it. So no, it wasn’t affordable, it’s become worse since then, but it wasn’t the wonderful past where everyone could buy a house that you seem to think it was.

affordable durable cars

Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.

people actually interacted in real life

People still interact in real life, go check meetups or other local events. In fact we have more opportunities to interact in real life today because we can look for stuff that interest you to check out, I. The 90s it was my experience you mostly always hanged up with that same people in the same place because you never knew what else was happening in the city.

no social media trash

No social media at all, social media is not 100% bad, you’re using one now

Now, we have billionaires

Those already existed back then, in fact they were mostly the same people. Also they had a lot more control over the media back then because without social media and internet there were no alternatives to mainstream media which is almost entirely controlled by billionaires. So long story short, the problem was already there, you just weren’t aware of it.

and LLMs.

What about LLMs? They’re great tools for brainstorming and getting unstuck, but beyond that they’re very limited and are a huge money sink that companies are desperately throwing money to try to get something out, but so far they haven’t delivered. Yes there are people getting fired because of LLMs, and it really sucks for them, and I wish they had a good social net to catch them during this time, but honestly I think we’re about to hit a turning point in the coming years where companies will understand that LLMs are all promise no pay (plus a few lawsuits from big companies getting their copyright infringed on will help) and will hire those people back.

I don’t see how anyone can possibly think times are better or going to improve.

Like you mentioned, civil rights are at an all time high, even with conservatives worldwide trying to revert the situation LGBTQ+ are well more accepted now than what they were in the 90s; Interracial couples is not a debatable topic anymore outside of the Klan; Smoking indoors has been banned and marijuana has been mostly legalized; Cars are lots more fuel efficient and that’s without mentioning EVs; Billionaires are still a problem, but as a society they’re now being criticized out in the open, whereas before they were not even discussed at all; Crime is at an all time low, and reporting percentage is better than ever (as in people didn’t used to report crimes), not to mention that we have a lot more crimes being recognized (Marital rape wasn’t even a crime until 93 in the US), and we have become a lot better at preventing innocents from being arrested and freeing the ones that had in the past; Life expectancy at an all time high, and medicine has become lots more affordable (although this might not be the case for the US, but it is worldwide) and better; Technology has not only advanced drastically, but it has become a lot more accessible both in terms of price and usability; Workers right have increased significantly, and work life balance is a lot better in general terms; etc, etc, etc, we tend to only remember the good things of the past and look at it with pink glasses, but in reality if you were to suddenly be transported back to 95 you would probably find it a worse time than today by most day-to-day metrics.

Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it’s missed on other replies.

I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that’s right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I’m talking about the original ncurses installer here).

After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with “I use arch BTW”, which meant you didn’t need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.

Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of “it doesn’t happen on my distro” effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.

This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the “I use Arch btw” replies and thought they meant “I know more than you because I use Arch”, so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using “I use Arch btw”.

That’s when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn’t break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn’t help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren’t cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.

At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I’ve tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it’s a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it’s also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other “noob” distros because at the end of the day it’s all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).

As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same “I use Arch btw” guys dumping on Ubuntu for being “noob”, other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.

Absolutely, but you need to set plugins for that and it’s not easy to get to the same state, but once you’re there it’s easy to surpass it. Vim has a very steep learning curve, this applies to everything from moving around the text to plugin specific stuff, but once you learn it it’s much better than any alternative I’ve ever come across (and I’ve been programming for 20 years, only switched to Nvim recently, although I’ve known basic vim since forever).

First let me tell you that I don’t know how to do all that you asked, some of it I’ve never needed, but I’m 100% sure it’s possible due to all of the other much more difficult stuff I have on my setup. The stuff that I do have, is much more convenient, e.g. with the cursor on a function/variable I can type gd (Go-to Declaration) to go to the declaration of it, or gr (Go-to References) to go to a list of references for that function/variable, that’s much more efficient than using a mouse, especially when it takes me at most 4 key presses to go to anywhere on the visible screen using jumps. So at the worst case scenario it takes me 6 keystrokes to go to the declaration of something I have on my screen, which even at 70WPM it means a bit over a second, whereas moving your hand to your mouse, mouse to the thingand Ctrl+click probably takes longer and is worse for the wrist.

But it’s the things that you can only do on vim that make it worth it, really you might gain a few seconds here and there, which do accumulate but it’s the stuff that seems like magic, e.g. have you ever had to replace ' with " on a string because you wanted to write can't? <space>srq" that’s my shortcut for that, i.e. space to enter a “special mode” Surround Replace Quotes with " (srq"), and if I wanted to change from " to ' it would be <space>srq' so only the character I want to use change. Similarly I can do <leader>srb( to replace parantesis/brace/brackets with a parenthesis, heck I can even do <space>srq) to replace a quote with a parenthesis (notice I used open in the other and closed here? Open parenthesis means to add a space, closing one no space, same thing for brackets or braces). Another cool thing this plugin lets me do is ciq (Change Inside Quotes) to change all of the text inside the current/next quotes or dab (Delete Around Brackets) to delete everything inside the brackets and the brackets themselves. And all of that is just ONE plugin that extends the basic around/inside keywords in vim. There are dozens of plugins that completely revolutionize the way you move around and edit stuff. It’s hard to learn, but it’s incredibly rewarding.