I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

It’s more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.

I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I’m trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

Hail, SATAN!

I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don’t know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.

Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can’t maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.

They’ve spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can’t even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it’s a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.

And let’s not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it’s consistently returning better results than big G.

If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.

Speaking as a non Rustacean, I’m pretty okay with it becoming more integrated.

It’s safe, performant, and isn’t any more difficult to pick up than C++. C has a weird aura about it that makes it seem intimidating despite the fact that it is the simplest language (macros notwithstanding) that I’ve ever used.

Based on Google’s recent track record of mind-boggling incompetence on all fronts, I want Go kept as far away from core functionality as humanly possible. This leaves either adding more cruft to an already ungainly C++, continuing to use Boost (another Google product) with C, or to pivot to a more modern language.

Oooh! Let me guess!

Every library involved in rendering the screen will now be in its own Snap?

Depends on how you “broke” it.

First step is to back up whatever data is there. Boot into a rescue distro like GRML dd the block device to an external hard drive.

If you nuked the partition table, there may be additional work to rebuild it if you used GPT rather than MBR. But gdisk should also tell you if there are backups, which would make your life way easier.

If you still have a partition (like /dev/sda1) but the mount command claims that it cannot find a valid ext signature, you might be able to simply use mkfs.ext4. It’s counterintuitive, but this isn’t destructive and will recreate the filesystem leaving the data alone. And if it does turn out to be destructive, that’s why you have your backup.

To recover from the backup, you can use scalpel or photorec from the testdisk package. Photorec holds your hand and can be run in read-only mode. Caveat: These tools work by looking for specific file headers and makes a best guess as to where it’ll end (if the format doesn’t have a defined footer).

In the car now, but I can respond with more detailed steps if your other options don’t pan out.

I had a very similar situation.

I have to use Rhino 3D for work but refuse to give up my Arch daily driver.

I’ve been a sysadmin since Red Hat came on floppies.

And getting PCIe passthrough, accelerated network and disk drivers, and a whole plethora of other odds and ends working to the point where I could even boot Win11 took two solid days of work.

I’m still not even sure how I did it. I wouldn’t expect anybody else to figure it out.

Next time I plan on experimenting with the Photon libraries.

I’ve been using Linux as my (mostly) sole desktop since 2005. We’ve come such a long way! But CAD/CAM software has always been anemic.

Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.

I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.

Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.

Ubuntu: If it wasn’t created here, we want nothing to do with it.

Hey! Soydevs are people too.

If you thought you hated Ubuntu, lemme introduce you to Ubuntuce!

The same shitty, anti-FOSS hyperfocus on Snaps, but now bundled with your favorite evangelical nuttiness!

I’m guessing that zombie processes automatically get born again.

I think the Venn diagram between Christofascists and Linux OS developers is one person.

PTSD…

I once destroyed a CRT monitor by misconfiguring X11.

Nowadays Linux just works to the point where my 72 year old mother is able to deal with Pop_OS without issue.

But man, those early days of unstable drivers, slow dial-up internet, and navigating through Usenet and IRC for decent support was a nightmarish labor of love.

The silky smoothness that we have now was built on caffeine and the backs of millions of greybeards.

(For the record: “Greybeard” is a nerdy term of endearment that I’ve seen adopted by people identifying all across the rainbow. Kinda like dwarfs on Discworld).

Shortened version: Snap, snap, snap. Snap snap snap. Snap. Snap.

Seriously, Canonical. Having software that automatically updates itself without user consent or the ability to opt out is so laughably against the open source ethos that it makes me sick.

Patching prod servers without the consent of an admin or following the strictures of a deployment strategy?

I genuinely, genuinely do not know why Ubuntu is even seen as an option by server admins. They try to upsell you more than a fast food mobile app and suffer from NIH to an absurd degree.

People still buy Lenovo laptops, Sony music, use Microsoft products and Google services.

No matter how loathsome and evil a company has acted towards their oysters, there will always be people who lined up to get shucked.

Off the top of my head…

Late 90s moved from Motorola 68k to Power PC.

Early aughts moved from PowerPC to Intel x86.

2020’s moved from Intel x86 to ARMv8.

It feels like 10 years is a good prediction for when they’ll shift everything again.

I’m no fan of Apple, but without a behemoth to force adoption of new architectures, we’d be stuck in the x86 duopoly for the indefinite future.

Blacklist the Nvidia driver and un-blacklist nouveau. I’m going from memory, but I think if you can get to GRUB, you can append ‘single’ to your kernel parameters. That should get you into a system with minimal drivers loaded.