They do keep trying, don’t they?

I had the similar comment about PKGBUILD/templates. The package definition is far less likely to do something malicious than the software you’re installing; it’s indeed a vector - a hypothetical AUR “git-plus” package could install git and a virus at the same time - but frankly I’m more concerned about upstream.

I lived this working for a company that, as part of a suite of services, tracked international business travelers for the companies they worked for. The air travel part was a nightmare.

You know what else was a nightmare? There’s an airport in Hong Kong which technically isn’t in any country as per most land country boundary maps; it’s built it out in the ocean. It occasionally gave us grief when we updated map data because we’d have to go in and manually change the map boundaries so the software would correctly locate travelers at the airport as being in the country.

Which countries are Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet, and Taiwan airports in? Hong Kong has since become un-controversial, but no matter what you choose people get upset about it.

That system was so complex, it was fascinating. The fight data alone is a nightmare, but when you start factoring in itineraries, and the fact that there’s no commonly used standard for booking systems and booking agencies have terrible data quality control, our most common issue was data quality; even after 15 years, the we’d still find edge cases in the system where real world varied from theory.

Dude(tte). I don’t know if pilots ever giggle about this, but

controlled flight into terrain

I know it’s the official, correct term, but still. Every time I see this, it cracks me up. The euphemisms that organizations come up with to either be extremely specific, or avoid using emotionally charged words like “crash” is hilarious.

Excellent, informative post.

You’ve got lots of answers, so I’ll just say that shorthand character classes like \s, \w, and \d - all those backslash ones - are not widely supported, especially in the only POSIX tools. Many tools have an extended or Perl mode that makes them available, but some don’t. You can’t rely on them being everywhere. That’s why you’re getting suggestions to use explicit, long-form character classes like [0-9].

Um. I can’t tell if you’re joking. It’s up to $139 annually, or $15/m.

Are you running on btrfs? If not, why not? If so, install snapper and grub-snap or refind-btrfs, or whatever, and go wild.

Sounds like you might also be missing backups, but snapper you can have run every 10 minutes at almost no overhead. Then it won’t matter if you delete something; you can always grab it out of a snapshot.

Yeah, there are a dozen “trash” commands. Honestly, I think changing muscle memory would be safer, but they could just install one of the trash commands and set up an alias as you say.

Oof. I didn’t get that far. They really mention DEI in the project README? That’s going to be a hard no from me. Even if I did agree with them, it has no place in the repo.

Big oof. I should have finished reading.

Wait, what? How did politics come into this? Did they talk about DEI in the README? I didn’t read the whole thing.

That would be disappointing.

shyly raises hand

I wish there was an alternative to Amazon. If there were only 3 or 6 stores where I could get everything I get from Amazon, I’d go through the trouble of multiple orders. But the alternatives to Amazon is usually a bunch of individual items ordered from a bunch of unknown sites, all of which give my angst about giving me credit card to, and which usually adds up to significant shipping costs. Or, driving into the city and spending an entire day driving from shop to shop, and being limited in my options and often never finding everything.

I so badly want an alternative to Amazon. Shopping was objectively worse before it. We’ve tried Walmart, but it’s worse and I’m not sure it’s an ethical improvement.

I still drive to the mall for clothes, but even the mall is limited for non-clothes - and often hella expensive.

Ah. So you gave addition a higher precedence than subtraction. That makes sense.

She graduated her Masters with a 4.0. I didn’t know graduate programs didn’t award a title, though. She did get extra tassels on her hat, so it was recognized, Latin honors or not.

Edit: her graduate program had an honors society, which was the equivalent of Summa for graduates. That’s what the tassels were for. I had to check with her: I didn’t myself rise to such lofty heights.

Well, that’s one way!

That can’t be legal anymore, right?

I don’t do this thing, so it’s a real question. If I were doing it from scratch, my instinct would be to go with the partition.

I don’t think you’d even have to make your own image, although you’d be mounting /home by hand every time if you didn’t. Hm. If you built your own image, you could mount everything as an overlayfs, and persist even application installs.

I mean, read the github README. The author is claiming that there are people trying to sabotage progress on X11.

If there are folks actively working on a fork, then it’s not deprecated, is it?

Ok. This is interesting, if a bit conspiracy-theory-ish:

moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to elimitate competition of their own products. Classic “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics.

Right after first journalists began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder’s gitlab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc,

I wonder what the story behind this is. Why would anyone want to hinder progress on X11?

That’s exactly where we got it.

It doesn’t rashly matter; all of the roles had to be casted. I wonder what that experience is like for the children. Life is Beautiful, for instance, or Saving Private Ryan (remember the French couple in the bombed out town?). How do you direct a child to emote trauma?

I’m really not criticizing art; that would be foolish. Plus, this is haut art compared to what I could draw. I was just saying, the second panel stuck my brain for several seconds.