I’m surprised you didn’t stick with NixOS. After spending tens of hours learning how to use it, the sunk cost fallacy is strong.

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Username checks out.

I’d be surprised if it’s not easy to transpile a Markdown document into the format

By hand—if you have experience writing roff typesetting—it is.

Having a program do it for you… you’re going to get something, but it won’t be correct and you will need to fix most of it.

A few problems come to mind:

1. It’s a macro-based typesetting language. As a consequence, there’s a one-to-many association between representations in Markdown with some equivalent in roff. A Markdown paragraph is just a paragraph, but in roff it could be an un-indented paragraph, a paragraph with first-line indentation, a paragraph with line-wrap indentation, or a paragraph with a left margin.

2. Rendering a man page, you have multiple different implementations of man and multiple different implementations of *roff (roff, troff, groff, nroff). The set of macros and features that are available differ depending on which implementation, resulting in one-size-fits-all solutions targeting the lowest common denominator.

3. Ironically, the one-to-many association goes both ways. With Markdown, you have code fences, quotes, italic text, bold text, and tables. With lowest-common-denominator manpage roff, you have paragraphs and emphasis that will either be shown as bold or inverted. If you’re lucky, you might also be able to use underlines. If Markdown tables are no wider than 80 characters, you could preprocess those into plain characters, at least.

4. Despite being more structured with its typesetting, the contents of a manpage are mostly still unstructured. The individual sections within the page and its use of indentation and emphasis are entirely convention, and not represented in the source code by anything more than just typesetting macro primitives.

It could work out if you generate both the Markdown and man page from something with more explicit structure. If the plan is to go from a loose Markdown document into a manpage, you’re going to end up having to write your Markdown document almost exactly like a manpage.

Any distro works.

Any non-LTS distro works*

Using a distro release based on a 2 year old kernel with brand new hardware is asking for a horrible experience. For gaming especially, you’re also losing out on months/years of improvements to Mesa.

Actually, they are. As far as the average conservative cares, both of them are dirty pests that should be driven away.

I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:

Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.

Oh, no. I’m saying Microsoft owning your operating system and using it to push their data-harvesting software as a default browser is a monopolistic practice, whereas using Chrome by itself is just reinforcing an existing monopoly. The same goes for Mac and Safari or Android and Chrome.

Neither option is good, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish a corporation for their active attempts to subvert competition in a bid to establish their own monopoly in place of the current one.

How’s the weather up there, on your high horse?

Rust wasn’t meant to be the be-all, end-all solution to safety and soundness; it’s meant to be better than the alternatives, confining potential memory safety issues to explicitly-annotated unsafe blocks.

But, hey. That’s okay. With that kind of gloating attitude, I’m sure your code is 100% safe and vulnerability free, too. Just remind me to never step foot anywhere near an industrial system or operating system using it.

If you have to pick between two monopolistic corporations, using both of them but giving each a little less of your data and attention is a way to mitigate the risks and damage.

If Microsoft can harvest data on how I use my computer, I can at least make it a bit harder for them to harvest my browsing habits too by not voluntarily giving them browser telemetry on top of that.

There’s plenty:

• Not supporting monopolistic practices.
• User preferences.
• Diversifying your software so you don’t get trapped in an ecosystem.
• Not having Copilot stuffed down your throat.
• User preferences.
• Making it possible to rip Edge out of Windows for the purpose of debloating.

It doesn’t work like that. They use the self-reported user agent from the web browser that is requesting the page.

“Hey, we’re both smart. This shouldn’t be too difficult.” - Freedom Chat CEO Tanner Haas

Good old Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The phoronix comment section is a garden of rationality and level-headed thinking in comparison.

Any time Rust is brought up in Phoronix, half of the comments are bad-faith idiots making strawmen and whataboutism arguments amounting to “skill issue, C is 300% safe and nobody needs better” and thinly-veiled contrarian antagonism against Rust because it’s popular.

A comment section worse than that? Impressive.

That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.

• “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
• “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”

Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.

Because of that lack of perceptible benefit to them, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t going to be good. Even if it’s an objectively better standard from a technical perspective, it will just come across to consumers as an unnecessary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.

They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.

The only way console manufacturers are going to stay united in kicking HDMI to the curb is if the organization behind HDMI pulls a Unity move and starts charging royalties to the manufacturers for every time a consumer plugs the console into a TV.

As long as the manufacturers are competing against each other, that’s never going to happen.

The “gamer” consumer demographic has some of the most whiny, entitled vocal minorities. They’re going to endlessly complain about the next generation of console needing a special cable/dongle to connect to their TV, one of the manufacturers are going to fold, and then the other one is going to walk back the lack of HDMI because they don’t want to lose sales to their competitor.

Mac is very similar to Linux in that it comes with bash (these days zsh) and a lot of the command line tools you’d expect on Linux, including gcc

No it doesn’t.

The gcc command is a wrapper for clang, and the clang command is a stub that runs an executable used to install the “Xcode Command-Line Tools”

It also uses the BSD coreutils, rather than the GNU coreutils present on most Linux distros. The two are only compatible up to functionality defined by the POSIX standard, and anything beyond that is an inconsistent mess.

Windows is more difficult. The command line is very different (it inherits from DOS instead of Unix like both Mac and Linux). It doesn’t come with Python pre-installed

If you limit yourself to not using WSL, sure. WSL 2 runs an actual Linux kernel with the same Linux executables you would find on any other distro.

It’s still Windows and full of telemetry and AI garbage nobody wants, but it somehow manages to have better Linux compatibility than macOS.

Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars.

Everybody else already covered his role in Tesla, so let’s look at something else that demonstrates his concern for the environment and his fellow species:

He has a datacenter in Memphis running 35 “temporary” methane generators to power Grok, the self-described “Mecha Hitler” AI. All but a dozen of them are being used without permits for permanent generators, and none of them have air pollution filtration systems installed. Oh, and it’s near a low-income community that was already plagued by air pollution.

And native software.

Because JavaScript runs everywhere, we have companies creating “apps” and PC “programs” that are little more than glorified web views. There’s normally nothing wrong with having shared code across implementations, but when that shared code is a 4 MB bundle of crap that creates 100s of MB in dictionaries and JIT compiler caches, you’re ruining the end-user experience.

They make entire SOCs. None of them are x86 because of the duopoly that Intel and AMD have thanks to their cross-licensing agreement, but they still have functional CPUs with a common ISA.

AMD: “Our partners will fry your expensive CPU on some boards.”
INTEL: “Our software will fry your expensive CPU on all boards.”