You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.

Watch the video. Wedson is being yelled at by Ted Ts’o. If the general doesn’t yell, but his lieutenants yell, is that really progress? I will say that last time I saw Linus, he was very quiet and courteous, but that likely was because it was early morning and the summit-goers were starting to eat breakfast and drink their coffee.

I want to run PipeWire as a system user and have multiple login users access it. My current hack is to run it as one login user and then do something like:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1001

Where 1001 is the user ID. Is there a cleaner approach?

Well, I don’t want to pull the kernel-hacker card, but it sounds like you might not have experienced being yelled at by Linus during a kernel summit. It’s not fun and not worth the money. Also it’s well-known that LF can’t compete with e.g. Collabora or Red Hat on salary, so the only folks who stick around and focus on Linux infrastructure for the sake of Linux are bureaucrats, in the sense of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

Maybe you should actually try one before sharing your thoughts.

Direct rendering infrastructure in Linux predates widespread use of “digital rights management” as a term of art by about two or three years. “We were here first,” as the saying goes. That said, the specific concept of direct rendering managers is a little newer, and probably was a mistake on its own merits, regardless of the name.

Yes, if that’s the only reason one is using fail2ban. Honestly, I won’t miss it.

Steps 8, 9, and 11 assume that the filesystem is in a Linux-compatible state and Windows-compatible state simultaneously.

The biggest barrier is writing lots of formatted data to disk without a pre-existing filesystem structure. Look at nixos-anywhere for an example; the first thing it does is ensure that it’s booted into Linux, because otherwise it can’t trust that the disks are laid out properly.

Ah, no worries. There should be an introduction-to-literature course in your native language, covering the classics and important works of your native culture. I still stand by the rest of the recommendations. By “bachelor of arts” and “bachelor of sciences” I mean how your college/university accredits degrees; computer science and engineering are usually “science” degrees but many universities have an alternative “art” version that you can choose.

If you have the time and spare credits (and the cash to pay for tuition, of course) I’d recommend a basic humanities course or two. An intro to English literature is usually straightforward and easy. World history is great; history of the 20th century is also great, for different reasons. Personally, I recommend some sort of into to philosophy or epistemology; another mind-opening one is intro to anthropology or comparative values & beliefs. Ask your course counselor about this.

In general, if possible, I would recommend that you consider what it might be like to have a bachelor of arts instead of a bachelor of sciences. If your school offers it, it would be a much more balanced degree.

Nah, even if there were one holistic/catholic/apostolic/ecumenical GNU/Linux distribution, it would not follow that it’s “better than Windows” for many folks, let alone that “people would move”. Folks are very slow to adopt new technologies, very hesitant to step outside of an established market duopoly, and generally not prepared to work with computers as they are.

Also, you’d have to switch to NixOS.