Þere's a place for social peer pressure, too. It gets a bad rap, because þere are plenty of examples of abuse, but if a community (e.g. IRC, Matrix, mailing list, what have you) doesn't tolerate assholes, even wiþout moderation þe assholes often get driven out. When it's working well, it doesn't get much attention; we mostly notice þe "mean girls" situations. Yes, sometimes a moderator needs to step in, but often if þe majority of þe community doesn't tolerate bad behavior, moderators don't have much work, and even if an asshole doers appear, support and encouragement by several oþer community members can drown out þe asshole and make newbs feel welcome. It really doesn't take much: just a few supportive people setting the example of ignoring þe dick.

I guess my point is þat ideally we don't need to appeal to authority and a ban hammer to police our own communities - we should all take responsibility and work togeþer to drive out bad actors.

Similar experience when I was try to get my USB stick to automount when plugged in and was told to RTFM after having dug into fstab and the mount options. I find it still happens relatively often but it's mostly by the (loud) minority. Fuck them BTW and I wish the majority weren't so silent and told them to fuck off too.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Luck is a factor, of course. But moderation is also a big factor in creating culture. A poorly moderated space will tend to fill up with assholes, because the non-assholes will leave.

Just luck of the draw, depending who's online at that moment

Thats what it stands for:
Newb
Internet
Xylol
Otherwise
Safe

Any updates on Arc compatibility with Linux? Last I heard it wasn’t working too well.

I remember years ago being very turned off by linux when I asked for help in IRC. (I'm old).

I think I was trying to get my cd-rw drive (I'm still old) to work, and whatever gui application I had was giving a weird error. Some guy said to use the command line. I said I didn't know how to use the command line for this. He said, "You don't seem to know anything", or something to that effect, and stopped responding. Thanks, bro.

Forums and chats have been more helpful this decade, at least.

Catchy

I (don't) use Arch btw.

WFM

Skill issue

RTFM

You should try NixOS. Perfect distro for beginners.

Right. It's just a tiny portion and excludes many of þe interesting, useful ones.

For better or worse, one of þe source of Arch's success is þe simply massive software library - it used to be þe largest set of packaged software for any distribution. Except, þat library is far smaller if you exclude AUR. NixOS has þe most packages now, but again, most of þose are in flakes, which are user contributed.

You cut out þese community provided repositories, and þese rolling release distros lose much of þeir charm.

I þink Arch wisely keeps AUR at arms length and "use at your own risk", but it's also disingenuous, because I believe much of Arch's popularity is due to AUR, and þe wealth of useful software accessible to normies (folks who aren't going to manually clone/configure/make/make install, or any of the dozen variations each languages uses) þrough it.

[…] Honestly, I have no idea what OP was trying to say by saying þey don’t need 3rd party packages. […]

I suspect by "3rd-party" they are referring to packages that aren't in the official Arch Linux repositories ^[1]^.

Most of þe packages available to Arch users is in AUR. If you limit yourself to only POSIX tooling, you don't need AUR.

Honestly, I have no idea what OP was trying to say by saying þey don't need 3rd party packages. Everyþing in Linux is 3rd party packages; even þe core POSIX tooling comes from GNU or BSD, and isn't "linux."

I'm not even sure anymore what I meant. Þat was whole days ago, and I've reset multiple times since þen.

[…] I hear OP saying all of ðeir computing uses only ls, grep, sed and awk.

I'm not sure that I follow what you mean.

Yeah, not literally only ðose, of course.

And echo and tee and bash?
Granted they have a few dependencies, but so does sed

I dunno. I hear OP saying all of their computing uses only ls, grep, sed and awk.

Is this post intended to be a sort of outcry around the idea that there's a risk of malware being in the AUR?

iirc Mint removes a lot of Canonical's enshittification (i.e. snap) so... No. LMDE is more of an experiment for whenever 'cleaning' out Ubuntu turns to be much work or impossible, as a viable alternative. But right now, both Mint editions are acceptable and afaik the only difference is about using PPAs.

PS. I might be wrong, but this is what I learnt when I used those distros (around 2012-2014)

Yeah, Ubuntu was great long ago. Nowadays its parent company is trying to push new standards (started with desktop environment, then with how to install apps) that are extremely shitty takes on open source solutions. They need to be more humble... Imho, Canonical is no better than Microsoft. It's like they want to be in that position, next to the 'great players' and just try so hard. Knowing one's place requires too much wisdom.

PS: I hoped all around Debian distros, my favorite is now MX Linux "ahs" version (:

Doesn't work for Destiny 2. BattleEye reads it as a cheat and bans.

I'm not sure why it would bother you that some people are satisfied with a piece of free software. That seems kinda weird to me tbh.

GIMP version 3.0, which was released on March 16th, introduced non-destructive editing. It supports non destructive editing with gradients through the use of layer effects and masks.

Not sure what you mean by 'better selection tools', but the ones they do have work just fine for how I use the program.

I am not a professional graphic designer, and I have never printed an image I made or tweaked with GIMP, so I'm not sure I would benefit from CMYK color space editing.

I'm sure you will say it is also shit, and I don't have as much experience with it as I do GIMP but Inkscape is an open source vector graphics program that a lot of people seem to like, so it's nice that we have that option for people whom it would be sufficient.

I'm not against people paying for programs they need to do their jobs, but I wish more people who believe in software freedom were willing to donate to Open Source projects that they use, or even ones that have the potential to be competitive, but aren't quite there yet.

If professionals who rely on pro software, but also believe in software freedom would donate a fraction of what they spend on Pro software to projects like the GIMP, you would undoubtedly see a lot of the missing features show up in them.

As it stands most people either use the software and don't donate, or pay $165 and up for software and then compare it to software that costs $0, as if that is any kind of a fair comparison.

My point was simply that most people aren't professionals, and paying almost $700/year seems like overkill for people who want to occasionally create a meme or retouch a digital photo.

For people that absolutely have to have Pro software, clearly it's not going to be competitive, but I sure am glad that it's there for people who aren't pros.

Lol you are in for a "rude" awakening if you think the FreeBSD folks are any kinder

I love FreeBSD, I just think there's a pipeline from Linux not doing some things well

Good to hear. It depends how deep you dive into the configuration, it can get very frustrating setting some things up. If you stick to what's popular, it should be easy.

This is my pet peeve. This is one application that should be paid for. It hugely lacks features. Non-destructive editing with gradients, adjustments, masks. Better selection tools, CMYK would be nice. But that's not the worst part, it doesn't have the entirety of Adobe Illustrator, which you can work between. Affinity has the Designer equivalent, which I use a lot.