I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.

More open strictly in that it allows free software to be rolled up into proprietary software.

A friend gave me the 6-CD “power pack” of Mandrake 10 that could install a quite wide range of optional software completely offline. Hooked me too.

That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.

Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.

The BDFL model, as it’s called, is what allows large projects to continue to have focused vision rather than devolving into design-by-committee. The kernel is actually already well beyond pure BDFL, but my point is having a single point of overall leadership can be a huge boon for the organization of large and complex projects. FOSS philosophy has literally nothing to do with management structure; it’s entirely about the rights of the end user.

BDFL is not without its own risks. WordPress is a good counterexample these days. But, when someone originates a project and sticks around to steer it, it would be silly to reject their proven successful leadership for such a vague reason as you have presented.

When things do go sideways, people are free to fork the project. That is what FOSS is.

The networking aspect will likely be the trickiest, but if you’re already interested in administrating a VPS you can absolutely do it.

1. Have an ISP that doesn’t block inbound connections. So far both Comcast and Verizon have been cool to me in that regard.
2. Configure your router to always give your host machine the same internal-network IP address.
3. Configure your router to forward any relevant ports (TCP/80 for insecure HTTP, e.g.) to the internal address you assigned to your host.
4. Go to ifconfig.me or similar to ascertain your public Internet IP address.
5. Buy a domain (Namecheap has been good to me for a decade) and change its A record to point to that address!

Not hard, but not exactly uncomplicated either.

Binary speed is really the least reason to do it. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to the individual, but there are a lot of little reasons Gentoo is uniquely powerful.

Benefits specific to compiling:

• fine-grained control of features and dependencies with USE flags
• very easy package maintenance (writing ebuilds)
  • much simpler to add your own custom local packages when you need them
  • less workload on the gentoo team which is good for repository health and breadth
• control of compile flags (yes speed, but more practically hardening for secure systems)
• the same gentoo is available on way more platforms and architectures than any binary distro

Bone skribis!

A strange choice. You’ve got most people who will be confused by the odd spelling, and then you’ve got esperantists like me who get confused by the missing accent mark. Until now, just seeing it in passing I assumed it was a password manager or something because of ‘forgesi’.

I am glad to see more Esperanto in the wild, though.

‘Toy’ feels strange to me here. It’s more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it’s not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.

You’re absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.

This is one of the little things I love about Gentoo. It’s rolling, but not bleeding edge.

Plus, you can opt into bleeding edge either per package or for all packages. It’s honestly a flexibility that doesn’t even require a source-based distro, so Arch could do it too.

Plus you can plug the mac into itself for free charging.

What reputable VPNs these days offer port forwarding? That’s a big part of what keeps me on a seedbox.

It doesn’t need to sound the same though, as long as the listener can spell ‘egg’.

Debunked how? The middle one is the only one I haven’t encountered in the wild.

It’s the character for ‘correct’, which doesn’t really explain much. Best I can figure it’s just that it’s a common character with five strokes in a satisfying right-down-right-down-right order.

Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.

Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.

Holy shit I think I have the same problem, mesh network and all. I assumed it was a driver issue; thanks for the pointer!

Bad code, yes, calling it ‘shit’, no.

Stuff like this is a big part of why software circles are seen as so hostile and unwelcoming to outsiders.

You can be completely clear and frank without resorting to insult, mild though it may be. Just because you and people most like you understand that calling their work ‘shit’ doesn’t reflect on them personally, doesn’t mean it’s not significantly exclusionary.

Now, obviously you can get to know your reports well enough to understand whom would take ‘shit’ well, but that doesn’t mean it’s not generally important to temper criticism with kindness. Kindness never has to mean holding back criticism, just avoiding stooping to insult.