“There are two types of people: those who back up and those who haven’t lost data … yet.”

I’m sure he has lots more candy in the back of his van

aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”

once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:

• deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
• switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
• playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
• bypassing the package manager (especially installing with curl | sudo sh)
• changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”

“Itty Bitty Baby Hands and the Skipping Dipshit”

• at the full-featured end, VSCode (OSS Code, VSCodium) has pretty much captured the market
  • for a while, Atom was a popular competitor until MS closed it down, you might have some luck with its successors: Zed or Pulsar
• mid-range, Kate and Geany have their fans
• deluxe text editors, join the Emacs / vim holy wars
• plain text editors, give up on extensions, plugins, etc. and just edit text

only for the low! low! price of a PhD in Hegelian philosophy

• the cool kids use Sourcehut
• I use Codeberg

comparing a distro release to a new game release

• pay a LinuxGem each time you open a terminal
• Flatpak is only available as a paid DLC
• use your LinuxGems to purchase randomized LootContainers with a chance of winning a Jellyfin install

(Chris Titus Tech getting blowback last year marking a whole group of distros as “Pointless” when they did nothing more than a reskin or pre-install a couple in-repo packages)

why have menus covering stuff up when you can just use keybinds?

(completely sidetracked here – there’s a reason Dirk Hohndel (and Linus) decided to go with Qt instead of GTK)

the fake raspberry that gives you metallic burps for the next four hours

it’s time to return to the roots, FORTRAN and LISP and COBOL – C is the new technology

don’t really have a favorite – started with Thunderbird a long time ago but switched over to webmail fairly early on

now that I’ve started to build a new system, I started to look around at the various options (and maybe getting off webmail or at least having local storage “backup”) – the standard GUI clients (Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, BlueMail, Mailspring) seem to be … fine – but none of them really stand out

recently stumbled across some nice screenshots of aerc and the idea sounds really appealing, but I’ve never had any contact with terminal email programs and found out they’ve followed a completely different evolutionary path than GUI apps (even terminology has diverged between the two) – GUI apps keep trying to be an all-in-one (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, …) whereas terminal programs almost seem to to favor a “balkanization” of effort – aerc looks like it’s grabbed a middle-ground, you can run it as standalone or go all in with a fully customized setup – problem I’m running into is I can find lots of “how” guides, but very little in the “what” or “why” side of things …

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

—G.K. Chesterton paraphrased by Neil Gaiman, “The Red Angel”, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

“Copyright should protect the artist, not the publisher.”

• Alpine Linux: Immutable root with atomic upgrades (wiki article, not an official how-to)
• Alpine Linux: Alpine Local Backup (lbu) (run everything in memory)

nano -m <file> or set mouse in your nanorc

and sometimes you just need a text editor, not an entire thesaurus