I don’t think you need to feel silly. Programming languages are tools. Some are better suited for jobs than others.

AoC is good for two skills:

1. Learning how to solve problems.
2. Learning how to process and model data.

With python #2 is no longer difficult. In the past I’ve used Rust or C and I spent way more effort on #2 than #1.

I think the key is what is your goal in doing this? I like the puzzles but have limited time so I use python to solve them quickly and be on my way. If I had more time i would have liked to learn / try go this year.

Python

Not my first, second, or third choice. But I’m in between moves and have very limited access to my desktop (even remotely/SSH) so I need the simplest tool for the job.

What’s your goal? Is it safe to match is a very open ended question.

Take RHEL, it’s meant to be a paid distro for enterprise, something Debian isn’t. But you could draw similarities too.

What’s are you trying to learn?

There are tools like rss bridge that can be a big help: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

YouTube wise I use invidious rewrite rules

I’m kind of addicted to miniflux.

I use it to aggregate my RSS l, GitHub release notes, & YouTube feeds so I can stay up to date

Don’t you need the JRE to run Java code?

Nope, it seems to just work!

I’ve found it best to avoid the pacman repo. It can leave my system in such a weird inbetween state. Seeing as you mostly want codecs I tend to prefer flatpaks for VLC, Firefox, etc.

If you insist on pacman, just wait. If you try to dup and have a conflict it means that either pacman or suse repos aren’t all updated so hold on a few days and you should be able to dup with no issues.