I wasn’t sure if it was a joke and I read another comment here that seemed to indicate that it was not. Thanks for clearing that up, unfortunately sarcasm is easily lost across the internet.

No clue what your issue is, but if your standard for OSS is not being associated with furries, I’ve got bad news for you.

I mean, yeah that would be my solution. I get that the AUR is attractive, precisely because it has a low barrier for anyone to submit their PKGBUILD. The level of oversight and verification is just a bit too low to recommend it to an average user, without a lot of caution. You’ve mentioned some alternatives that fall on different points along the spectrum of delivering software. Something like flatpak is a much more reliable tool in the hands of someone who just wants a GUI app and not think about how it gets to their desktop. For everything else that isn’t part of your distros repositories, there’s really not a good noob-friendly solution that doesn’t carry a big potential risk. Most distros have third-party repositories that use the same underlying tools to deliver software, but are less strict about QA and stuff. This is kind of a bad fit for rolling release distros in my opinion and is probably one of the reasons the AUR is so hands-off and DIY oriented.

There’s probably a better way to handle this, but I don’t think it’s an easy thing to solve (especially for the rolling release model) and the AUR isn’t really appropriate for mass-consumption by average users. Also, there will always be a certain point beyond which you’re on your own, it’s just not feasible to have reliable, safe, distro-agnostic packaging for every piece of software out there.

All official resources, Arch maintainers and high quality guides have been putting a ton of effort into teaching people how to use the AUR safely. That hasn’t stopped some people, even back before Arch got really popular, but you can’t reach everyone. Alternative package managers and pacman wrappers made the AUR a lot more accessible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are good reasons for all the caution. Combine that with Arch increasing in popularity and getting picked up by all the shitty influencers and you get a lot of people ,who don’t know what they’re doing, installing everything from the AUR with their CLI/GUI of choice. Then you’ve got Arch derivatives making AUR packages easily accessible from the start, bad advice on places like reddit etc.

Long story short: it seems that over the years whenever I check in, users that barely know how it works are happily installing random shit from random people on the AUR because they saw it in a YT video or something.

The AUR is a great resource but it’s also being sold as a package repository users don’t need to actively think about or understand. I honestly think malware is going to be much more common on the AUR if we aren’t careful.

The US spends a shit-ton of money on sports… as long as it’s basketball, baseball, football or soccer. Stadium construction for those sports is breaking records in the US and all of those projects are heavily subsidized. It’s a giant, capitalist industry and as such it is propped up by tax money, lol.

Microsoft has been weirdly protective of their installation image downloads for some time now. I don’t really get why.

I’d be fine with it, but I had to pin the flatpak to an old release for now, because the redesign fucked up the migration, deleted all my presets and also caused issues with voice chat apps not getting any audio input. The new UI is also unquestionably a downgrade and less accessible when it comes to setting slider values, but I hope that can be fixed with time. I certainly don’t blame FOSS devs for their work.

Btw. seeing some of the comments in here: is it the fate of all Linux shitposting forums to be filled with hardliners who really care what software you install on you Linux system? Let me use my GTK apps in peace. I don’t need opinions on UI cleanliness and density from people who don’t even use easyeffects, because my god, is it a mess currently.

An evening spent admiring how thin that TV is.

The Lunduke effect.

There is nuance here and it’s up to medical professionals and researchers to find the right balance. The biggest source of the unnecessary usage of antibiotics is rampant over-prescription, not taking a few more doses after the first second you feel better. Rebounding with a more resilient infection after stopping antibiotics early is still a relevant concern and happens frequently.

The default paste action is pretty much the only thing preventing anyone from picking a different function for the button. That’s the the biggest reason for reversing the default behaviour.

There are programs that use the middle mouse button but also support pasting from clipboard. I’ve been annoyed at work plenty of times when I’m trying to translate across a canvas but accidentally paste a random node of text. Bonus points if it contains some kind of password that was still in your clipboard. I don’t think it’s a good default.

Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”

Depends heavily on what place you ask for help in. There are plenty of spaces explicitly meant for community tech support. In OPs case, I’ll say the title doesn’t help and asking an LLM for advice on a topic you’re unfamiliar with (and not second-guessing the commands you paste into the terminal) is such a bad idea that it really can’t be understated. I regularly catch some of my colleagues making AI-assisted mistakes and they’re professionals who genuinely know better. This shit shouldn’t ever be recommended as a learning tool for beginners without some kind of supervision or guard rails to ensure you’re not being gaslit.

Yes, hello? Is this the Bryan Lunduke comment section?

At some point one must have considered wearing the speakers on their head…

Why would a “pretty positive person” wake up and, for no reason at all, decide to be a massive fucking cunt for the day?

Do you communicate with all your friends on a level like that?

I can’t speak for the person you replied to, but I would be miserable if I had friends who behaved like this.

The more I scrolled through the comments, the more I longed for the familiar comfort of the braindead phoronix forums. It’s one thing to be convinced that C is the peak of programming language design (sometimes without having ever written a productive line of code), but it’s another thing entirely to be convinced that Rust is some sort of figurative (or even literal) trojan horse pushed by a global woke conspiracy and/or connected to the “planned release” of COVID-19.

His YT comment section is an experience. They’re breeding a unique kind of right-wing, tinfoil hat Linux extremist, whose software usage is determined solely by esoteric association and “suspicious timing” like seeing widespread adoption during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The phoronix comment section is a garden of rationality and level-headed thinking in comparison.

Linus Torvalds is the last person to extend an olive branch to anyone contributing kernel code. Anyway, big news: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/