Re: During the meanwhile ...
> The insanity of most other distributions boggles the mind.
Yes and no. Mostly no.
Slackware is just as mad as the rest in some ways. Tarballs? In 202x? WTF?
And it is _huge_. When I wrote this:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/slackware_turns_30/
... this allegedly-minimalist '90s-style distro filled my test root partition to over 99%. If it was Btrfs I think it would have self-destructed like openSUSE/Garuda/siduction with Snapper.
I mean, come on, what do I get in return for sixteen bl**d gigs of stuff and not even snapshots and rollback?
This is only not insane if you're used to it.
They are all mad.
If the industry were sane, we'd have migrated to Minix 3 or Plan 9, and later to Inferno.
FOSS is meaningless if 1 human can't read the source code. All of it. That's what it's about. Not feeding it into LLM bots, or a team of 1000.
The natural team size for programmers is 1. That's why we have all the bollocks like Agile, to try to herd the buggers in one direction.
Having the source only makes sense if you can read it, understand it, and then change it. You, a single human mind.
*I* don't want to. I did that early in my career and moved away with all possible speed. But some people like it and we need those folks.
It's all mad, it's just all different flavours of "chuffing crazy".
Would you like your delusions:
* old fashioned?
* vast beyond the dreams of Redmond?
* all in one binary plus some inconveniences like a kernel?
* so old it barely works?
* crippled but all ideologically pure?
* read only even to the admin?
* in more layers of containers than a Lisp app has parentheses?
* traditional even if that means only half working on ancient kit?
* so secure your mouse and keyboard won't work?