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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • That is kind of the UNIX philosophy at work and you’ll find that in a lot of open-source and self-hosted projects. The goal is to do one very specific thing really well in a small and streamlined package that integrates into other processes in a clear, defined and transparent way, not to be one of these super-convenient but bloated “it does everything and the kitchen sink” behemoths. It’s a different style of software development but it’s popular in the open source community for a lot of reasons, for example it’s a lot more maintainable by a single person or small team with limited time. You’ll find most of these large complex open source projects are organized and developed by companies (like Pangolin is), while the smaller UNIX-style projects are often written by individuals or very small teams volunteering their spare time. There are tradeoffs in either direction, but for self-hosting I think following the UNIX philosophy has a lot in common with a typical goal of self-hosting, reducing your dependence on for-profit companies that have a financial incentive to enshittify or otherwise try to squeeze money out of you.




  • As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)





  • PikaOS is Debian based, and they’ve built the deps they need for Steam in 32-bit, so it’s not the end of the world AFAIK. GloriousEggroll seems to be part of it too, so if any refugees are looking for something not Fedora-based there you go. Although his efforts for now seem focused more on Nobara (which is Fedora-based) maybe this will cause some shake-ups there too. I can see Pika is already picking up speed from this though, the Discord is super active.

    Even if Fedora doesn’t ever drop support I think even considering the possibility is shaking people’s confidence in using it as a base going forward, sort of like how Unity’s quickly-walked-back disasters drove people irrevocably towards Godot and other engines. Arch and Arch-based distros are probably starting to look much more appealing too.



  • I absolutely love that you describe PikaOS as porno filthy. No judgement, no defense, no argument, I just think it’s a hilarious description while perfectly making your point, and is pretty much the best thing I’ve read today. Thank you!

    And just to stay on-topic, yeah I’ve found flatpak invaluable in working around some of debian’s unfortunate packaging limitations. I try to use the debian packages first if possible, but if the version is too old, not available, or has crappy dependency conflicts, flatpak to the rescue!



  • I think it’s a great OS and it’s absolutely amazing how far Linux Gaming has come even in the last few years. Personally, I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite’s immutability-based design. I know there are pros and cons, and they just don’t balance for me. I’m a tinkerer, I like to play with the OS internals and have full control of them. Sometimes that causes problems, but it also causes learning, and I like to learn how the OS works and what it’s doing “under the hood” and in my mind Linux is great for that and that’s part of the appeal. For a lot of people, an immutable OS is probably the right way to go, it’s much safer, and stabler, and I know most people don’t care. But I do think it’s worth considering that Linux is not one-size-fits-all and while Bazzite might be best for some people it’s not best for everyone.

    As soon as you start getting into more customization, if you find annoyances you want to fix, sometimes it’s much easier when you’re on a traditional, non-immutable distro, and I consider it an important bonus that this will help you learn. You do have to be more careful, and more respectful about running shell commands freely that might destroy your system, but I think that’s good experience to have.

    Personally I run PikaOS (debian-based) with KDE Plasma 6 and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I have found some of the above mentioned annoyances, but I’ve fixed them to my satisfaction and I’m extremely happy with the result. I have yet to find any game that is difficult to get running, I have yet to find anything that is difficult at all really. It’s been straightforward and rock solid stable. I give a lot of credit to not just the distros but also to projects like KDE, Wine, Proton, Lutris, etc. which are building this incredible gaming ecosystem on Linux. It couldn’t be a better time to dump Windows, and soon we’ll be at the point where no one will mourn it.