Also PKGBUILD’s are the superior packaging format. Back in the day people use to talk about preferring debian or redhat based distros based on how much they liked debs or rpms. Building packages on Arch is easier than pretty much any distro I have ever tried to build packages on.

I used them for some things, but other things still don’t work quite right. Take Steam for example. I do love flatpaks for testing out apps, things with really finicky dependencies, or pinning a specific version of a software that I want to continue to work in the future. However, for most things, Arch + AUR just covers all my needs without any hiccups.

To me flatpaks are sort of like NixOS. All the benefits they provide aren’t something I need on a daily basis. Rolling back works just fine 99% of the time with downgrade. I already have system backups. Despite what some articles might insist, things don’t just break all the time. I’m not running untrusted software.

Basically no solution is perfect, but they don’t need to be. If the benefits I gain can be recreated through other methods without the tradeoffs they introduce, then I will go with that. Of course, that isn’t to say they don’t have their place, but sometimes I feel like some people think that “being designed from the ground up” to handle certain use cases is always better than whatever “cobbled together” thing we currently have and that isn’t always the case. I’m specifically quoting those two phrases because these are the exact phrases you will hear projects using to justify their existence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some people have outright confused modularity for “cobbled together”.

One last example I want to make is that I make use of projects like the fish shell and helix editor. In these cases, I find the features they introduce to be worth the tradeoffs and work better because of being designed “from the ground up” to do what they do. However, I don’t make use of immutable systems, containers such as docker, or say filesystems such as btrfs. The features they provide are not useful enough to me compared to the problems they introduce.

Maybe pipewire and the ROC protocol? I’m not sure if it can be used on windows. You will have to refer to their documentation to get anything working. On Arch the package is called pipewire-roc. On Android the app you will need is roc droid. I have used it from linux to android, but have never introduced windows into the mix.

Well she was right. I did learn something new about those commands.

I’ve been using some ancient java app called jmkvpropedit to do this.

Depends on how the project and how long they have been around.

About the time that Windows 10 came out. I was just messing around and ended up liking it.

I’m constantly surprised at this point how anyone fails at it. Not to mention there are a number of distros that provide them out of the box now and somehow people still say they couldn’t install it.

Finally time to bust this out again.

Believe it or not. kde’s khelpcenter is what I have been using. Not sure if it includes images, but it renders simple html files and according to the Arch package. It is only like 7 MiB. Way better and faster than using a whole browser, but doesn’t really support javascript obviously.

Yep, I remember when distros had to ship git versions of sddm with unmerged patches to fix issues because of the disconnect between the sddm maintainer and kde developers who seem to be doing most of the work. They are unfortunately limited to goals and architecture of that separate project project and its maintainer and its finally time to get away from it.