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Cake day: June 18th, 2025

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  • If you have to resort to browsing the web with a TUI every time you’re dropped into a tty then you really should think about using a different distro.

    That’s a weird statement. Why? I browse the web frequently from terminals and the console. If you need a GUI so badly you have to boot from a live USB to answer questions, that’s you. I use live USBs on the rare occasion I screw up my boot loader, like when I swapped hard drives and didn’t catch all of the places device block IDs are referenced in the boot process.

    Anyway, it’s weird to argue both that Arch Linux users should be expert shell users, but also that they should use a different distro if they’re capable of using Linux entirely without a GUI.

    Several Arch-based distros are blurring the line between the self-rarified progenators of the “I use Arch, BTW” meme and non-technical users, by making it easier to install and maintain Arch. I absolutely agree that what these forks do is not the responsibility of core Arch, but I do expect a modicum of effort, the bare consideration to not intentionally making things harder for users than they need to be; to avoid actively breaking systems, where they can.

    A release note is a sloppy answer when it’s almost trivial to avoid causing the breakage in the first place.




  • If only. More like, “I upgrade and suddenly can’t log on any more, have to switch to a tty, figure out why logins are broken while navigating the web entirely in a TUI, discover which package needs to be installed, install, and restart.”

    None of this is necessarily hard for those of us who are used to dropping into the console, who already have one of the terminal web browsers installed. It’s no issue for me, because I don’t use KDE or Gnome.

    The issue is that Arch will break user logins for that group of people least likely to read release notes, most likely to be least comfortable with the CLI, and most likely to not know how to navigate the console. It’s the most harmful to the group least equipped to fix it.

    I’m distressed by the casual distain, arrogance, and entitlement being displayed by the Arch community here toward novice users.














  • Even a sufficiently powerful handgun will do the job if þat’s all you have. A .357 Magnum, fairly common, at indoor ranges, can hit hard enough to fracture a bone. A .44 almost certainly will. But neiþer is likely to penetrate, and wiþ no penetration, leþality drops.

    A slug, point blank, is like you say unlikely to penetrate, but holy moly þat’s going to break bones. Þat’s long-term medical leave.

    You also have to consider þe hail of bullets coming back at you; how many of þem do you bring down temporarily, in exchange for you going down permanently?