sysV is the init system linux distributions used before systemd, openrc, upstart, runit, smf etc. It’s pretty much the old daddy and comes from Linux unix roots. Even MacOS used it before they made their own called launchd.

S6 sounds like a update to it since the capital V in sysv stands for the Roman numeral 5.

Huh, didn’t even know my country had a sovereign tech fund. Looking more into it … yeah. It gets money from the federal government but it is in no way run or even associated with it. Looks like a GmbH is behind it, which is a for profit company in Germany. It has a volume of 17 million €.

Also its name is literally sovereign tech fund, even in German, I.e. that’s not a translation, that’s its literal name. I wouldn’t say it’s sketchy, the people behind it definitely look legit, but it certainly doesn’t quite meet the lofty associations the name suggests.

I get visits multiple times a month because a Eula or something shows up on phones or tablets asking them to accept whatever. You know, the stuff nobody reads and just clicks accept on. Old people sometimes have trouble discerning where messages come from, anything from a pop up to a disclaimer for an update is "my phone asking me something".

Chrome OS is still corporate BS. They will manage to confuse people with legalese. I have elder neighbours come to me confused that were literal pages into that BS. I always tell them they can just accept everything google/microsoft/apple asks of them, but that’s the problem, they can’t tell where it’s coming from. To them it’s just a legal contract showing up when they wanted to read their mails, it’s scary and they rather want me to check everything is ok.

Aurora is better for them. No legalese pop ups, fully automatic updates(no "click to accept", "when do you want to schedule the update" or even an info that an update happened). I just tell them to make sure they turn off their PC at night and they will boot into the update next morning, never being the wiser. It just works.

Toilet licking is especially stupid because different part of our body deal differently with the same bacteria. For example bacteria that are beneficial in your colon are most likely very much detrimental anywhere else. Training your immune system against colon bacteria is beyond stupid. Wouldn’t be surprised if that could lead to all kinds of issues.

It’s just unscientific thinking. People think virus and bacteria are the only thing you have to worry about, but lots of the time it’s the bacteria producing toxins as part of their metabolism that’s dangerous to us. In other words, their shit is poison.

One of the reasons we don’t want some groups of bacteria growing on our foodstuff is because they turn stuff literally toxic to us, completely unrelated to immune responses. Same way some molds can be toxic while others are not. It’s not because the fungus starts growing inside your body and has an epic free for all with your immune system. Its byproducts are just toxic. Like some berries or some plants are toxic.

On one hand it's stupid to sabotage your health to appear more masculine. On the other hand casually bringing up that you have contracted a pirate illness in conversation does sound pretty damn masculine.

Nice overview, don’t want to contest anything you said, just add my 2 cents to it.

The truth is the lines have gotten awfully blurry the past decade. It’s not just about FHS(basically a standard how the file system is laid out, where binaries go etc) getting more or less phased out(there are dozens of places where binaries can end up these days for example) but also some deeper changes of how we run software on these distributions.

Frankly arch and cachyos(which is a arch variant, yes it has optimised packages, but so does opensuse, it’s just a decision to leave behind compatibility with older hardware, not some inherent magic) belong into the standard Linux distro bin for me, they do nothing special or noteworthy beyond being competently implemented. They are not really different from Debian, fedora or Ubuntu, you can install those just the same manual way you do arch. Yes arch is rolling and others are release based but opensuse shows how there isn’t that much difference between the models, they run both on the same package base, as did Debian with its sid repo since forever.

Then we have gentoo and yes it is a bit special even today. The idea behind it is that you compile your own packages instead of using a binary repo. But why? The answer to that is that when you compile a package from source you have a vast influence on the resulting binary, for example by giving instruction to the compiler, that’s how cachyos gets its optimised binaries. But another even larger influence is by using configuration options built into the package by its developers. For example to disable or enable certain parts of the code. What gentoo did was collect and categorise the most common of these options into what became known as use flags, a system configuration that affects every single package built on that system. If you add the -dvd use flag it will strip dvd support from any package that has it. Or maybe you don’t have a printer -cups will remove cups support from all packages. This doesn’t just not install cups, it removes the very support of cups from packages that would otherwise interact/look for it in some way. This has obvious security advantages and is where the notion of gentoo being a lean system comes from, you’re stripping out entire functions of code from your binaries. If there is a bug in a certain OpenSSL mode that’s included in all binaries shipped by other distros, but you have deactivated all modes besides the one you intend to use, you are not affected by the bug. The idea behind gentoo is a kind of customisation that goes beyond the package layer, you’re no longer just choosing your individual packages but also the options of these packages.

As for the others, immutable, declaratives, cow or a/b root distros… that’s where the lines are getting blurry. The declarative like Nixos are very different in their implementation, but then again, you can use the nix package manager on other distros and we have been using docker containers set up declaratively via compose files for years by now. Likewise the immutable seem very alien, until you realise that they are only divided from their normal counterparts by a very thin line, important yes, but thin nonetheless. There is a reason these new distros get spearheaded by the old guard, a fedora workstation distro is very similar to a fedora silverblue immutable and from opensuse tumbleweed it’s a very close step to opensuse microOS. It’s mostly different default packages and some config options with an added package or two. Sure they seem very different, but just because you bolt the hood of your car closed doesn’t fundamentally change it does it?

These days I’d say gentoo is for learning. Not just about Linux but about interacting with source code and learning about the individual software you choose to install. The optimisations frankly matter less these days, sure you can optimise for speed or size of the binaries but are you going to be able to tell on that 12 core machine with 2 TB of nvme storage? No, not really. Security through a lean system might be nice, but there are specialised distros that already do so and you can run software in their own namespaces, control them via SElinux, put them in jails, bubblewrap them, containerise or VM them, hell even flatpak them, all probably more effective ways of archiving security.

There is literally a gentoo-install: https://github.com/oddlama/gentoo-install

If you are worried that the NSA might be reading your email maybe it’ll be better for society if you don’t update … just saying.

The amount of dos systems I have seen powering critical infrastructure in banks and hospitals is quite frankly nightmare fuel.

There are a couple interesting browser these days, for example floorp. It’s always interesting to check who is behind a browser, in the case of floorp it’s a Japanese company which I like.

They might still pull a corporate fast one on you, but at least they will apologise profusely over it. It’s also genuinely a nice browser, obviously fully open source and privacy focused. I think it’s a nice filter between my browser and mozilla which lost some trust from me over time.

https://floorp.app/en

They are deprecating the underlying technology(called manifest V2 or MV2 for short) and replacing it with a different one(MV3) that lacks some of the capabilities for some kind of adblocking.

So yeah, it’s pretty much dead on chromium. The developers of brave have commited to provide a best effort support for their browser though: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Firefox on the other end has no intention of deprecating support for MV2 so any browsers based on that are fine. Keep in mind MV3 supports some adblocking and some Adblockers have already moved to it, it’s just a lesser extent.