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I think you can probably find a better example, even if less recent. The AUR is unofficial and not properly vetted in the same way as the actual Arch repos, Debian repos, etc.

I had to do the pledge in early elementary school. It didn't continue forever. Not sure if people still do it. I do agree it's disturbing. Interestingly we once read a book in school that featured a character who refused to say the pledge and got in trouble for it. IIRC it was a case of "you aren't technically required to do this but they'll give you a hard time if you're the only one not doing it".

I'm using a OnePlus 8T with LineageOS and it's been great for me. I replaced the stock OS day 1, after getting the latest firmware update. I got it off eBay for a decent price a few years ago when AT&T made a bunch of old phones stop working via a whitelist. My OnePlus 5 I had at the time supported VoLTE on paper but didn't make the whitelist for some reason so I had to get a newer model. I don't really see the appeal of Pixel phones. I think I'd still wanna replace the stock OS right away to get the experience I'm used to if I had one. Not even sure I'd wanna go with Graphene.

The notes end when the song does, then you can start another song or stop playing. Do you ever run out of posts when scrolling?

So you don't mean stick or button layout, just the body shape then?

While Switch is 360-esque now, the Wii Classic Controller had symmetrical sticks at the bottom, Wii U Pro Controller and GamePad had symmetrical sticks on top. So Nintendo wasn't totally committed to the 360 design even if the GameCube controller was almost there before. (Not gonna count the Wiimote as it's a little too different) Steam Deck and Steam Controller have symmetrical sticks as well. I don't think it's as clear cut as you say. 8BitDo and GuliKit have controllers in both form factors also (released in the last 2 years even). Also worth noting that XInput has been holding back PC controllers so that anything more ambitious than a 360 controller is hard to get working. Microsoft is also the only controller manufacturer to not put gyro in their controllers.

Is logging in from a browser good enough?

Seconding this. Look for something with ROCKNIX support and put that on there.

Modern controller DNA goes back to the PS1, first to have 4 shoulder buttons and two analog sticks.

I check for game and system updates on my Deck before and after a session and it just takes a few minutes at most. I get excited to read changelogs if a game has a big update. These updates are not automatic/forced if you don't want them to be, and for singleplayer stuff at least you can just go play the old version if you're in a hurry or have little to no Internet.

The OLED Switch has the same specs and is the same gen, just a different screen. Like the Vita 1000 vs Vita 2000, they play the same games. Xbox One and Series are different gens.

The amount of otherwise decent games that run poorly due to Unity or UE is very unfortunate. I wish people would stop recommending this stuff. I do hope Godot and Bevy are better, but I'm not sure if they are.

To name some games with very bad perf issues that I've played in the last couple years: Core Keeper (Unity), WORMHOLE (Unity, mostly see the lag in endless mode), Crab Champions (UE4, have to use nonsense upscaling stuff that makes the game hideous just to maintain 60fps at 1920x1200).

Meanwhile Terraria, Necesse, and Barony use their own engines and run great, they have aged like wine.

Out of fairness, I'll say Tiny Rogues (Unity) usually ran pretty well from what I recall, though the dev is actually working to move off Unity in the future, so he has clearly found issues with it himself.

I know there is the argument of making a game vs making an engine, and actually getting a game done and shipping it, but when you put out garbage you aren't gonna have a very positive legacy. I think it would be better to take the long way and ensure some level of quality. Games are often played for decades after release and if they are buggy or laggy, people will continue to run into that forever.

Thought this might be about the video game series, and even after seeing "Fable 5" my first reaction was "wow, up to 5 already?". It looks like they made it up to Fable III before rebooting the series with a 4th game (well, it's not out yet), so there is no Fable 5 yet.

TFA seems to be about some AI thing. Crazy how many words are actually just AI things now. Learning, reinforcement, language, model...

I thought the PinePhone community had succeeded in making custom firmware for the modem in the PinePhone, though I'm not sure of the legality of actually using it. Plus both PinePhone and Librem 5 had a killswitch to disconnect the modem at least.

I would highly recommend LineageOS. Supports non-Pixel phones, some of them many years old (although now that I double check, the Galaxy S3 and OnePlus One aren't on the devices list anymore, I guess they do stop supporting old stuff eventually...). The OnePlus 5 is still supported and was released in 2017. For anything older than that, I guess I'd recommend looking into postmarketOS.

What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.

I've mostly just used LineageOS for several years now, but I believe the first time setup pushes you to sign in to a Google account, but you can easily skip it. If you do sign in, it's sticky/permanent and I think may require a reinstall to get back out of it.

I believe on my Mac (non-primary machine, FWIW) I ended up signing into an Apple account, and I doubt I did that for no reason. I don't rely on iCloud or spend money on apps. Is it required to get Xcode, which is required for some things from homebrew to work? You did mention the App Store, which maybe applies here. Is the App Store the only way to get Xcode?

Guessing this is just a hypothetical, but if you really can do that (disable the DM via the GUI by accident), I'd be curious. If you told me to do that on purpose, my first instinct would be to uninstall the package.

I have long thought that fewer things get properly packaged for Arch due to it having the AUR as a crutch. Stuff like Void and Guix will have packages that are only in the AUR for Arch.

That one's survivorship bias I think.

The LLM stuff is tiresome, but how is retro stuff even comparable? Maybe I'm not seeing what you're seeing, but I generally think people tinkering with old Mac OS stuff is cool. Though I'd rather OS X than Classic, as the unix-y bits are part of the cool factor for me. I do like the fonts and visuals of Classic, though.

LLM posts are like when a new meme template comes out and gets run into the ground everywhere you look, but someone tinkering with old computers just seems like normal human hacker interests. Perhaps you could argue that too much nostalgia is a bad thing. I have been hearing "frutiger aero" a disturbing amount the last year or so.

foot is great, I have yet to use anything better. I suspect Ghostty is aimed at part-time and full-time Mac users. I don't get the hype.

Same here. Main terminal w/ tmux, editor terminal with tmux (runs nvim so I can jump to it with a key bind), ssh to remote server with remote tmux, scratchpad term with tmux. I try to reuse the same panes a lot, otherwise open a new tmux window temporarily to do something (C-b c). Basically never open a whole new separate terminal instance on top of those.

The same kapton tape used in electronics? Never heard it called space tape.

And yet. You probably shouldn't use literal cron (or its more modern cousins) for scheduled tasks! In 2026 there are more modern options available

What are people on non-systemd distros like Guix System, Void, PCLinuxOS, and so on using for this? Is there still something better to use than cron?

Admittedly I never learned cron, I use a lot of `sleep` and `countdown` for relative delays instead. Just earlier today I set up a 12h countdown followed by opening a URL with xdg-open since I expect a release around then and don't want to forget. I also threw in a little notify-send command in case my browser isn't visible, I should see that pop up. Considered using espeak, but don't wanna scare myself and/or ruin my watching experience if I'm watching a video at that time.

Hosting a Minecraft server was pretty big for me. Learned about screen and tmux to keep it running and be able to detach and reattach. Learned vim to deal with configs on the headless server.

Another thing that helped me learn a lot was what I call "anime playlist management", but may be too niche to recommend. Basically after I moved from VLC to mpv I had to create and add to playlists without a gui. I learned a lot about the find command, text redirection, vim, fzf, file permissions... I retrieve the full file path for the videos and dump that into a .m3u file that I then watch in mpv or rearrange later in vim. find helps to get to the exact files quicker even when everything is sorted neatly into separate directories, fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively. find can also filter by mtime, so I have some one-liners that just show e.g. all files 7 days old or newer in the media directory, easy to rerun and select the stuff I just downloaded to put in the playlist.

At some point I preferred vim over geany or whatever other text editor I used to use. It's nice to be able to use the same tools everywhere, including over ssh, so that reinforced a preference for stuff that runs in a terminal. irssi, aerc, stig+transmission-daemon, neovim, mpv (controllable over ssh). Also having a file server gets you more into rsync, sshfs, stuff like that.

I've made several vim macros to speed up the "anime workflow" as well. Like I add new episodes to the very bottom of the file, but the file has sections broken up by empty lines, and I have a macro to take everything just added at the bottom and move it to the bottom of the top section, where the high priority stuff goes. I also have macros to delete the top line of two side-by-side files in vim at once, saving both. I have both a human-readable list and the actual playlist file and then I delete the lines as I watch.

I've been incrementally refining this workflow for several years now. Just find something you enjoy doing and try to polish it, learn more applicable tools you can incorporate, etc.

If you and 5 others go to McDonald's for 3 meals a day, it will always appear busy to you even if it had no traffic outside those moments you were there with the 5 others. Similarly the news can report on outliers using AI while most people you know IRL may not use it. In other words, it is accurate, the groups are not the same, and statistics often don't feel like they reflect reality.

When asked about why Picos use micro USB and not USB-C, he said it's a cost issue. USB-C connectors are more expensive than micro USB, while also taking a tiny bit more board space. That said, USB-C will probably happen someday.

Glad I'm not alone in caring about this. All I want from them is a Pico with a USB-C port. When using them for keyboards and arcade controllers you either need to wire up a separate port (and USB-C is awful to solder) or use someone else's variant with one on there. I have had issues in both cases. The Open-Frame1 leverless controller needed me to either pay for assembly or fail at soldering on the extra port myself (did the former for batch 1, got cocky when ordering batch 2 and didn't pay assembly, never got any of the new boards working). Flatbox rev 5 used an RP2040-Zero from Waveshare, which initially seemed fine but later turned out to have major bouncing issues. Typing on a virtual keyboard with it was nearly impossible, all the extra inputs being detected. The amount of debounce needed to be added in GP2040-CE settings to completely solve it resulted in it being much higher latency. I heard a theory that it was due to a lack of filtering on the MCU. Meanwhile Haute42 started pumping out incredibly cheap leverless controllers in all sorts of designs within a year of me building 10 Flatboxes. They're so cheap you can't really DIY one cheaper anymore unless you need them in bulk, and they have no bouncing/input issues. They even have extension ports to help deal with console auth. Their non-3d-printed buttoncaps also don't break as much, though I did eventually have one break after living in my backpack a while.

I'd like to take another crack at building a solid leverless someday. A new Pico with a USB-C port would probably be enough motivation.

Also I should note that part of why USB-C is such a big deal on a game controller is because they all use it now, and I've got lots of long USB-C to A cables connected to consoles and my PC, I can easily switch controllers at the user-facing end without having to re-run a cable. I can go from my Open-Frame1 playing Rivals of Aether to my Steam Controller playing Crab Champions to my Haute42 M16 playing Melty Blood all with the same cable routed under my desk, often without leaving my chair.

This is not the kind of gap a community closes by writing better software. It is the kind of gap that takes a decade of full-time employees auditing every label in every default app, a market mechanism that punishes you when you don’t, and a centralized review process to enforce it from above.

We have seen a bigger push to get everything using XDG config dirs in recent years, and also getting everything working on Wayland. These to me seem similar, other than that this accessibility standard would be even more niche, and if it was stated upfront to be made with AI in mind, I think there would be resistance.

Personally I do not want to let an AI tool run loose on my machine, but I do like having ways to script and automate stuff. I like Sway's IPC and that every keybind is also a command you could run. So the explanation of Apple's accessibility stuff sounds cool. I wish I had something like Unity's HUD where I could use a search to select from any depth of graphical menus in a given program instead of having to poke around by hand. If the accessibility standard were like that and allowed more stuff to be done from the CLI more easily, that would be great.