I haven’t heard anyone talk about puppy Linux in a bit. That used to be the go to for ultra lightweight setups.

“I want to know why this is broken. How to fix it can come later.”

Arch. Started using it in high school. Never had a reason to switch. Now I’m just regularly frustrated by other distros trying to make things easier by abstracting simple configurations behind layers of custom scripts.

AUR, when I can. I run my own binary package repo. App images are an interesting concept, but usually they are compiled against ancient versions of glibc for increased compatibility. Optimizations and CVE patches may or may not be applied, LD lookups are longer, etc.

Sway still primarily counts as a WM + Compositor, but considering it has keymaps, autostart, and libinput config mechanisms embedded in it, I would say it borders a desktop environment.

The real problem: Define beginner distro

Every user is starting from a different point. There is no such thing as a beginner distro. You can say this distro is good for people who can grasp the idea of a command line or this distro is good for people who have no idea command line interfaces exist, but that doesn’t differentiate between beginner friendly or not.

Executing a command, capturing all terminal formatting and escape codes so I can do some light manipulation on leading whitespace before dumping it back to the terminal.

People always sleep on script. It’s badass and let’s you do goofy things like this while keeping standard terminal formatting: https://github.com/StaticRocket/dotfiles/blob/043e9a56cc9515060188ec4642e4048c0dd6c000/dot_bashrc#L79-L94

I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”

+1 to caddy. There are some services that set safe headers following the recommendations outlined by Mozilla but others don’t control headers as strictly. Caddy is the only web server that I found that supports loose default header values. These values will be selected unless the upstream application specifies their own values.

You can do something similar in nginx but it requires playing with maps and has a little more indirection than I’d like.

Just wish caddy was capable of starting as root and stepping down permissions like Nginx. I have certs being managed by other tools and have to make sure they are installed and chowned for caddy’s use when they are cycled.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/xdotool/xdotool.1.en

https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/wtype/wtype.1.en

Pipe your clipboard contents through either of those depending on your windowing system. I’d recommend putting that in a script and binding it to a keyboard shortcut.

Llvmpipe is enabled in mesa at compilation time and actually modifies the swrast_*.so the last time I checked. Not runtime configurable. Also, I know at one point it had issues running on 32 bit machines. Not sure if that’s still the case.

Just add a new user

I made it through college without using windows on any of my personal machines, but I did need to access a library or computer lab to take 1 test that needed a specialized web browser for some reason. Other than that, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to slip by with a good PDF viewer, libreoffice, and Inkscape.

My degree was in computer engineering, most groups I worked in outside of the engineering department just preferred collaboration through office online or google docs.

Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.

They aren’t all formatted uniformly though, so you’ll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You’ll also always be a little out of date…

Bash, just because everything else already uses it. That and bashisms have infected nearly all of my scripts as I clumsily bump into the limitations of POSIX string manipulation.

I have found some very fun things with sed branching patterns as a result of these limitations though…

https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Branching-and-flow-control.html

Microsoft tried to lock a development feature behind a paywall by introducing an artificial dependency on Visual Studio.

This also happened to occur right around the time there were also licensing and hosting issues around open source libraries. The manipulation of the .NET foundation was the really concerning part. Made it clear that MS still doesn’t give a damn about the wider community using their language.

A thinly veiled M$ ad, trying to save face after the .NET fiasco of 2021…

Some of them advertised specific performance improvements.

I’m not going to rag on them though. Some of them did have performance improvements and basically created the tools and optimized defaults that propagated to standard distros, allowing the gap to close.

For people using bash that are thinking “how do I do that”:

The bash-complete package adds the _command function for recursive completion on commands that accept other commands with their own arguments. It’s what sudo uses last I checked. You can add complete -F _command stfu to your bashrc to link it to the stfu command.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/bash.1#Programmable_Completion