Oh, that book is so good. Yes! I really need to get myself a copy and re-read it.

A few years back, during Covid lockdowns, I stumbled upon Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed and liked it a lot. It was fascinating to read how people reacted to the plague back then.

Mandriva is gone, but there’s a couple of projects carrying its legacy. OpenMandriva is one of them, obviously. Mandrake was my first distro too, so I have a soft spot for it.

From my perspective, OpenMandriva’s biggest strengths are that it’s independent, non-derivative, community driven, and based in Europe. Unfortunately it’s also small, but the people behind it seemingly do a lot with very little, so the community is passionate about the project.

Personally I’m just happy that there are smaller, non-corporate distros still out there providing alternatives. And OMLx seems like a pretty solid distro at that.

For their selling pitch, you can check their FAQ.

I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.

I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.

Hey, I don’t even disagree with that criticism. And maybe I’ll check out The Fountainhead later.

It’s a funny thing, I was never politically aligned with Rand to begin with, but I really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged as a science fiction book. The dystopia led by incompetent and ideologically empty boobs was an interesting take. From the way Rand portrayed her characters and presented the ideas of her opponents made me think she might have been autistic. Her politics made me think she was insane. It’s a fun book.

I had a good, deep, cathartic laugh at this I didn’t realize I was in need of. UK politics has been an interesting but unfun mess for a long while.

Turns out this is also available in Alpine repositories, so I went ahead and installed it on my phone. Could come in handy when browsing from public Wi-Fi or such. Thanks for the tip.

I turn it off every night or if I’m away for many hours, so about 10 minutes right now.

I do have a Raspberry Pi that’s been up 12 weeks, 5 days, 19 hours, 59 minutes. I believe there was a planned power outage when it was lasted turned off.

Yup, Konsole is good enough.

They are the true blue bloods of the animal kingdom, they are already at the pinnacle.

The male lion then killed the cubs so the female lions would go in to heat. Nature is majestic.

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I’d be perfectly fine if everything was just mixed mono. I see little value in stereo. I’m weird like that.

I really should read that one. I’ve been a fan of Poe’s Haunted for a long time.

I’m reading Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. I think I like it, but how much probably depends on how the writer is able to bring it all together in the end. I do like the somewhat unconventional structure though, and the book is very atmospheric. It feels like it’s more focused on painting pictures of a time and place than strictly telling a story, or something, I’m not good at describing it.

“Install Gentoo” is a meme, not life advice. With Gentoo, the installation process gives you good insight in to the internals of Linux systems and compiling (almost) everything from source is interesting, but won’t produce noticeable benefits for average users. Especially since updates take some time, what with compiling the programs again. Gentoo is a great distro with a fantastic package manager, but unless you’re an enthusiast or a serious hobbyist, Don’t Install Gentoo.

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Carl Sagan.

Yes, yes I am.

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