are rolling release distros stable enough

I’ve been using Arch (or some flavor of it) for several years, and I’ve never had any serious issues that I didn’t cause myself. The thing that might catch you with your pants down is if a dependency introduces a change that breaks another application, but catastrophic failures are fairly rare, as long as you’re willing to learn how to maintain your system.

is it possible/easy to roll back to a previous version

Yes. The application is called Timeshift, and it’s specifically designed to back up the system files to a separate partition. If your root filesystem is btrfs, it can also manage filesystem-level snapshots that you can roll back if you bugger the system.

Did somebody let an ornithologist into the entomologists’ enclosure?

Magnetic tape. It’s one of the better long-term offline backup solutions. It is compact, inexpensive, has no moving parts (bearings, motors, reader heads), no scratchable surfaces, and can last for decades in a moderately climate-controlled room.

Just keep it away from magnets… or iron vaults. According to an anecdote (that I can’t find right now), a large bank vault was repurposed as an offsite backup storage, except it kept wiping the magnetic tapes because the thick iron walls reacted to changes in the geomagnetic field.

This bacterium gives me the sniffles. This other bacterium liquefies and eats my muscles. But if I don’t have enough of this other bacterium in me, I get violent explosive shits??

I can’t address the entire reply since it’s 3 in the morning, but I just want to point out something.

I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist, or a Marxist-Leninist. I don’t consider myself to be a “leftist” (which I see as an overly broad term), and I’m sure as hell not a centrist. If my views are inconsistent, it’s because I don’t follow any single doctrine.

I’m generally leaning towards progressive or left-wing ideas, but with a few exceptions.

• While I support the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I believe that DEI initiatives are highly susceptible to exploitation because of the widespread and largely uncritical public support of the concept (or even just the abbreviation) with little regard to the implementation; and by tokenizing ethnicity, gender, and identity, it is at risk of doing what it was meant to prevent.
• I believe that law enforcement is a deeply flawed system to say the least, but ultimately necessary because the alternatives are lawlessness or ineffectual systems. This is of course colored by my European perspective where guns and driver’s licenses aren’t handed out like candy.
• The “tolerance is a social contract” mentality is hurting society. A person who experiences rejection and exclusion from progressive communities for voicing “intolerant” opinions will not be interested in reconciliation, and will inevitably fall in with a more radical group where they experience acceptance and belonging, where they will never be exposed to different ideas and their views will never be challenged. Integration should be sought whenever reasonable.

The last point is especially important to me. I grew up in a fairly conservative environment, and it took me a lot of conscious effort to un-learn my prejudices and learn acceptance. But whenever I get downvoted and shouted down for voicing an opinion that aligns with conservatives, or simply isn’t “leftist” enough, it makes me want to distance myself from “leftist” ideology and adds to my disillusionment.

Counterpoint: if you have the ability and willingness to learn how Linux works, un-fucking a broken Arch installation will teach you more about the system than spending months with a stable distro. I know because my first serious daily driver was Manjaro.

Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov (the lead artist) formed their own company Red Info in 2023. I will only recognise a game as Disco Elysium’s successor if it comes from them.

hesoyam and impulse 101

And the most powerful one: bind w kill

Cry me a fucking river, David.

…maybe it’s better that the Windows source code remain closed.

At the same time, I’d love to see the developers of the world glimpse at that eldritch cognitohazard and collectively go insane.

Command line cheat sheet (with bonus vim controls):

A bus that couldn’t get over a small incline because of fresh snow on top of ice and had to be pushed by the passengers and pedestrians. It’s odd because it happened in Europe in a city where buses are particularly well-maintained.

Isn’t that just sparkling racism?

I was ready to have a rant about PHP. Well played.

Don’t forget the dissolved remains of humans who fell into those pools!

I love the smell of redistributed ood in the morning.

It’s all fun and games until somebody mixes up pinus contorta with the ol’ dick twist.

Managers will still expect you to do 60% of your work on 60% of your keyboard.

The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don’t hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.

Oh, fuck off! I can barely use Blender because dragging a spinner control does something with the cursor that makes Hyprland shit its pants. It’s been fixed and broken several times. May or may not be related: Vaxry has expressed his disdain for Blender in issue notes. (edit) found it: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3270

(edit2) I should also mention that Hyprland is the only compositor where this happens. KDE Plasma, Qtile-wayland, Sway, Wayfire are all fine.