Not sure why the downvotes. The good news is that we should be very close to the end of that with GIMP 3 out very soon.
Earlier in the year they announced that it was expected in July or so. I hold out hope that they at least get it out this year. Once it is out, all will be forgieven. Let’s hope that we do not see as long of a delay next time.
There is also Ladybird :
Ladybird is the only browser engine not financially dependent on Google.
It is early days but already becoming usable. I use it to browse sites like OSnews, Hacker News, and LWN.net and it already works pretty well for those.
No love for bcachefs?
How is keeping Arch up-to-date hard? Because there are a lot of updates?
I found Arch to be easier to maintain than any other distro I use. Everything is managed by the package manager ( no snaps, no flatpaks, no PPAs ). Updates are frequent but small and manageable. There are really no update “events” to navigate. And everything is current enough that I never find myself working around missing features or incompatibilities. I found it to “just work”.
I am not sure how your first point relates to SElinux. SELinux is part of the Red Hat ecosystem which is why Fedora uses it. It is not new ( SElinux may pre-date Arch Linux ). Whether you have it installed or not has nothing to do with how hard the system is to maintain. Default Debian installs do not use it either. Most Linux distros don’t. Ubuntu and SUSE use AppArmor instead.
I do not use SElinux on desktop but it makes sense for a server. The Arch kernel includes SElinux support so all you have to do is install the package if you want it. Generally, Arch gives you a newer version than Fedora does.
I have never done Linux From Scratch but I have been using Linux long enough that I remember that is how things were. Compiling the kernel was pretty routine. Getting XFree86 up and running could be true black magic though. You were literally controlling how the electron beam moved across the screen.
One of my systems is running Red Hat 5.2 ( not RHEL - the pre-Fedora Red Hat ). I think it has GCC 2.7.2 on it.
For some reason, I want to get a recent kernel and X11 running on the Red Hat 5.2 box. It would be cool to get Distrobox running on it while leaving everything else vintage. I had been thinking that LFS might be the right resource to consult. This article will hopefully kick me into gear.
I am pretty sure I compiled the kernel once a month back when I had a Pentium 133. Looking back, compiling the kernel must have been a huge chunk of what that machine accomplished.
You were on your way to reinventing Gentoo
Haiku is getting pretty nice actually. With the Falkon browser, it may be getting pretty close to daily drivable for a lot of people.
I agree that it is a cool little system. I think the 32 bit version is still compatible with BeOS though I have not tried that in a while.
Hardware support is a bigger impediment than functionality at this point.
I have been playing around a bit with both Antix and Damn Small Linux 2 that is based on it. I have been quite impressed.
First, it is really just Debian curated to be light-weight. You have full access to all the Debian repositories.
The 32 bit versions also work great. I booted to a fully working desktop on a 32 bit system and only 84 MB of RAM was being used. On top of that I ran Firefox, LibreOffice, Scribis, GIMP, and I think other things and was still around 900 MB. It would be amazing on ancient hardware.
You could argue that Cinnamon is not really a “fork” per se. It is more of an alternative interpretation.
MATE is a true fork. When GNOME abandoned GNOME 2 for GNOME3 3, MATE picked up the GNOME 2 code and continued.
Cinnamon took GNOME 3 and built a different desktop experience on top of it. Specifically, they rejected the controversial GNOME Shell to present a more traditional desktop. The earliest attempts at Cinnamon tried to provide a traditional desktop in GNOME Shell itself. By the time Cinnamon 2 came out, GNOME Shell was completely gone.
Cinnamon also provides X-apps which is a suite of GNOME applications adapted to work with Cinnamon ( but also MATE and XFCE ). These really are forks.
Linus Torvalds is author and maintainer of one of the most successful pieces of software ever written ( software that is decades old and still growing in popularity ).
What does Linus says about your philosophy that “Sometimes you do need major changes that break stuff to upgrade the base”? I think his first sentence explains where he stands but he expands on his initial point.
Most .NET development is arguably superior on Linux than on Windows. I would certainly say this for console, web or cloud, especially if you are using containers. Mobile dev is a bit more of a mixed bag. Obviously if you are building desktop Windows apps explicitly then that is better on Windows. However, if you are building cross-platform .NET apps ( eg. Avalonia or Uno ), you are back to Linux being better.
If you like a full IDE like Visual Studio then you want Rider on Linux ( which is better than VS even on Windows IMHO ). If you are a Visual Studio Code person, you can use that on Linux natively. Of course, if you are a neovim or Emacs user, we are back to Linux being better.
Many distros ship .NET in their repos these days. One issue with that is that you may want to update .NET more often than your distro does. While you can do that, I think it is best not to do that. For this reason, I think choosing a distro that stays up-to-date is best for .NET dev. My recommendation would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS. EOS includes .NET in the repos and provides very timely updates.