verdigris

Oh, so the main reason why it's so good?

Yeah all of the times I see Rust being described as "harder to learn" than C I just shake my head. It's like saying that it's easier to just fall off the cliff at the Grand Canyon instead of taking the path down. Any additional difficulty is because the language forces you to understand memory and pointers properly, instead of just letting you fuck around and find out.

Ah right, I remember being caught by that before. Fixed, thanks.

This is currently one of the biggest selling points for the browser, since Chrom(ium) is dropping support for v2... So I don't see that happening.

An actual WM is not a DE, and if you use something like i3 (sway is the Wayland version) all it does is manage your windows. A DE includes a WM; GNOME's is called ~~gdm~~ Mutter. If you install a WM yourself, that's all you get. Docks, bars, etc. might have suggested or sibling implementations for a given WM, but you'll be setting them up yourself and you can easily swap in other options, or just not have them. There's also no included software suite with things like a file manager. You're expected to pick and use whatever tools you like, which is exactly the appeal but can be intimidating if you're used to a full fledged DE.

Tiling is just a way of organizing your windows, as opposed to the more common "floating" scheme that all the major desktop UIs use. You can totally use tiling in a DE, you just need an extension for it. I know they exist for GNOME and I'm sure there's a way to do it on kde too. Even Windows has tiling modes available.

So you can probably just enable tiling on your current setup to try it out (or install GNOME on your VM --i know that PopOS! used to have a built in tiling mode, but it's been years since I tried that so ymmv). Moving to a WM instead of a DE is a very different and more involved process that's mostly for people who want a totally custom setup with no extraneous features that they don't explicitly set up. It's basically the UI side of doing an LFS or classic Arch install where you pick which system components to use by hand.

The meme is mostly a relic from the days when installing Arch was a very involved and mostly manual process -- it wasn't to the level of LFS, but you had to configure most of the base system, and it would leave you with a pretty bare-bones setup (no GUI by default, etc). So it was a pretty big hurdle and successfully installing it did give you a bit of nerd cred, though even then the "arch BTW" meme was tongue in cheek.

These days it's just one of the most well-supported rolling release distros, and it's got automated installers and GUI spins just like any popular distro. The two biggest assets are the AUR and the wiki.

NixOS does kind of feel like the spiritual successor in terms of effort to set up, and in that immutable OSes are kind of the next big thing, like rolling release was fairly unconventional when Arch was taking off.

I think there's value in pushback against popular but problematic software. Some people just don't realize that, for example, WhatsApp is owned entirely by Meta and is known to collaborate with law enforcement, which are two facts that entirely undermine its main selling point.

I'd rather gatekeep than lie to people, which is what you're doing if you're claiming that using Linux for gaming on your home PC doesn't require a good amount of knowledge and a willingness to learn and fix things. If you get a steam deck or a pre built Linux gaming pc, yeah, just about anyone should be able to use those without issue. But any gamer looking to run non-steam games, or even steam games that aren't well-supported, is going to run into edge cases and optimization issues, and not everyone wants to put in the time or effort to figure those out when Windows does most of it for you.

If you're rebooting to fix an "fps issue", you don't understand what's causing that issue. It doesn't sound like you're looking for advice, but to others scared off by this, this sounds a lot like a user who got in over their head and started mucking with things they shouldn't have.

What a perfect excuse to not pay for it!

Do you pay rent (to someone not in your family)?