Such as?

That tells me you don’t understand what a “stable” release branch is. The Debian maintainers do a lot of work to ensure that the packages not only work, but work well together. They don’t introduce breaking changes during the lifecycle of a major branch. They add feature updates between point releases, and continuously release security updates.

In the real world, that stability is a great value, especially in the server space. You’d be insane to use Arch as a production server, and I’m saying that as an Arch user.

Something, something, sword of Damocles.

You must think you’re clever. Take a few days to think about what separates you (specifically) from the toxic “PC Master Race” evangelists, and maybe fornicate some greenery.

It definitely depends on your home instance. You’re on LBZ, and Ada is a helicopter parent who blocks, bans, and purges anything and anyone that may be upsetting to her children. So yes, you’re probably not exposed to the full picture on Lemmy.

Visit the comment threads on Phoronix and you’ll see WOKE and FASCIST and COMMUNIST and TANKIE and any number of insults thrown around like manure in a monkey cage. Or try to argue in favour of systemd in a high visibility thread and inevitably someone will say that it’s bloat, that it’s corporate trash, and recite “enshittiication” like it’s some Pavlovian reflex.

It’s closer to present-day Lemmy. Certainly in terms of the concentration of crazy. A bunch of opinionated jackasses with delusions that their particular niche views are morally correct and should be the norm, and any deviation from that self-declared correct opinion gets shouted down. The wrong distribution, the wrong display server, the wrong init system, your app is not suckless enough, you’re the wrong kind of Libre, you’re wrong about something that a new user doesn’t even know exists… and that extends to maintainers and all the way up to the LKML too. If I saw the state of the discourse back in 2022, I would’ve thought twice about even trying to approach Linux.

Allow me to interject for a moment to talk about our holy father Richard Stallman…

Linus Sebastian: “Why do I hear boss music?”

I was already an adult when I learned that “salmon” is supposed to be pronounced as “sammon”.

Why don’t they just team up?

All you had to do was google “thinkpad” and pick out a stock photo.

I think I see where your confusion comes from. Either that or you are writing programs with willful and reckless disregard to the importance of standards.

A process (or program) has multiple outputs. The return code is a one byte value that is set by the process when it ends, and often checked by the parent process (interactive shell, script, program) to make decisions regarding the flow of control. This value is severely restricted in its usefulness, to “provide data”. The type (unsigned byte) limits the range and precision, and you can’t write to it asynchronously or before you’re ready to gracefully end the process. The name is deceptive: this is not the same kind of “return” as the return instruction in programming languages. It simply describes the way a process ended, nothing more. It should never contain meaningful data, and always adhere to the POSIX conventions.

Why? Because everybody does. More than that, everybody writes programs that expect a return code of zero to mean success, and a return code other than zero to mean failure. It was decided before I was even born. It’s an implicit agreement that we adhere to (except Powershell because they’re special). Deviation from this will only lead to compatibility issues and confusion.

If you want to convey meaningful data, you should use an output stream. The POSIX standard states that programs should communicate using strings, and that the standard input and output streams should be used for this unless other methods are needed. If your program produces meaningful data and you want to convey it to the parent process or another program, you have to write it to stdout, and the other program has to accept it via stdin. This exchange is facilitated by the shell through the pipe and redirection operators. It frees up the return code to meaningfully indicate the exit state of the program without mixing it up with the data produced by it, and once again, it’s what everybody does, and what everybody expects.

To be pedantic: there is no such thing as a boolean value. It’s all just bytes and larger numbers behind an abstraction that allows a higher-level programming language to implement Boolean algebra by interpreting numbers a certain way. One such abstraction is the POSIX convention of treating a return code of zero as success and everything else as a failure. This consequently defines how Boolean algebra is implemented in POSIX-compliant shells:

• The if statement tests the return code of the command specified in the header, then executes the then branch if the return code is zero, the else branch otherwise.
• The while loop similarly tests the command in the head and executes the body if its return code is zero.
• The boolean && and || operators treat zero return values as true and nonzero return values as false. Go try it out.
• Even the true and false commands are just programs that immediately return 0 and 1 respectively.

If you start treating nonzero return codes like a success value with meaning, the only thing you’ll achieve is that your scripts won’t be compatible with the shell. stdout exists. Use it.

That’s… that’s what a distribution is. A base OS with bundled, preconfigured user applications.

Take a gander at the git repo: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy

It does as much as most desktop distributions. More in some areas. It has merits regardless of your politics. I know I’ll be borrowing some of the scripts.

Because it’s a competently-made, new distribution with interesting features. Not everything you don’t understand is a fucking conspiracy.

We’re all shipping the penguin and the wildebeest.

I’ll just link my comment from the other day: https://lemmy.world/comment/19749012 (also read Morphit’s reply, it gets worse)