alekq
alekq on Hacker News
Posted by
alekq on Friday September 11, 2026 @05:21PM
from the thanosapollo.org dept.
Posted by
alekq on Monday July 20, 2026 @08:45AM
from the wren.wtf dept.
Thanks to Chez Scheme I guess...
Considering your experience and preferences, what do you like?
As a long-time Gentoo user and supporter, my main issue is the time investment. Not the investment in installing and initial setup, not compilation in the background (binary packages make things much easier today), but staying up-to-date with software upgrades and changes. I did not mind it before the "life happened", but now when it takes even one available night in a month or two, it seems a lot.
Other issue is when you need something promptly, if nothing else to test it out or one-use only and you either have to wait or use something like official binary/flatpak...
Posted by
alekq on Thursday May 28, 2026 @12:54PM
from the tuomov.medium.com dept.
It’s funny how this happens the very same moment we get to read about Claude’s Mythos and a New-Yorker article. I really doubt the attacker is up to date with either…
The only thing surprising here is how naive you guys are. He is a marketing&sales guy in the first place.
Amazing project, great people behind it, but it is a time sink.
Posted by
alekq on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @05:16PM
from the blog.kalvad.com dept.
Whenever I think that the time I invested in some of the mini-projects is lost/wasted time and that it was probably better choice to do just about anything else instead - I come across something like this. The only thing I can conclude is that there is no such thing as wasted time, as long you enjoy the road.
Kudos.
Posted by
alekq on Monday March 31, 2025 @07:05AM
from the codecs.multimedia.cx dept.
This might be too harsh... Do not think it is betrayal, but it is idiotic and can understand someones frustration with it. On par with FreeBSD developers using MacOS to develop their OS.
Is English your native language?
People easily install these without being concerned about security or privacy. I am actually more curios if these are audited at all or the risk is solely on users?
I use GNOME only in throwaway VM, but even there - only the extensions available in official repository are used.
Posted by
alekq on Monday June 03, 2024 @05:51AM
from the poets.org dept.
If you cannot audit it and supervise it, do not offer a point-and-click way to install it. Do not rely on end-users experience and sanity nor the good intentions of random people online.
Installation of Gnome extensions or KDE themes (unless official package from distribution's repository is used) always seemed as unnecessary risk to me.
Posted by
alekq on Thursday February 15, 2024 @01:59AM
from the michael.orlitzky.com dept.
Posted by
alekq on Friday November 10, 2023 @07:09AM
from the usesthis.com dept.
Although I do prefer look and feel of the GNOME and most of the software I use is GTK, I use Plasma as well. The main issue I personally have with GNOME is it's dependency on 3rd-party extensions. For start, it's missing clipboard manager and notification tray that you get with Plasma out of the box (as well with other DEs and OSes). You want the dock? Again, you need the extension. Then you upgrade and at least one of the extensions is lagging behind.
I knew about Trinity right from the beginning of project (back then it was available in one of the Gentoo's overlays), but I am genuinely surprised it is still running and they actually introduce new features to the DE and applications. It is remarkable effort.
It is just SecureBoot which is officially supported by many mainstream distros.
I unlock encrypted partitions with a passphrase, not TPM.
Usually I look for alternative way - like zipped binaries or similar. Most of the developers offer it.
I went this rabbit hole roughly 2 years ago and I just quit at the very end, because my focus went from using the OS for something productive to maintaining it, securing it and becoming home sys admin.
Since then, I’m simply “ignorant” and sane - use it, update it regularly, use official software sources (so official distros repos and Flatpaks), FDE, SecureBoot, do not run random net stuff (like scripts, “Git” etc.), try to stay as default as possible and use a VM to experiment if I really need to.
I am curious - how many of you regular desktop Linux users actually had security issues (or at least suspected something shady)?
I am running “full-blown” desktop with relatively minimal Plasma (I installed only the KDE software I actually need). The initial setup was quite straight-forward, without any tweaking or particular issues. I do use binary packages (available in Portage) for the stuff I do not care - like LibreOffice or Rust compiler.
Upgrades where you are expected to do something rarely happen and even then it is fairly simple.
The major downside is when you want to try out something - it takes time usually, so it is not instant as with binary distros and other OSes. For now, when I am not willing to wait, I just use Fedora VM to test stuff first.
Gentoo ended my distro-hopping phase back in high-school/college student days (17-18 years ago). Top class documentation (the title moved to Arch in the meantime) and helpful, supportive and knowledgeable users of their community taught me so much about Linux. Additionally, although I'm not educated nor working in CS field, Gentoo got me curious about programming languages, build systems and compilers (as a hobbyist). I used it happily and exclusively for 6-7 years (then moved to Windows at work and Mac at home).
From summer of 2020 I restarted with Gentoo on my new home desktop.
Thank you Gentoo for everything.
Mentioning the debt without any figures is at least... superficial.
Article does not mention how much sleep daily is considered sufficient (I'm aware it is individual matter). Also, if naps help or not.
Pat always gives it a personal touch:
Wed Feb 2 22:22:22 UTC 2022
Slackware 15.0 x86_64 stable is released!
It is Ruby implementation if I got it right, not a Ruby-like language.
Not the first and probably not the last one (jRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby etc.).