pasadenasunrise

Just run Sid. My daily driver has been Sid for the last three years, with no major hiccups. Nvidia driver updates have worked surprisingly well. Only difference from Ubuntu has been minor edits needed by shell scripts for specific software installs.

Something that surprised me was that Debian Sid + GUI still benchmarked (pts, geekbench, cinebench) higher than Arch running CLI-only.

Give it a try, if only just for grins.

Perhaps my naivete is showing, but I fail to see how an option that allows broader range of use cases suddenly becomes a religious war about spacing.

In the spirit of dev/user freedom, the creator has every right to enforce a standard, regardless of its basis - even if arbitrary - but I find it a little creepy. Then again, the prevailing usage of “opinionated” in dev circles was new to me, as well. What ever happened to design around maximum flexibility AND feature coverage?

Are developers more likely to be “opinionated” in their work if the predominant digital culture of their early career was rewarding of evangelism via self-promotion? Or grew up in an educational era that promoted activism? Are these sorts of issues more common in smaller / person-driven teams vs. corporate behemoths?

e.g., if VS Code were a one-person show vs. a corporate effort, would we risk seeing changelogs like “Insiders 2.20 - lead Architect and Face of the Product removes plug-ins starting with vowels, “because they lacked cohesion and product-centered aesthetics. They looked poopy in list format with most fonts.”

Absurd, to be sure, but what if these decisions don’t step on obvious toes? The average supporter is more likely to tolerate slightly warmer water than hop into another pot, right? And if you stayed in the pot through several degree increases, you’ll feel a sense of Boiling Frog Belonging (TM).

And if you credited the original dictatorial decision for this emergent sense of community, you’d be very much correct.

Absolutely right, and you even provided a meta-example. Words like “feel” to describe thoughts would rarely be used, except to indicate a conclusion reached with minimal or no reasoning. “Think” vs. “feel” still rages today in some circles, and it mostly functions as a proxy for the person’s age.

I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.

As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.