I used to run their closed cli client years ago, but only when connecting to grab wireguard configs, then I closed it and connected with that config without it, which worked well*.

I also remember strace showing it reading a bunch of stuff including /etc/os-release. So they at least knew what distro you were using 😉

It was okay for me because I knew how to deal with it, although I’m with a provider that provides configs directly so you don’t need to use any service-specific clients.

Nord was never, or should have never been, a “privacy” choice, unless you are the kind of person that falls for paid reviewers and comparison sites, or marketing bullshit like all the X eyes talk.

*you can do that with any client that connects through wireguard since you can run wg showconf on the connected wireguard device. Although you would have to do some scripting yourself to replicate other steps like DNS and routing. I don’t think I was the only one doing this.

A long time ago, there was this misconception that “linux” was terminal-only. You know, like the interface sysadmins and Hollywood hackers use.

A small long-defunct non-tech forum I used to be a member of had a tech sub-forum, and in that sub-forum there was a new post one day introducing “linux” and covering some basics. It was full of DE screenshots (GNOME 2 and KDE 3) specifically to dispel the “terminal-only” misconception.

That was almost ~20 years ago. And the rest is history. I never liked Windows or M$ anyway for both technical and non-technical reasons. So it wasn’t that hard to convince me.

I almost exclusively use the terminal for everything except web browsing now, and don’t use a DE. So you could say that I myself ironically became a perpetuator of the misconception 😉

Or to avoid ad hominem accusations:
No code. Don’t Care.

And no benchmarks either. That intro about stack vs. heap also reads like someone who never went further than sophomore-level knowledge, or someone explaining things to kids.

People stopped taking Brian seriously when he helped create Go. That was pre-Rust.

Even the “talking points” here seem to be re-used from “Go vs. X” ones. Also, his experience speaks of someone who only tried Rust pre-v1.0.

Anyone who actually knows Rust, anti- or pro-, knows that what he said (partially in jest) is factually wrong.

Feel free to prove otherwise, especially the part about the performance of Rust programs. Don’t be surprised if he simply didn’t pass --release to cargo build, a common pitfall for someone in the “hello world” stage of trying Rust.

And this is why appeal to authority was never more fallacious, considering we live in a world where Dunning-Kruger is a universal reality.

man 7 hier is much older than linux itself. The 1994 start date in the article is not doing the history of the tradition justice.

It would have been weirder if the creepy “init system” (with its 58 executables and counting, 52 + 6 arg0 links) dictating the future of that tradition didn’t raise some eye brows.

Thought it was on my end.

Change your mirror!

I’ve been using the repos relatively frequently, and never noticed anything.

I also just tested my mirror of choice with a random big package.

https://mirror.dogado.de/archlinux/extra/os/x86_64/libreoffice-still-24.8.7-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

All good!

reflector uses https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ to get mirror status info, and caches it under ~/.cache/Reflector/. So as long as that end-point works, reflector should work.

I just grabbed a copy and pasted it at http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json.

Anyone can grab that JSON data and use file:// URLs so they are never out. e.g.

curl -L https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ > /tmp/mirror_status.json
# or if down, use pasted json
curl -L http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json > /tmp/mirror_status.json
# and then
reflector --url file:///tmp/mirror_status.json ...

But, as you noted, this has been mostly a nothing-burger from a user perspective anyway. Other than the homepage being unavailable on occasion, everything else has been mostly available just fine as you can see from https://status.archlinux.org/.

I didn’t notice https://gitlab.archlinux.org/ going down either.

BTW, and as a general rule of thumb, NEVER take specific technical advice from these editors. They don’t actually know much, and this is me trying to be nice.

Take for example:

For AUR disruptions, it’s a bit of a pain if you’re not a regular git user, but you cloned packages directly from the GitHub Arch Linux mirror. To do this, use the command:

See that link ;) At least he got the command below it correctly, somehow.

You are in a thread where a user is having a problem because of the push for flatpaks, and because of some distros like Fedora crippling their packages and providing objectively worse alternatives on purpose (because they don’t want to risk RH IBM getting sued). If the user was using some sane community distro like Arch, the user would have never come to realize that such unnecessary issues even exist.

As for flatpak hate specifically, see my ramblings here.

Users are better off using a “freeworld” ffmpeg package, or not using Fedora at all. The cisco decoder is shit.

your life will be better if you stop using both flatpaks and openh264.

The first thing forcing an option does, is depriving that option the ability to know what it could achieve on pure merit.