They get all the patches and minor upgrades in a timely fashion, similar to other distros. The major version updates do not come as readily though.

Have got Debian on an old thinkpad too because it is too under resourced to compile everything. I think Debian is amazing for a solid, reliable distro if you have weak hardware.

I use Gentoo and I love it. The installation process is a bit more complex than Arch but it doesn’t have to be if you choose the precompiled kernel.

The package management is extremely flexible and the community are great. I have a morning routine where I log onto my gentoo desktop before work and update everything; would compare it to raking one of those miniature buddhist sand gardens. Very theraputic!

I guess a silver lining here is that he must be good at negotiating if he managed to free that monster.

Yeah the Manjaro devs have a long history of gaffes not to mention the infamous one with PGP keys requiring users to reset their system clock

Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.

When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.

Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.

Don’t have a horse in the race really but I particularly dislike Jenrick so would have rather seen Badenoch vs Cleverly

I remember being stubborn and trying to setup eduroam at my uni library using only wpa_supplicant for a whole day. Hugely frustrating. Gave up and installed NetworkManager and it just fucking worked… my tech minimalism phase was extremely counterproductive lol

I know some who have managed to hold down successful careers despite their habit. I wonder how many hidden “functional” users there are

The phrase “absolutely decimated” annoys me since to decimate has a really exact definition of shedding 10% of something

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is probably what I’ll remember her best for

I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…

Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.

RustyTrombone: An unusual musical instrument. (Urban Dictionary)

Yeah the spectator are probably the most right-wing publication in the UK with wide readership. They have a lot of edgy columnists like this dude. They are probably somewhere between the tories and reform in terms of the right wing scale.

Edit: My boomer parents actually got me a subscription to it for a year, a few years back as a birthday present. I’d say like half of the political coverage was palletable and pretty good on the whole; half was swivel-eyed right wing garbage. The arts coverage was susprisingly good.

Personally? I’m a Lib Dem member but I care about civil liberties a lot. Probably obligated to say Ed Davey but he’s a bit too wet for me.

Yep that’s what the spectator is like. I still think their general point is interesting.

I’m not sure how my thousands of hours of JRPGs can contribute to the nation but if they figure it out I can give it a bash

I believe if the instance is still up then it will still work up until a daily limit is reached. Most of them appear to be broken because the limit is fairly low.

Stephen Daisley - Why is Labour so Puritanical?

Can you be a progressive without being po-faced? I wonder sometimes, especially when I read that public health minister Andrew Gwynne is considering ‘tightening up the hours of operation’ for pubs. The Telegraph reports that Gwynne told Labour conference that changes had to be contemplated because of ‘concerns that people are drinking too much’. After 12 weeks of this government too much is nowhere near enough. It follows the suggestion earlier this month that ministers could ban smoking in beer gardens and other areas outside pubs. Not only would either of these measures send hundreds more licensed establishments to the wall, they give an early indication of the kind of bossy, finger-wagging, goody-two-shoesism we can expect from this government. It’s like waking up to find out Lisa Simpson got in with a landslide majority.

We are currently going through another bout of discourse on the nature and existence of a national identity. My own definition of Englishness is this: a fierce and instinctual hostility towards the sort of people who would interfere with the drinking of a pint of beer. Yet that is what Labour seems determined to offer: five years of nagging and tutting. You drink too much. Stop smoking. That’s high in calories. You can’t say that anymore. You’ve used the wrong pronoun. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a dreary barrister and a sensible bob reporting you to HR – forever.

Progressive priggishness is nothing new. Reflecting on her time in the Reagan White House, Peggy Noonan mused at how Hollywood portrayals of Democrats (hip, young, blue-collar radicals) and Republicans (middle-aged preppies in pinstripes) had failed to keep up with the political and cultural changes of the 1980s. She observed: ‘Up on the Hill or at the White House the young rough-looking guy from a state school is probably either a Republican or a conservative, and the snooty sniffy guy with a Thank You For Not Smoking sign on his tidy little desk is a Democrat.‘

In British politics, it probably goes back further than that. There has always been a preacher’s zeal to Labour. As a historical analysis, Morgan Phillips’s assertion that the party ‘owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’ is debatable, but as a description of what we might call the Labour tone it is more than apt. That tone is serious, certain, impatient, improving, and more than a little judgmental. It is the earnest hectoring of the young idealist, the scolding admonition of the schoolmarm, the icy disdain of the educated. Labour knows best, it’s for your own good, and you’re holding back the whole class, not just yourself.

Add to this the professionalisation of the party and its fixation, acquired in the wake of Michael Foot’s leadership, with image management. Patricia Hewitt once described Neil Kinnock as ‘very witty, very funny, very exuberant, bubbling over and very spontaneous’, and while that might sound unremarkable from his former press secretary, she meant it as a criticism. Kinnock’s singing, dancing and beer-supping were viewed with horror by his proto New-Labour advisors, who deemed such behaviour ‘un-primeministerial’. His successors have, with the exception of Tony Blair, been a dour, self-serious, personality-free bunch. It’s no coincidence that Kinnock is the most recent Labour leader you could imagine telling or laughing at a risqué joke, skulling a beer, or popping out of view for a fly smoke. Labour has become the teacher’s pet of political parties.

But deeper down the well of Labour’s puritanism lies an explanation the party would rather not confront: class. The professional party – the MPs, bag carriers and policy wonks – is a largely middle class enterprise and like many such outfits there is a profound suspicion of the masses. Most join Labour brimming with social democratic good intentions, eager to correct injustices and redistribute resources and opportunities from the privileged to those who are less so. These are noble sentiments, which is to say I largely agree with them, but there is a dark underbelly to them. Labour is more than a smidgen sceptical of the working classes. It doesn’t trust them, doesn’t trust their judgement, assumes they’ll make bad choices unaware of the risks.

Remember that quotation that got Jeremy Corbyn into grief a few years back? ‘Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people.’ Labour believes that about the working classes too, and while the logic that social problems require social remedies is sound enough, there is still a sinister ring of ‘you’d be nothing without me’. A Labour party could very well draw out the potential of the working classes but this Labour party seems to think it put the potential there in the first place. It is this proprietorial attitude that leads Labour to believe it must save the masses not only from the market but from themselves.

You don’t have to be po-faced to be progressive. In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Wilde lists among the boons of a socialist society ‘an individualism expressing itself through joy’ and tells his fellow radicals: ‘One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.’ This is a far broader view of the mode and purpose of progressive politics than Labour would be prepared to entertain. Joy. It is hard to think of a word less suited to the reign of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, those walking mirth sponges, with their fusspot paternalism and lanyard-knows-best petty despotism. Social democrats can redistribute wealth without confiscating pleasure, improving lives without micromanaging them. Labour should remember it believes in roses as well as bread.