Thanks for posting this. I’ve been keeping MX Linux in the back of my mind as a possible Debian alternative if I ever need one.

they aren’t letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn’t accept anon-aliased emails for logins.

Ouch. That’s a red flag for me, since it forces people to expose themselves to spam and tracking if they want to participate in the community. Which alias service did they reject? Maybe there’s one that doesn’t trigger their rule?

I mean, pretty much every desktop environment that’s not Gnome or KDE has been dragging its feet.

To be fair, migrating a desktop environment from X11 to Wayland is a lot of work, Wayland still hasn’t reached feature parity, and most desktop environments are maintained by very few people with scant resources. It’s no surprise that the big ones are ahead of the others.

That laughably understates the RAM required for Windows to be useful.

the Linux ecosystem that’s currently driving away developers in droves with fragmentation to consider that.

I am very skeptical of this. Exactly which developers are being driven away “in droves” because of packaging system differences? If you want to make a case for that assertion, you’re going to have to identify them, so they can be counted.

If it turns out that there are many developers who think like this, someone ought to let them know that they don’t have to package open-source software for every distro out there in order to reach all the major distros. Just package it for one, or even none, and let package maintainers do their thing.

Or, are you talking about proprietary software? That would be a different discussion.

Well, you could do this yourself too…

No, but you and someone else could collaborate to do something like it, if both of you had sufficient skill in this area.

And, importantly, it would require a great deal more time and effort.

The current laws are tuned to cost, benefit, difficulty, and volume assumptions that are made outdated by LLMs.

And it’s not just web development.

This mindset has been spreading for… probably decades. Nowadays, it is even pushed by certain popular programming languages, by including a toolchain that makes it as easy as possible to pull in third-party dependencies while offering a standard library so minimal that a developer is strongly encouraged to rely on said dependencies.

This inevitably leads to a world where software supply chain attacks have massive reach and high chances of success. And threat actors take advantage of it, of course.

With or without ligatures? Without them, I think it’s essentially Fira Mono.

The main reason to not including python is that students aren’t particularly in the CS field,

In that case, I think Python is a better choice for teaching programming. Just skip the fancy features that have been bolted onto Python over the past 15 years or so.

I might argue in favour of JavaScript if web application programming is specifically the goal. But for programming in general, I consider it a troublesome language.

I think JavaScript and web app development will be among the first programming jobs to be eaten by LLMs, and it’s already a crowded field. I’m skeptical of that being a wise career move for newcomers today.

This was posted here, and criticized, two months ago:

https://programming.dev/post/44731999

What about Fluorite stands out to you as holding promise?

Based on what’s stated in the article, I would describe it as very experimental, but interesting nevertheless. Thanks for bringing it up.

I haven’t used either one yet, but I already know that I would rather my projects be married to Godot than to Unity, even if that were to make development a bit harder. Open systems are far less likely to betray me in the future.

Yes.

Do what? Get another program’s secrets? Just ask the d-bus interface for them.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/secret-service/latest/

Alternatively, eavesdrop on d-bus when secrets are being stored or retrieved.

man dbus-monitor