One time I figured out why a strange dependency was needed in a LaTeX book. It’s part of the official documentation of a project and the author had opened an issue about it. I dug deep into the package code and figured out why, came up with a fix, and contacted the author about the solution. That was two years ago and they have not replied or fixed it, but just worked on different things. I don’t demand anything, but I haven’t felt motivated to help out since then in that documentation project.

ed is sadly not installed by default on some modern distros. Even vi is often a symlink to vim in vi-mode.

It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.

What are main things you’ve found that BSDs lack to make you prefer GNU+Linux? What are things from the BSD world you wish that GNU+Linux had?

One project goal of OpenBSD is: “We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”
They are not being taken advantage of, this is a desired outcome.

The Dijkstra way.

I agree. Maybe this is because Debian tries to be everything, the universal OS, server or desktop or whatever, while for example Fedora Workstation can be preconfigured as a workstation. Back in the day around 2008 this is what Ubuntu was to me, a Debian Workstation. Now it’s different, they’ve diverged so much. Maybe Spiral Linux could be a preconfigured Debian Workstation now.

I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.

I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?

Could you give us your opinions on what you would change about bash if you could go back in time and just decide how it was?

Badness 10000 usually indicates that something is very wrong. Usually overfull hboxes. If the text is spaced out to the point where it immediately looks bad, that could still be like badness 5000. What I have seen mostly is macros not playing well with other macros, and in LaTeX there’s a lot of macros under the hood, so it’s very hard to troubleshoot.

If you don’t want an image to float, don’t put it in a float environment.

The reason is that you’re reading TeX, not LaTeX. The latter has abstracted away the fundamental building blocks so few people know how an hbox is set anymore. So, an hbox is a box where the content is in horizontal mode. Between the things is glue. Glue can stretch and shrink. Depending on how you have set your tolerance and penalties, there’s a maximum percentage of stretch allowed. If the glue stretches more, it becomes bad, this is called badness and can effectively be up to 10000 bad. So why not just put more things into the box? Well, (La)TeX probably tried to do that, but came up with worse badness. TeX always chooses the least bad option on a paragraph level. In practice, the usual suspect is often that you have something else that can’t fit the last part of a line, like a really long word. If you can look at it and manually hyphenate it, things might be better.

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”

Back in the day, find required that you added “-print” to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But… following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.

I think you actually convinced me to start using OpenBSD again.

Is the breaking change going to happen in stable mid release cycle? Or at a major version upgrade?

OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.