Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they're also working on a browser that will use it.

Here's the maintainer talking about the current state of the project, and a demo of the current functionality

I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones...

And it just seems to me like there's more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they'll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.

So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?

It's the series finale for our friend Plague Roach. Big props to Drue for all the work he's put into this project

Here's the full series playlist on youtube

I've been using nala on my debian-based computers instead of apt, mostly for the parallel downloads, but also because the UI is nicer. I have one issue, and that's the slow completions; it's not wasting painful amounts of time, but it still takes a second or two each time I hit tab. I don't know if this is the same for all shells, but I'm using zsh.

I tried a workaround, but it seems prone to breaking something. So far it's working fine for my purposes, so I thought I'd share anyway:

1. I backed up /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala to my home directory
2. I copied /usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/Debian/_apt to /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala
3. I used vim to %s/apt/nala/g (replace every instance of 'apt' to 'nala') in the new /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala

Already that's sped up the completions to seemingly as fast as any other command. And already I can see some jank peaking through: zsh now thinks nala has access to apt commands that it definitely doesn't (e.g. nala build-dep, nala changelog and nala full-upgrade), and it has lost autocompletions for nala fetch and nala history.

Once I understand completions files syntax better, I'll fix it to only use the commands listed in nala's manpage and submit a pr to the git repo. In the meantime, if anyone has suggestions for how to correct the existing completions file or more ways to make the _apt completions fit nala, it'd be much appreciated.

As a user, the best way to handle applications is a central repository where interoperability is guaranteed. Something like what Debian does with the base repos. I just run an install and it's all taken care of for me. What's more, I don't deal with unnecessary bloat from dozens of different versions of the same library according to the needs of each separate dev/team.

So the self-contained packages must be primarily of benefit to the devs, right? Except I was just reading through how flatpak handles dependencies: runtimes, base apps, and bundling. Runtimes and base apps supply dependencies to the whole system, so they only ever get installed once... but the documentation explicitly mentions that there are only few of both meaning that most devs will either have to do what repo devs do—ensure their app works with the standard libraries—or opt for bundling.

Devs being human—and humans being animals—this means the overall average tendency will be to bundle, because that's easier for them. Which means that I, the end user, now have more bloat, which incentivizes me to retreat to the disk-saving havens of repos, which incentivizes the devs to release on a repo anyway...

So again... who does this benefit? Or am I just completely misunderstanding the costs and benefits?

Most people are aware that gasoline sucks as a fuel and is responsible for a large portion of carbon emissions, but defenders love to trot out that "if every end consumer gave up their car, it would only remove like 10% of carbon emissions"

I can find tons of literature about the impact gasoline vehicles have, but is there any broader studies that consider other factors—like manufacture, maintenance, and city planning—while exploring the environmental and/or economic impact of cars and car culture?

I know there's great sources that have made these critiques, but I'm looking for scientific papers that present all the data in a single holistic analysis