2xsaiko

Also, I keep wondering why Anubis got so popular while other proof of work captchas have been around for much longer.

It’s the anime girl obviously.

Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

Well, I’m pretty sure I had this happen once or twice in the recent past after wake from suspend I think, but it might be that my CPU is just one of the faulty intel ones.

Either way the rest of this does not reflect my experience at all. Try distrohopping, I feel like you’ll find one that you like and doesn’t have these issues. openSuSE is always one of my suggestions, it was the one that I used for a long time when I started out as well, but tbh I’m out of touch with the more mainstream distros, I’ve only touched Gentoo and NixOS in the past >5 years. (I also specifically recommend against using Ubuntu.)

Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.

Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

Check journalctl --user, and also htop, specifically the process state, for the last one (you mention a NAS, is it perhaps stuck on IO? I’m in a fucked network where that regularly happens with my NAS.)

KRunner perhaps. It doesn’t have such an extensive UI (it’s more like Spotlight) but it’s extensible with search plugins like unit conversions and whatnot.

I’m primarily talking about Win32 API when I talk about Windows, and for Mac primarily Foundation/AppKit (Cocoa) and other system frameworks. What third-party libraries do or don’t do is their own thing.

There’s also nothing wrong with bundling specialized dependencies in principle if you provide precompiled binaries. If it’s shipped via the system package manager, that can manage the library versions and in fact it should do that as far as possible. Where this does become a problem is when you start shipping stuff like entire GUI toolkits (hello bundled Qt which breaks Plasma’s style plugins every time because those are not ABI-compatible either).

The amount of time that I had to get out of .dll-hell on Windows on the other hand. The Linux way is better and way more stable.

Try running an old precompiled Linux game (say Unreal Tournament 2004 for example). They can be a pain to get working. This is not just some “ooooh gotcha” case, this is an important thing that’s missing for software preservation and cross-compatibility, because not everything can be compiled from source by distro packagers, and not every unmaintained open-source software can be compiled on modern systems (and porting it might not be easy because of the same problem).

I suppose what Linux is severely lacking is a comprehensive upwards-compatible system API (such as Win32 or Cocoa) which reduces the churn between distros and between version releases. Something that is more than just libc.

We could maybe have had this with GNUstep, for example (and it would have solved a bunch of other stuff too). But it looks like nobody cares about GNUstep and instead it seems like people are more interested in sidestepping the problem with questionably designed systems like Flatpak.

And yet, ancient Windows binaries will still (mostly) run and macOS allows you to compile for older system version compatibility level to some extent (something glibc alone desperately needs!). This is definitely a solvable problem.

Linus keeps saying “you never break userspace” wrt the kernel, but userspace breaks userspace all the time and all people say is that there’s no other way.