black0ut

Tbf, they renamed it to try to get away from the bad press they got after the Facebook Files scandal. They thought renaming the company would make people forget, or something.

At that time they were all in on the metaverse, so of course they had to name it Meta. I guess that's another bad decision from zucc added to the collection.

What I really don't understand is why they haven't changed it again, either back to Facebook or to something new. Now Meta always reminds me of both the metaverse failure and trying to weasel out of the Facebook Files fallout.

Cuz it's annoying to work with (it usually breaks stuff because it's purposefully incompatible, and they have to force their way), it's slower than alternatives, it is a mess, and I don't like its philosophy.

SystemD is the Windows of Linux, and it has already brought enough problems. Sadly, all the major distros went all in on it, so a lot of software is developed with increasing dependency on SystemD's non standard systems.

Also I don't trust Poettering at all. This guy is antithetical to free, open and standard software, and he himself has said it.

And on top of all that, they went and folded so quickly to implement stuff like age verification when Linux wasn't even tied by those laws. Their excuse was that they were doing it to set a good precedent and a safe standard for it on Linux, but their implementation was unsafe and flawed. When pointed out, Poettering himself said that why bother with security, because that data is "not important".

TL;DR: I have many concerns with SystemD's management and philosophy, and their software often breaks, causes issues, isn't compliant with standards, has security holes and is slow.

I manually triggered it, and didn't read the logs when it said it failed. That was my fault. If it fails, it will tell you. You still have the machine working until you reboot, so if you read the logs, you can clear /tmp and retry again, and the machine should be bootable again.

Linux lets you do anything, including stupid things. I'd say doing stupid things is the fastest way to learn about it, though.

The same issue would have happened even on Ubuntu, as it uses the same tools as Arch for generating the initramfs. I don't consider it an Arch or Linux issue, just a user mistake. It won't happen normally, unless you manually trigger it.

My record with Arch is longer than 6 months without updates, and it completed the updates fine.

My oldest install is 4 years old, and it's true, it became unbootable once. But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail. It was a quick fix once I figured it out.

All of this isn't to say rolling is as stable as Debian, of course. Rolling is inherently gonna be more unstable, and that's by design.

But if you take some care, you can actually make these rolling distros pretty stable. Hell, my servers run Arch (I'm working on migrating them to Gentoo to get rid of systemd, but I haven't yet commited to it). And I haven't had any serious breakages, even on Arch Linux ARM.

Who uses virtualbox on Linux having KVM, QEMU and virsh/virt-manager?

It's gonna be slower, proprietary, and it's not even as easy to install

Management is obsessed with the cloud and "serverless", because it's cheaper short-term, and they don't have to care about eventualities like hardware breaking.

Long-term, it would be far cheaper and way more secure to host locally, especially for data storage.

But we all know long-term thinking is something that management can't do. And of course, the PR doesn't help at all.

At a lower efficiency than before, and a lot of stuff now won't get blocked because of the limit in definitions.

I can't tell you about the text, but the whole site is vibe coded. The CSS, the js, everything. Which doesn't really inspire much confidence on the text, especially as it's explaining how to bypass the claude detector.

Rar is proprietary, so you can't freely implement it. Only the decompression code is freeware, and you have to implement it as is. The license includes clauses against reverse engineering and rewriting the code.

Microsoft could totally pay the fees, but you know how scummy they are.

7zip is good

Afaik (and I may be wrong), RAR is a proprietary format created by the guy who made winrar. Because of it, the compression/decompression libraries are licensed, and cannot be freely written. However, in order for the format to catch on, the developer released a freeware (free as in beer, not as in freedom) decompression library. That way, anyone can easily incorporate decompression code in their software, and thus, anyone can decompress a rar.

However, the code isn't free to rewrite, so rar decompressors (at least those that don't make a deal and pay money to winrar) are stuck with the same implementation of the rar decompressor. If that freeware code is slower than what winrar uses, winrar will always be faster.

Imho that's a bit anti-competitive, and is what has kept me from ever using the RAR format. Especially now that we have way better formats (both in compression and features), like 7z.

To be fair, a lot of platforms just flag any encrypted archive file (not just rar) as malware. Their argument is that those files are commonly used to get past malware detection, which is kinda true. Still a pain for everyone who has a legitimate need for the feature.