I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

It’ll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I’ll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

They were fantastic as well!

The series with Mike Wozniak should be avoided unless you’re okay with passing out laughing.

The New Zealand version has a different dynamic, but I enjoy it as least as much as the OG.

The accuracy required for the ink droplets just isn’t there for prosumers.

I can (and have!) built multiple extruders for a variety of 3D printers. Some of my own design.

Sadly, the tolerances for an inkjet are at least an order of magnitude greater.

I have zero doubt that a few clever hardware hackers could design an open source inkjet printer. But A: They’d get sued back to the mesolithic by every printer company with a patent. And B: the process would likely involve micro machining your own hardware.

I’ve just said, “fuck it” to the entire industry. I’m in my early 40s and I’m reasonably sure that my Brother laser will outlive me. And possibly the heat death of the universe.