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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

    *multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.





  • I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…

    Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.


  • I was trying to write a custom Strategy for an objectMapper in Java. Foolishly decided to ask ChatGPT about it and got instructions which suggested an implementation that was the inverse of how Strategies actually work. Stuck for an afternoon.

    Then in the evening I read the docs and put it together in half an hour from scratch. Lesson learned about the stochastic parrots.










  • Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I’ve not used much Discord but potentially the “gamer” culture might put people off.

    Matrix seems good but it’s not quite there yet from what I can tell. It’s got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.

    For IRC I’m on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.

    *More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason


  • This is the main development path for most distros - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

    Issues are tracked on bugzilla and then the patch is sent to the developer mailing list citing the bug ticket with git send-email. Not sure about Debian but in the case of Gentoo they accept contributions via their git mirror and email. The developers keep both in sync so that new contributors (who likely use github) are encouraged but more established users can stick to the mailing list.