According to Debian users, “stable” means “unchanging” and not “doesn’t crash or have bugs” … If you still ship 100% of the changes but just delay them by 2 weeks, you have the same number of changes. So by the Debian definition of “stable”, no, it is the exact same as arch.

By the everyone else definition where “stable” means “doesn’t crash or have bugs”, then also no. Shipping buggy code 2 weeks later doesn’t reduce bugs. And if you use the AUR at all, then things get worse, I’ve found, as the AUR pkgbuilds expect dependencies to match current up to date Arch repos.

tl;dr - no

My arch install is 10 years old at this point.

I would be interested to know what inspired the need to “feel fresh” from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can’t handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as “needing a cleanup” ?

If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).

Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands. “Qdtq” means “Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet” (“quiet” makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them “Rns” means “Remove, no backup, recursively” . and the - at the end means “Use the values from the first half of the pipe”… This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.

For this command, a “dependency” is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn’t been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.

This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.

But overall, there’s very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.

But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.

It isn’t just about ungoogling things though. Having a monoculture in the browser space means that if Google makes a push to favor ads, say by removing certain extension support from their browser engine that everyone uses, then the entire internet suffers. It is effectively a monopoly.

Mozilla tries really hard sometimes to be unappealing, but there is value in not just letting Google have full control over the internet.

I get conventional mail marked up like it is from the manufacturer claiming my warranty is expiring.

With the added fun bonus that all the things they claim to cover are engine related, and my car is an EV with no engine.

One of my (otherwise random) WoW guild members had my grandma as his kindergarten teacher.

I have a few cheap TLDs because as an individual I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for the dot com versions. But I’m not a company.

You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”

Debian aims for rock solid stability

To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”

Hopefully “we’re still trying to learn what’s best for PC” isn’t some sort of code for “PC players are too whiny and won’t bend the knee, this weekend was bad PR that wasnt worth it. we just won’t release future games on PC”

What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts

This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.

You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.

The archlinux-keyring package will install a few gpg keys.

But also, the AUR also uses gpg keys to validate things.

Just searching the AUR for one of the repos that Jaffa linked to in another comment…

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=librespot

Here is the PKGBUILD. Note line 24:

validpgpkeys=('EC57B7376EAFF1A0BB56BB0187F5FDE8A56219F4') ## Roderick van Domberg

And I’m sure if you got through the AUR there are plenty of packages that use this

Many AUR helpers (like paru, or yay, etc), will either auto download these keys for you, or prompt you. Even if you were to build this pkgbuild by hand, unless you removed that line, it would require you to import the key for the makepkg to work. So “how does a fresh arch install wind up with GPG keys that I didn’t manually import?” … the answer is AUR helpers most likely (or you did it manually for a makepkg and just forgot).

It’s also worth pointing out that GPG handles signing things, but also signature verification. These are all public keys in your system. Having public keys that have been used for signature verification is perfectly normal and kind of the point. If you had Roderick’s private key that would be weird.

When you’re a trans teen from OK getting beaten to death by classmates, the culture war feels a lot more urgent to focus on in the moment. Survival isn’t something you can be passive about.

Some people partake in the culture war as part of manipulation by the rich… Some people are forced into it by defending themselves from the first group. And some people are compelled into it to protect the second group.

While you’re not wrong about how we got here, it feels like it would be too easy for one side of the culture war to spin this as “Ignore my bigotry, Wall St is the real enemy!”

He saw himself having an epiphany about privilege in general, so he had to swerve and add race into the mix so he could say a true (albeit unrelated) thing and miss the point.

It’s like when anti BLM people say “All lives matter” … Sure, all lives DO matter, but they’re intentionally missing the point, so they don’t have to acknowledge that police brutality disproportionately affects black lives.

Saying unrelated “true” things to undermine the original statement is a bit telling about intentions.

My dad once told me my mom didnt feel safe walking alone at night in the neighborhood and asked if I felt the same. I said I didnt feel any concerns, but added the caveat that Im not a small woman, and Im a large man.

He paused for a minute, nodded and said “that makes sense.” Then after another few seconds goes “That’s not white privilege.”

These sorts of decisions can impact future decisions. It is to early to say that this is a trend, so people shouldn’t get all up in arms over things. But still, using other company histories as a basis, it is concerning about where this could end up.

Cute fluffball. Nice NES keycaps. 10/10