The "jokes" in this thread are mostly lame, recycled dad jokes that only dads themselves find funny.

On the other hand, taking a "joke" thread seriously (in any context) is actually pretty hilarious. First time I burst out laughing on here (since the quote-to-reply button was removed).

Debian and its derivatives are not meant to be used in that way. You should be using a rolling release distro if you want the latest versions of packages. Your only other option is to compile it from source.

Political opinions should only represent the individual, instead of the entire project. Debian is like that old man at a teen party spitting out trendy buzzwords to stay "cool" with that crowd, but it only works against their favor. Their association with Outreachy was kind of the writing on the wall, even more so with Systemd having been adopted "coincidentally" after its founder's death.

I will keep using and supporting Devuan, provided that the project focuses on good code over all else. If you follow OpenBSD's example in eating your own dog food, the users will come. I understand that you get most of your dependencies straight from Debian, but Devuan still provides some technical sanity to this day, when not everyone is into rolling releases.

At this point, the whole Systemd hate has kind of died down. Wayland is the focus now. It is where your use case will not matter at all to the pretentious GN*ME/Freedesktop.org/Red Hat folks.

Sorry you feel that way. Anyway...

Dunno about that. The Artix guys don't care at all about "muh hurt feelings", and their distro is currently ranked #3 at DistroWatch.com. In fact, one of the questions they ask you in interviews is: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of an SJW are you?

And their distro is every bit as functional and popular as the other non-Systemd distros. Oh, and their inits (e.g. Runit, s6, OpenRC, Dinit) are complete on their own -- instead of Debian's half-assed way of relying everything on SysVinit to some extent.

There's also OpenBSD, whose protocols are strictly about keeping things "as politics-free as possible". Thus, they won't take kindly to anyone going on their mailing list and complaining about Elon Musk or why the project "needs" to endorse BLM/Antifa (the two are the same to me).

What a way to kick off the new year. Yes, amazing news. Yes, it's time to retire 32-bit systems. Yes, everyone should be using the latest Intel and AMD products by now, especially with AI "features".

It is so truly revolutionary on Debian's part to push further towards being a rolling release distro. All they wanted was to make it easier to communicate with your multiple processes, they said. Oh, and then when that wasn't enough, they also wanted to make it more user-friendly to start your system and easily manage your services. Even after all of that, they still wanted to use memory-safe programming languages to make it easier to code your software, and now they want to make your graphical session more secure and modern.

Hooray for progress! Linux (without the GNU, because we shouldn't scare away newbies) is finally letting go of stability and embracing on-demand updates!

The great thing about Qt5 is that you can set an environmental variable to make your programs use GTK2, thus an easier time matching your preferred theme. That also includes VLC.

Simply install the package qt5-gtk2-platformtheme (add qt5ct and qt5-style-plugins if you want to tinker further). After that, open up your ~/.profile file and add export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2 to it. Save it, log out, and log back in. Pretty much any Qt5 program will look and feel more like GTK2. For example, if you used the GTK3 version of Transmission, the Qt5 version will match your GTK2 themes and icons! It's basically a lifehack to always prefer Qt5 versions over GTK3 versions whenever possible.

Firefox and its forks (e.g. LibreWolf) also allow you to change its default GTK3 filepicker to the Qt5 filepicker. Just install xdg-desktop-portal-kde, which should start automatically. Go to about:config, search for widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker, and change 2 to 1. Try to open or save then. Pale Moon is the only "modern" GTK2 Web browser still being maintained.

CSD is an abomination. Thankfully, some GTK3 programs are merciful enough to let us disable them either through setting GTK_CSD=0 or in their options (wow, we have a choice). I know Celluloid lets you do that.

So, what do you guys propose we do? Take up on maintaining LXDE (GTK2) and add the better features from Xfce? Or do we fork Xfce 4.12 (last GTK2 release), remove all the Wayland and GTK3 dependencies, and cherry pick the features and bug fixes from upstream? Also, SpaceFM supported up to four panels, but it's been abandoned, yet it's the ONLY file manager that lets you customize everything under the sun. It is a lot of work, and many of us don't have coding experience. In which case, i3 is all we'll have to settle for in the not-so-distant future.

Assume all Intel CPUs since the end of the Core2 Duo/Quad era to be backdoored. AMD CPUs started doing something very similar just a handful of years later, but it's a different term -- and yes, it affects the popular Ryzen lines.

In terms of a "secure" OS, there isn't one. Not by default, at least. On the other hand, my understanding is that the less lines of redundant code, the less likely there will be tampering. It's a good idea to phase out the Linux kernel and embrace OpenBSD. If you can't do that, then Alpine Linux might be a good carryover for now. Note that these might not be as fast or as responsive as Devuan, but they are tailored to the paranoid among us.

For a good list on the pros and cons of each e-mail provider, Dig Deeper laid it out on this article. It's definitely a good idea to not put all your eggs in one basket, so use a mixture of different providers for different use cases. Better yet, self-host your own e-mail accounts if you have an unmanaged hosting service. Always assume that someday, an attacker might read all of your e-mails (in which case, start encrypting your messages).

Similarly, Dig Deeper also posted his article on which Web browsers to use. Just as I mentioned back there with using multiple e-mail providers, the same would be recommended for the browsers (especially since not all Web sites will work correctly on a lighter browser such as Pale Moon or SeaMonkey, but Ungoogled Chromium or LibreWolf could be a good middle ground between privacy and "convenience"). Might not even be a good idea to rely on Tor Browser anymore.

Also, have a look at Spyware Watchdog for some spyware mitigation tutorials. The Web site also talks about non-browser software spyware risks.

It's highly recommended to use a stable VPN that has been routinely audited. Mullvad for paid and Riseup VPN for free (they are GPL-compliant) services. NordVPN is alright, but like I said, never put all your eggs in one basket.

Get your own router (don't use your ISP's), install OpenBSD on it, tinker with it, and keep as many connections strictly wired. Only exception would be if you are on the move with a laptop, but anything that sits on your desk is much more worth it to have Ethernet extension cords all over your walls hooked up to them. Encrypt and store away all sensitive data.

There are more tips, but I think these should cover the base of things. Just use common sense whenever applicable (hint: always). The parasites that shall not be named are working diligently to brush this information off, giving the masses the illusion that they have no freedom to begin with. I'd rather have enemies for sticking to my guns than to have "friends" for going with what the mainstream narrative tells us to believe.

If you don't like a distro, just don't use it. Find the one that works best for your use cases, but don't distrohop. Devuan itself is just a tool for those who want Systemd removed from an Aptitude-based distro, and it does a good job at making all the services compatible with traditional inits. Everything else falls on the user to customize it the way that they like it.

In my case, I always base my installs on Refracta, which is a well-done Devuan respin by the same guy you're butthurt over. No one distro out of the box is for everyone. That's just the reality of FLOSS. You are more than welcome to stick to Debian or another distro... In fact, you could go above and beyond by doing us all a favor: go back to Windows 10/11/whatever and stay there. Their support team at least will get a paycheck for babysitting you.

You can also edit your repositories via Synaptic Package Manager (sudo apt install synaptic) by going to Settings, and then Repositories. The rest of it is pretty straight-forward: just check and uncheck what you prefer, and add the extra lines as needed (check in Section(s)).

That's because xfce4 itself is a metapackage, so of course it's going to install everything under the sun.

You'd want a "minimal" Xfce install with the following command (feel free to adjust to your own liking with more or less packages):

sudo apt install xfce4-terminal xfce4-session xfce4-settings xfwm4 xfdesktop4 xfce4-panel xfce4-power-manager thunar --no-install-recommends

In fact, you could do away with xfwm4 and just use something like openbox, i3wm, or fvwm in its place. Hell, even just keep xfce4-panel and use feh or xwallpaper for setting your desktop wallpaper without the need for xfdesktop4. thunar is recommended for full functionality, but you could swap it out for rox-filer or spacefm (not the icky GTK3 build, of course) and still use those for a "desktop" UI.

The point is that Xfce is what you make of it, and it can work for various use cases.