When something looks like satire but is real…

it doesn’t mean that everyone who dislikes the EU is a MAGA republican or Russian bot

No, but 99 out of 100 times someone disliking the EU and then whining about “bottle caps” and “paper straws” got their talking points from one of those bots directly or from one of the far-right culture-war bullshit influencers who get their instructions from the same source. Because that’s one of their popular topics, which is not surprising given that any actually substantial criticism of the EU would need more context, basic political understanding and in-depth reasoning than what those propaganda tools just pushing simpke narratives allow.

When config files change with an update pacman writes the new one as a .pacnew file instead of overwriting the existing one. That’s always an issue with updates on config files (although one less severe on slow updating distros). Do you keep the old config to keep your changes intact while ignoring new default options that should be in there or do you replace the old config with a recent one but risk using manual edits?

pacdiff basically just searches for .pacnew files and then queries you what to do with each.

You can define a viewer via a DIFFPROG= variable (I simply use vim -d because that’s already my editor of choice but the package pulls diffutils as a dependency so just diff works, too) and compare the new default config file with the existing one side-by-side (with differences highlighted), so you can either copy your personal edits to the new one or copy additional or changed default options to your old one, whatever is easier. After that you have the option to dismiss/delete the .pacnew file or rename it to replace the old one.

PS: pacdiff is part of the pacman-contrib package. That package also provides checkupdates.

Running pacman -Syu updates your package list to the recent one, then updates all your outdated packages. You are not actually supposed to update the list, then abort the update of packages or just update some of them because Archlinux always assumes up-to-date systems (see: unsupported partial upgrades). So pacman should not be used to just check for available updates without updating. That’s where checkupdates comes in, simulating pacman -Syu without actually touching your system and just getting a list of available updates.

PPS: the AUR has a similiar aur-check-updates tools to do the same for AUR packages.

All the Archlinux based ones, too. (Although I don’t accept the buggy mess that is Manjaro’s Pamac as an actual tool.)

The only way to get a distro with no graphical updater by default nowadays is using one that does not come with a graphical desktop by default (so archlinux and some server installations…).

As the “graphical update tool” is just a basic wrapper for the normal updater, I would be very surprised if any distro coming with a desktop environment by default has none…

So the answer would be “every single one but Archlinux (nothing by default but the base system) and server installations”

(PS: My “graphical” updater on Archlinux is a handful of very small scripts that a) runs checkupdates and flatpak remote-ls --updates from time to time writing the result into a temp file, b) displays an indicator if that file isn’t empty, c) prints out the file as a notification on clicking that indicator and d) runs pacman -Syu && paru -Syu -a && flatpak update && pacdiff in a terminal window when I right click the notification.)

(PPS: Small correction… Manjaro doesn’t have graphical updater but a buggy abomination prone to fucking the AUR instead.)

Thank you for –just accidently of course– getting rid of all the “…with the screaming they constantly use to divert from their corruption”-context.

What an interesting coincidence that people parroting populist talking points always use the exact same populist tactics.

The media has long stopped to even pretend its job was informing us. It’s just straight agenda and narrative pushing nowadays.

You might have missed that the same party blocking any new debts while amassing a massive investement backlog and letting the military rot for decades campaigned on “no new debts!”, instantly took on literally a trillion of new debt for military, economy and infrastructure investments the moment they won… and then managed to actually even reduce the investements into infrastructure compared to their (because of them) cash-strapped predecessors while all spending on “the economy” was gifts and tax breaks for their rich buddies that do exactly nothing for the economy. Oh, and of course they started demolitioning social systems because somehow, magically they have no money…

So just fuck off with that “but there is a war!” screaming they constantly use to divert from their obvious corruption. That we can only spend money on the military when we fuck the people is already a fairy tale in the first place. There is enough money if we finally starting taxing people properly. Instead they just funnel off hundreds of billions in debt to their mostly untaxed donors, then start raising taxes on workers and reducing social spending because they need money for the military and the money dedicated exactly for this magically vanished (and we all know where it ended up).

Why do idiots always need to copy any insanity from the US where they are also brain-washing people into thinking that military spending is the reason they can’t afford health care or stuff, while much of that “military spending” is just hidden industry subsidies and corrupt waste and they also actually spend massive amounts in healthcare… it’s just bad by design to make the rich even richer.

but I believe you can get a free domain usually from noip

Up to three, including stuff like mx entries. For the free tier you get a mail every 30 days with a link to confirm that you are still using that name and that’s it.

Every new generation of WiFi brings higher transfer speeds… at lower ranges where I can just use a cable, while WiFi reliability and range often suffer in most scenarios where a cable doesn’t work well.

after failing to produce world-leading chatbots like DeepSeek or Claude

Oh, no! Why didn’t we succeed in building our own insanity bubble that has no working business model, barely produces anything of worth, and just makes people poor by creating energy and water scarcity (not even speaking about the fact that it’s also used as a pretense to burn more fossil fuels just because…), all so that a handful of ultra rich can look at big numbers that have lost any actual meaning for them… 😂

“Ballroom donations” a.k.a. the public front used to pay bribes to Trump for completely unrelated stuff…

I’m not missing the middle ground. I am criticising that there is no middle ground in this fake discussion manufactured to keep engagement going.

Every single time someone makes a nuanced argument that is not matching one of the two dogmatic extremes (so exactly that Linus Torvalds is doing here, just –Linus being Linus– not very diplomatically phrased) the same kind of people start screaming about the end of the world (see again: this very thread where idiots express their condolences for Linus finally going insane by not denouncing AI alongside those praising the fact that he finally has seen the light an embraces AI as our saviour).

Why even differentiate between Russia, Russia’s corrupt puppets in the US (and elsewhere) and fascists supporting Russia and their puppets? It’s all the same threat.

My “script” to update the blocklist from time to time was literally

curl <blocklist1 link> > templist
curl <blocklist2 link> >> templist
grep '^0\.0\.0\.0' templist | awk '{print "local-zone: \""$2"\" always_refuse"} > blocklist.conf
systemctl restart unbound.service

and an include blocklist.conf at the bottom of unbound.conf (awk to convert it from the “0.0.0.0 <site>” format to “local-zone: <site> always_refuse”).

No, calling pigs rolling around in the mud pigs is neither an insult nor taking part in the strange mud bath ritual.

But as you seem to be bad with analogies:

Spouting ideology for the sake of it is bullshit no matter which side does it. Pitting your ideological dogmas against each other is not a discussion. If that’s your thing start a new religion (that’s not even far off from some of the influencer and tech-bro bullshit nowadays anyway…).

Most people are sick of the always same “AI is the evil and will destroy us all!”, “No, you need to embrace our saviour AI that will save us all or get left behind!” idiocy repeated a million times in slightly different spelling. You need to be absolutely lost in a delusion to miss the costantly alternating pattern of pro-AI / anti-AI posts in social and other media pushed to keep engagement going. Ffs… when it’s about the Linux kernel it’s even worse and even more obvious when we are bombarded with alternating pro- and anti-AI statements from the same single person. People can’t be that dense. So why pretend that at this point it’s something else but induced insanity.

It literally is a cron job or systemd timer to load an updated blocklist from time to time and I haven’t looked at it for years (well… other an changing a path when I switched from unbound to dnsproxy, because that one is even simpler, doesn’t even need a config other than a few parameters at startup and can provide DoH, DoT and/or DoQ access for when I’m not at home)

If you just want simple ad blocking you don’t actually need pi hole for it’s web interface you don’t ever look at once it runs. Unbound alone can do the job with minimal configuration.

Nowadays I even changed my setup to dnsproxy, which doesn’t even need any config. It’s just a handful parameters when you start it. And it does all the filtering for my home network as well as providing DoH access for when I’m not at home and connected from somewhere else.

I never understood pihole in the first place. It’s just a fancy web interface you do never look at if the thing does its job quietly in the background. And unbound alone is perfectly able to use blocklists with one line of configuration (and an onliner script to convert the common lists into the right format).

I use no-ip because that was one of the few my router back then many, many, many years ago supported out-of-the-box and there was never a reason to change…