More like companion.

Public key cryptography and signatures are common technologies nowadays.

It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.

They are using the wrong kind of Linux! My kind of Linux is superior, because it’s broken in a different way and more difficult than yours.

Homebrew is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.

I use it on my recent Linux Mint install. Mint has pretty old packages or enormously bloated flatpacks, that come with limitations.

neovim only came in an ancient version, that doesn’t support lazyvim. Nicotine+ came as ancient from the Mint packages or as a 4 GB monster via flatpack.

I used Homebrew and everything installed quickly in current versions and worked like a breeze.

The great thing about Homebrew is that removing it is as easy as rm -r /home/linuxbrew

Nix is great as well of course and very powerful. Can be a bit of a bitch to write all the config files though.

As a user the license doesn’t matter for you. Even if you contribute back to a project, you will be able to use your changes in the project.

The license only matters if you want to redistribute a changed version yourself or use parts of it in your own software.

Best of both worlds:

• install boring stable distro
• use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.

the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel

A more common issue with Nvidia is older hardware no longer being supported by Nvidia’s current drivers and the kernel not supporting the old drivers. For older cards, you need to run kernel 6.8 or older for the binary drivers to work. The open source Nouveau driver is noticeably slower and getting hardware accelerated video to work can be difficult. So you can easily end up with mesa-llvm, meaning your CPU emulates OpenGL.

The easiest way to get this to work is to install Linux Mint 22.1.

I also liked GNOME 2 a lot. Current GNOME is okay for what it is, but it feels too dumbed down for my tastes. For example the default editor has basically no features compared to gedit back in the day. The desktop is kind of nice on a laptop with a good touchpad and gestures though.