The wave of the reddit protests is over, now lemmy must grow on its own merits rather than being "not reddit".

There's an old saying: "Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows. BSD users use BSD because they love Unix." Obviously this is not true for every individual user, but I think it describes a trend or pattern.

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

break a lot of backwards compatibility or radically change the current way of doing things

Plan 9. We can still have textual interfaces without emulating the ancient use of teletypewriters.

People use ed because they want an editor. They don't want an emacsitor or vimitor. Those aren't even words.

Long time ago, I did several villages where I grew up. This was before satellite images covered that area, so I did it the old fashioned way with a GPS, cycling up and down every single street, writing down name and surface in a notebook. Walked around every field, every patch of forest, creek, etc. It took years, but I've literally been everywhere in those villages. It was fun :) When aerial images came I could do private buildings too.

How do you define "stable"?

People will say "use this editor" or "use that window manager", but honestly it's just personal preference. There's no award for using ed to edit files, and almost anything you can do with one distro you can do with any other distro. You might get an urge to distrohop and compile the kernel, and that's fine, but imho far more useful is to learn how pipes work and what you can do with regular expressions. A tutorial for bash is always useful.

"Hello, support? How do I get through the Gnomish Mines in Nethack?"

Have you thought about the implications and consequences if we start banning non-violent expressions of opinions because someone else might find it disrespectful?

While I do agree that the website is bad, nowadays the main iso includes non-free firmware, and it's the same installer for all DEs.

If you are planning on adding things, my humble suggestion would be how to write a really good bug report, maybe going through how to research what went wrong to narrow down the problem, looking for already filed bug reports, using diff and patch if you have a proposed solution, using reportbug, etc.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/...

Third paragraph. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I also installed Debian a few times without seeing it.

I see. I asked because "stable" means different things in different distros. In Debian it means that interfaces and functionality in one version doesn't change. If I set up a script that interacts with the system in various ways, parsing output, using certain binaries in certain ways etc, I should be able to trust that it works the same year after year with upgrades within the same release. To some people this is important, to some people it isn't.

That civilized society is a very thin layer on top of more primal behaviour.

I've used debian stable for a decade now. The things I care about are not dependent on new features, so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade to newer versions. I'm happy with security updates and a system that is reliable above all.

If you can understand written english well, there's translation/internationalization that isn't too scary. What is your native language?

This reminds me of a talk by Rob Pike that was made 23 years ago: https://doc.cat-v.org/...

Everyone has their balance between convenience, requirements, and willingness to explore. I'd guess that most Linux users haven't given BSD a fair chance, and further away Plan9 people lament that few people wanted to migrate away from Unix.

The original vi has not been maintained for many years. Most distributions, including Debian, Fedora, etc, use a version of Vim which (mostly) is similar to how Vi was.

From Fedoras wiki:
"On Fedora, Vim (specifically the vim-minimal package) is also used to provide /bin/vi. This vi command provides no syntax highlighting for opened files, by default, just like the original vi editor. The vim-minimal package comes pre-installed on Fedora."

From the vim-tiny package description on Debian:
"This package contains a minimal version of Vim compiled with no GUI and a small subset of features. This package's sole purpose is to provide the vi binary for base installations."