I wrote this eulogy to St Stallman already quite a few years ago, with the point that he may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way, and that is a good thing. Still relevant:

St Stallman: A Hero of the Highest Order

I didn't think I would ever say this, but: arch isn't always the answer. True: the last time the entire system broke on me was in 2006'ish, but I can't count the times certain apps have stopped working or some python upgrade messes up things. Sure: that's the price of rolling release and AUR, and I wouldn't be without it, but it's a thing one has to learn to live with, and a thing that makes 'arch' the wrong answer to this particular question.

Nei, jeg har heller ikke reagert noe på /r/norge, men på alle mulige andre /r/'er hvor krenkelsesvilligheten er så høy at man blir utelukket bare man nevner feil navn. Det var bare så deilig å se det skrevet eksplisitt at "her gjelder ytringsfriheten og Norges Lover", i stedet for "dette skal være et varmt og koselig rom med blomster i vinduet og prikkete gardiner, hvor alle skal føle seg hjemme."

Amen to everything you're saying.

Was Shrek only 17 yrs after Various Positions?!

This is perhaps cheating, but after diving deep into the hardcore tiling mangers (ratpoison, wmii, xmonad), I grew softer and stayed in awesome for a while, but eventually I realised that since all I want from tiling anyway is the ability to quickly place two windows beside each other, I might as well go with a DM that does all the other stuff I want automatically (mounting, monitors, etc.), and since KDE is now good again, and coming along on the tiling side, that's the tiling WM I'm using.

Yes, I said I was cheating ...!

I installed Arch in 2004, and I haven't hopped since. I was trapped in Ubuntu for a short while once, when I had a new work laptop where for some reason I couldn't get Arch installed, but when I tried again a couple of months later, it all worked. So I guess the answer is: for 19 years.

That's exactly why I'm wary of Family Search. In principle, I love the "open source" character of it, but that also means that one is not in control of one's own tree.

I agree that the source linking in familysearch is excellent. I'm a bit weary about using it as my main tree though: the lack of control, over the data and the architeture, the latter-day saints connection, and who knows when they will start charging? Etc. All the reasons why open source and open standards are always to be preferred. But I do admit to having a tree there ... :)

It also has a much simpler and forgiving syntax. Just type rg anything and it finds anything

I have to say, as several others have said as well, that these days, I don't recognize your tribulations at all. I can think of three possible reasons:

• I'm staying faithful to Arch, which is a much more robust system now than in the early 2000s
• thanks to Arch, I know my system quite well by now
• I've settled on Lenovos, so no Nvidia trouble or any of the other stuff that seems to plague others. I don't know if the machines I've had have been particularly well suited, but at least they have worked without any problems.

I would have liked to add "I've been faithful to DM x" as my fourth point, but that's not true: I abandoned KDE after 3.5, used Cinnamon for a while, and was happy with it, mostly, but when KDE became good again recently, I've switched – and must admit I have occasional problems with bluetooth and dual monitors, but nothing I can't fix.

Ranger and/or vifm as file managers. Can't live without them

I thought about it, but I didn't dare ... My experience is that the Dylan folks tend to be a bit slow. Perhaps they will come around eventually. :)

Hehe. Sorry if I put you on the spot; that wasn't the intention, really. (And: IDMA. "I don't mind acronyms")

MOCs – I guess I use them all the time, but not in a systematic way. I'm a folder guy, so I use folder notes fairly consistently. I also try to use "landing pages" for specific projects, with links to all the various bits of contents, so that I have everything in one place. But again: fairly unsystematically.

In general all those kinds of systems tend to make me think that they require a whole lot of thinking about thinking rather than the thinking itself...

What is a MOC and a LYT?

'not speedy, but ongoing' - That sounds like E, alright ...

Fikk tekstbeskjed på skjermen, men ikke et pip fra telefonen. Derimot kunne sirenekonserten vært litt kortere. Ganske kjedelig musikk i lengden.

I was going to say Combat Rock as well

I always have Gramps installed on my laptop, and occasionally I import my ged-file, either just to see how Gramps has evolved, or because of some specific task that it does better than webtrees – mostly exports, coming to think of it.

Locations is a gedcom-inherent problem. It is partly solved in webtrees through a plugin which allows one to have a geolocation with several different names, countries, etc. Works quite well, I think.

I even thought of doing some pull requests in their git but I’m not sure since … well I’ll just be honest - I’m scared of joining OpenSource projects, they always sound so hostile. But maybe it’s time to give it a try

Could be the case (the attitude/response I hate the most is when one points out a serious flaw or shortcoming, and some dev responds: "why don't you do this instead?"), but on average I think most of them are nice. Go ahead and try!

Hei! Fint vær i dag!