Eh, every distro is trade-offs. There’s not a straightforward “better or worse”.

The worst mistake you could make? Making it hard for you to change your mind later.

So take notes on what you modify, try to keep your data/configs consolidated so you could easily migrate to a new distro, etc.

And ideally have your hardware set up so that you can try booting a new distro without losing your existing setup.

Chesterton’s Fence

I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.

It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.

I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?

There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?

Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.

The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.

But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.

Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Cool, but… why not just NixOS?

ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

Steam on ARM?! Gimme gimme gimme!!!

I’m fine with that. That’s how I’d prefer to play anyway. It’s just hard to commit 1-2 hours to completing a run sometimes.

Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.

For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.

Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.

Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.