Perfectly readable white text on a black background on my devices. The problem must be on your end.

Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.

There are already several Rust Kennel From Scratch projects that are reasonably progressed. Redox is one, Asterinas is another.

The latter is I think aiming for Linux ABI compatibility.

where [it] comes from

You imply it comes from:

The “thin blue line” symbol has been used by the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which emerged in 2014

But you link to a Wikipedia article that says:

New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show The Thin Blue Line. Parker used the term “thin blue line” to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.

The Oxford English Dictionary records its use in 1962 by The Sunday Times referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The term was used for the title of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood.

I have no idea about this guy’s politics, but it’s a pretty well known phrase with a lot of different contexts.

If in doubt, you can always play the old “Chosen One” card to hand waive that sort of thing away.

Mr “higher midichlorian count in history” Skywalker might get a free pass just because he’s magic.

Which on balance probably means it was pretty lucky he did a redemption arc before he died, otherwise they’d have been stuck with an evil maniac in their immortal ghost club.

Every single time. I know how I’m supposed to read it, I know what it means and where it comes from, but I physically cannot read it any other way.

Worst name ever.

For me it’s MATE.

For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).

BSD is BSD-like

It certainly is that, yes.

BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.

A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.

The UK isn’t quite that far, but it’s absolutely the dominant text messaging and calling app in the UK. Nobody uses the built in Android or Apple tools anymore, and I’m as likely to receive a WhatsApp voice call as an actual phone call these days.

I have Signal on my phone, but I’ve literally never had a cause to use it; I’ve simply got no contacts on there.

One of these days someone should write a script that just automatically adds all the Amazon Prime games to your various Epic/GOG/etc. accounts.

I say “someone”, because I’m far too lazy to do it.

But anyway, it would take a lot of work out of the job of mindlessly hoarding games I’ll never get round to playing.

It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.

But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

Argh, Microsoft Store? One of the very few stores which remains doggedly impossible to get games running on Linux. Boo to you, Prime Gaming.

If a machine is going to have multiple users (all my computers have multiple profiles for family members) all those users have to be called something, and I’ve not got the energy or the creativity to come up with fun and funky usernames for every system when my actual name is more than good enough.

Simple question: what would your employer say if you asked them?

My contract has a standard “no using company computers for personal business” clause. However I feel entirely confident that my employer doesn’t mind me using it to do personal errands using the web browser (on my own time). And I know they have no problem with me using Zoom or Teams to join meetings for non-work things in the evening. How do I know this? Because I asked them…

I’ve never asked them “can I install a new hard drive in my laptop, install an OS I downloaded off the internet, and boot into that OS to do things which I’d rather you not be able to track like you could on the main OS”. But I’m completely confident I’d know what the answer would be if I did ask.

If you think installing a new SSD etc. is acceptable, ask them. If you’re not asking them because you’re worried they’d say “no”, then don’t do it.

Try asking them instead if you can use your laptop to look up directions to the dentist on Google Maps. See if you get the same answer.

I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.

Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.

When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.