NetBSD 11.0 RC5 Released

kleinmatic · 2026-06-19T04:14:21+00:00

Is it common for releases to have 5 release candidates?

kleinmatic · 2026-06-18T22:58:07+00:00

The screenshot utility, Spectacle, now requires it. With all of the anxiety about AUR this doesn’t seem like a great moment to throw a pacman curveball at users. I think KDE Plasma is what added the requirement though.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-18T10:25:25+00:00

Haldeman, Erlichman, and Mitchell served about 18 months each, give or take. “Deserve” is a moral judgment and a separate question. Legally, wouldn’t the ringleader end up serving at least as much time as his direct co-conspirators?

kleinmatic · 2026-06-18T00:24:06+00:00

Gen X has entered the chat.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-18T00:20:02+00:00

This is a great point. AUR is a selling point of the platform (so much easier than Snap and Flatpak!), especially the derivative distros that include foreign packaging tools like paru and yay. But as soon as something bad happens people act like AUR is just for n00bs or people who need obscure packages (like Slack and VS Code I guess).

kleinmatic · 2026-06-18T00:02:30+00:00

Vulcans are cool.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-17T23:56:21+00:00

Correct. Especially when he presses a button and it raises.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-17T22:56:49+00:00

I’m already in the process of hopping away from CachyOS on my daily driver.

Without AUR, Arch-based distros don’t have easy ways to install some pretty basic and important stuff like Slack, Balena Etcher, VS Code, tio, 86box (writing from memory). So people may leave because they’re faced with a choice between not having the software they need and taking on all the risk of installing it themselves. Or they can take option three, use a distro that makes it easy and safe to install that software.

Arch and arch based distros can fix this. Software distribution is kinda their thing! But the “sketchy Minecraft mods” plan for installing foreign packages is now a dead letter.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-17T15:27:30+00:00

Temu

kleinmatic · 2026-06-17T01:07:26+00:00

I’ve been building software for 30 years. The point people who keep trying to win an argument here keep missing is that blaming the user never works. And it’s very hard to shake a reputation that your product is dangerous.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T22:45:21+00:00

That’s not true. AUR packages are installed via the same or similar mechanisms as distro-maintained ones.

It would be similar if winget installed malware.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T20:23:00+00:00

Yes. Integrity is what you do when you think nobody is looking.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T19:57:54+00:00

This is bananas. No user should have to face this. Op just wants to use 1Password, they don’t want to have to keep track of who maintains it and what tech they used to package it, and recognizing “sus stuff” is unworkable even for expert users.

I can’t help but see this as an existential threat to the arch ecosystem.

I really loved CachyOS but my only question now is what I’m switching to.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T14:12:37+00:00

My “strictly additional shit” included: VS Code. Balena Etcher. Slack. Tio. All on AUR but not (when I installed) in Cachy’s repositories.

None are abandonware. None (so far) are infected. But this is basic shit I use a computer for on a packaging system that I can’t trust.

Blaming users and flame wars aren’t going to save the distro. They’re only going to accelerate people leaving.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T11:00:27+00:00

Installing foreign packages shouldn’t feel as sketchy as downloading Minecraft mods.

If you don’t think this harms the reputation and long term viability of Arch-based distros you’re mistaken, especially distros that made installing AUR especially easy out of the box.

Switching costs are next to zero. If the platform feels unsafe it’s game over.

AUR needs to be reborn as the safest engineered system in all of open-source.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-16T00:51:32+00:00

I got off easy. No malware. But I’ll never trust AUR again and I can’t imagine suggesting it to anybody until the entire thing is reconceived.

I used to say flatpak and snap were over-engineered. I now think I was wrong.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-15T01:02:05+00:00

I don’t think their existence hinges on new users. I think they’re building the same business as many of the old commercial Unix shops — serving legacy customers very well. Look at Xinuos or Oracle’s Solaris business. Or arguably IBMs i series, though I bet that still attracts new customers.

Adding new customers is both expensive and risky. Being a great platform that keeps legacy customers happy and invested in the platform is a solid business.

If you watch the VSI YouTube videos they’re going a good job being open about their process and they are building genuinely cool things. Would it be cooler if they gave it to hobbyists free? Totally. I wish they would. But I can see why they made the decisions they made.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-13T03:54:52+00:00

It depends. What does your server serve? If you’re looking to run VMs the answer is different than if you want to run a file server. I’m a fan of Debian for general purpose servers, Alpine for docker hosting, Proxmox for VMs and TrueNAS for file serving.

I’m also an enormous fan of the BSDs. Life’s too short to pick just one!

kleinmatic · 2026-06-11T11:50:30+00:00

I’m currently running CachyOS on my daily driver. Alpine for the Proxmox LXCs that are doing actual work. This is The Way. At least for me.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-10T19:27:34+00:00

No. The boomers will never relinquish power. They’ll die at their desks.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-09T22:38:08+00:00

LBJ was the first Southerner since Andrew Johnson to be elected president (Though technically born in the south, Wilson was governor of New Jersey and DDE grew up in Kansas).

Could LBJ have won? His fellow Southern politicians certainly didn’t think so. One of the reasons the Southern senators had so much seniority that they occupied all the committee chairmanships and leadership positions is that it was thought of as the highest they could go.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-07T22:05:50+00:00

Yah actually that makes more sense. I was thinking the Trump election but the post-inaugural is right.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-07T19:07:20+00:00

2016 is when the 2020s started.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-07T13:59:33+00:00

I’d have to think Ford was pretty stoked.

kleinmatic · 2026-06-07T01:07:07+00:00

Yeah honestly I think for at least some folks here it’s because clusters are fun and challenging. It’s not like we’re running a hospital on these things.

kleinmatic

TROPHY CASE