You don’t really need to care about that from a consumer perspective. Unfortunately however, this is a common weakness of FOSS projects. If the maintainer is an asshole, the project suffers and eventually dies most of the time. Being an asshole is not conducive towards attracting contributors. Who knew?

Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.

Time to hit the mysterious S↔D button.

I wasn’t sure if it was a joke and I read another comment here that seemed to indicate that it was not. Thanks for clearing that up, unfortunately sarcasm is easily lost across the internet.

No clue what your issue is, but if your standard for OSS is not being associated with furries, I’ve got bad news for you.

Depends on your use case. Manjaro is in the unique position of having such a poor management track record, that almost any other Arch derivative (or, you know… Arch) is preferable. They’ve let their SSL certificate expire for the 7th time just last week I think? I honestly haven’t kept count, but it happened at least a few times. If it works for you, that’s fine. I imagine most reasonable people don’t really care. I personally dislike Manjaro for their poor track record managing their repositories or SSL certificates, their historically stupid approach to the AUR and the generally negative effect it had on Arch linux (tech support). Honestly I think Manjaro benefits most from its popularity in the tech influencer spheres and the fact that most of its userbase doesn’t seem to question if a rolling release model actually makes sense for their use case.

I mean, yeah that would be my solution. I get that the AUR is attractive, precisely because it has a low barrier for anyone to submit their PKGBUILD. The level of oversight and verification is just a bit too low to recommend it to an average user, without a lot of caution. You’ve mentioned some alternatives that fall on different points along the spectrum of delivering software. Something like flatpak is a much more reliable tool in the hands of someone who just wants a GUI app and not think about how it gets to their desktop. For everything else that isn’t part of your distros repositories, there’s really not a good noob-friendly solution that doesn’t carry a big potential risk. Most distros have third-party repositories that use the same underlying tools to deliver software, but are less strict about QA and stuff. This is kind of a bad fit for rolling release distros in my opinion and is probably one of the reasons the AUR is so hands-off and DIY oriented.

There’s probably a better way to handle this, but I don’t think it’s an easy thing to solve (especially for the rolling release model) and the AUR isn’t really appropriate for mass-consumption by average users. Also, there will always be a certain point beyond which you’re on your own, it’s just not feasible to have reliable, safe, distro-agnostic packaging for every piece of software out there.

All official resources, Arch maintainers and high quality guides have been putting a ton of effort into teaching people how to use the AUR safely. That hasn’t stopped some people, even back before Arch got really popular, but you can’t reach everyone. Alternative package managers and pacman wrappers made the AUR a lot more accessible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are good reasons for all the caution. Combine that with Arch increasing in popularity and getting picked up by all the shitty influencers and you get a lot of people ,who don’t know what they’re doing, installing everything from the AUR with their CLI/GUI of choice. Then you’ve got Arch derivatives making AUR packages easily accessible from the start, bad advice on places like reddit etc.

Long story short: it seems that over the years whenever I check in, users that barely know how it works are happily installing random shit from random people on the AUR because they saw it in a YT video or something.

The AUR is a great resource but it’s also being sold as a package repository users don’t need to actively think about or understand. I honestly think malware is going to be much more common on the AUR if we aren’t careful.

The US spends a shit-ton of money on sports… as long as it’s basketball, baseball, football or soccer. Stadium construction for those sports is breaking records in the US and all of those projects are heavily subsidized. It’s a giant, capitalist industry and as such it is propped up by tax money, lol.

Microsoft has been weirdly protective of their installation image downloads for some time now. I don’t really get why.

The snail has been taken over by parasitic flatworms that control it to seek out exposed spots and pulsate inside of their eye stalks to get eaten by a bird and enter the next stage of their life cycle, which they spend by living in the birds cloaca and spreading their eggs via feces.