When working with git, and I have a separate working copy, my options to sync are either rebase or create a merge commit.

It sounds to me like the pijul workflow is almost equivalent to just doing a merge commit instead of rebasing. Am I correct here? What’s the difference then?

It’s hard to understand what exactly will change for me if I used pijul vs git. What will be noticeably different?

This is mostly due to inertia and, to an extent, SEO.

Most people use github because it’s all they know and its name is almost synonymous with git hosting. Publishing elsewhere leads to people asking you why you’re not on github, how else can we contribute, etc. Moreover, github seems to score better on Google SEO than other platforms.

Its best to use a protocol that doesn’t allow unencrypted messages

This is an implementation thing and not a protocol thing. What protocol doesn’t allow unencrypted messages? I am sure signal’s protocol would still allow it, it’s just that the implementation doesn’t.

And same for XMPP. Just go with the implementation that doesn’t.

Guix is almost like nix but with scheme, right? Any other differences?

I do like scheme. Nix is quite impressive. But my unpopular opinion is I am not convinced it’s philosophy is necessary. Nix feels like a workaround to legacy baggage in POSIX to allow for all its features of full reproducibility of packages and the overall system. Although Gentoo is not exactly reproducible, I feel like the level of control is sufficient to give me the benefits I want.

Nix works for maybe 95% of cases, but the 5% where its workarounds do not work sre annoying to deal with. Gentoo on the other hand doesn’t break so much from the traditional unix way of doing things, but still grants the user a great load of freedom and choice.

It works even if steam is installed through my system package manager rather than flatpak, which I find even more puzzling.

I suppose steam is installing something alongside it that bottles is using. Can’t figure out what it is.

I don’t think this should have to do with it, as I run the game outside of steam in bottles. I am running a GOG copy.

That’s a fair argument, thanks for showing me the other perspective!

Imho, I prefer an editor that focuses on doing editing right, and provides the interface and APIs for integration with other things. I get the appeal of built-in LSP working OOTB, but I prefer this gets done by distributing the a good editor pre-packaged with LSP and other plugins, sort of like how you get lunarvim or nvchad as neovim with config and plugins ready. This way you get LSP out of the box, but others can customize if they need.

helix […] shares kakounes keybindings and input system

I get that it is inspired from it, but it felt like a strange in-between to me. It still has 3 modes, and the two non-insert modes seemed not to have a well-defined boundary. It didn’t just click with me. Kakoune seems to do it much better imho.

You can do this [shell integration] in vim and helix as well

I know vim has some basic she’ll integration, but it is not the same as Kakoune’s, unless I missed those features in vim and helix. I don’t wanna duplicate things, so I recommend you read the shell section of this page: https://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html

I personally liked podman’s networking a lot more, but my issue is that it is not well documented. I hope that improves.

May I ask which networking issues you had?

I’d love to clarify if you tell me which part of the post you didn’t understand.