But how am I going to use capabilities to have my equivalent of sl having setuid to nobody?

They’re downloaded somewhere under /var/snap and by default a snap only has access to a limited set of directories - one under /var/snap for system-wide data (generally used by snaps that run services like cups or MySQL) and one under ~/snap for each user. When you snap remove an app, it bundles that up into a file that’s kept for a while in case you reinstall, but it won’t if you use --purge.

Obviously many apps request access to other places (such as non-hidden directories in your homedir) so they can read or write stuff, but that’s down to the app to then behave correctly (same as with any other packaging system).

Let me know when I can get cups as a flatpak.

(Oh and snaps predate flatpaks.)

Yeah the API is open and there used to be an open store, but lack of interest ended up with the project shutting down. As it turns out people don’t like alternative stores nearly as much as they like the idea of alternative stores.

sl and KDE plasma

Yeah, Steam is pretty much a monopoly. But I haven’t seen what I’d call monopolistic practices from them. It’s just that everyone else appears to fall flat on their faces when trying to make a competing product.

I’m less mad at Steam and Google because there are clear, simple ways to avoid their cuts.

I have no basis to say whether they’re providing a service worth the 30% charge. I’m also less mad at Steam than at Google because they’re being less shady about trying to push people into their store too.

Good way to check that all the parts are working before putting whatever you want on it.

My ex: what charging cables do you have? They last forever, mine break after a year!
Also my ex: so I got a bunch of the same charging cables you have and they all broke after a year

Great way to damage a power cable.

The only reason my last machine didn’t get more than 10 years worth of in-place upgrades was because I decommissioned it as a desktop and turned it into a server, so I wiped it at that point.

Because despite all the people telling me I’m wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I’ve ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.

Kate

I think a better analogy would be that you’re tuning your bike for better performance because the trade-offs of switching to a car are worse than keeping the bike.

It’s all about trade-offs. Here are a few reasons why one might care about performance in their Python code:

1. Performance is often more tied to the code than to the interpreter - an O(n³) algorithm in blazing fast C won’t necessarily perform any better than an O(nlogn) algorithm in Python.
2. Just because this particular Python code isn’t particularly performance constrained doesn’t mean you’re okay with it taking twice as long.
3. Rewriting a large code base can be very expensive and error-prone. Converting small, very performance-sensitive parts of the code to a compiled language while keeping the bulk of the business logic in Python is often a much better value proposition.

These are also performance benefits one can get essentially for free with linter rules.

Anecdotally: in my final year of university I took a computational physics class. Many of my classmates wrote their simulations in C or C++. I would rotate between Matlab, Octave and Python. During one of our labs where we wrote particle simulations, I wrote and ran Octave and Python simulations in the time it took my classmates to write their C/C++ versions, and the two fastest simulations in the class were my Octave and Python ones, respectively. (The professor’s own sim came in third place). The overhead my classmates had dealing with poorly optimised code that caused constant cache misses was far greater than the interpreter overhead in my code (though at the time I don’t think I could have explained why their code was so slow compared to mine).

os.linesep

Lol jk none of my stuff runs on Windows anyway

I use almost exclusively FOSS and I have monthly/annual contributions set up for various projects.

This takes me back to my childhood… My dad would take me to the fair and get me a deep fried router on a stick and a roll of cat5.

If you say so