Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).

(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)

I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.

Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)

So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.

Well, I consume more open source software that I will ever produce, so I am in a dept to the community. If it means working a bit more to make my contribution useful to others and fit it into the bigger whole, I will gladly do so.

Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

I would avoid reading too much into it. They and their developers are still contributing on other stuff. Also when working together, there will always be some friction, in any public collaborative project ever.

Nothing of this is a burden, it is just part of being a good contributor that reads and follows the rules. Contributing is pretty easy, when you have read and are following the guides. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try.

I am pretty sure that this isn’t the first contribution of Valve to the Linux kernel. It sounds more to me like “works for me, don’t care about others” attitude. Which is not a good attitude to have when working in any collaborative project. (Not necessarily against the developers, could also be management.)

Well, it is about code quality. And the same codebase should work on different hardware, which is not something that is required in downstream forks.

But it is sad to see that the driver was submitted in the past, is still actively developed and improved, but there doesn’t seem to be plans of submitting them again.

Also I don’t think that a platform driver is so complicated that it requires such a long time for mainlineing. It not a filesystem or VPN.

On a more interesting topic, the SteamDeck platform drivers are still not merged into mainline Linux… :'(

Last news about it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-Platform-Driver-2024

So similar to kakoune? I tried that for a while, but it was missing some features so I went back to vim/neovim.

I need to know vi anyway, because that is available everywhere (as part of busybox), so using vim/nvim for bigger systems just fits.

Or you get a message at 3 am the next day, where they apologize that they didn’t made it, but that they will deliver sometime between 8 and 22 that day.

What about Lua/Luajit?

In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.