It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.

You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.

C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

Usually I hate this, I’m using man for a reason, but sometimes I’m scrolling through a novel-length man page thinking that maybe most of this information needs to be anywhere else.

Almost certainly the person doing their assignment, my ricing very rarely has any applicability outside of the specific config files I’m tweaking.

If I would stop spending so much time modifying (read: breaking) it it probably would be more productive. I love the ergonomics of my setup.

But also wouldn’t it be cool to add just one more fancy widget to my already janky-as-fuck eww bar? No? Well I’ll do it anyways.

The reason you don’t see a lot of love for Manjaro is because your experience isn’t quite typical. Manjaro is notorious for taking Arch and making it less stable. It’s mostly Arch with some defaults and software to make it easier to set up, but the few cases where it drifts from Arch tend to cause more issues than if you just used Arch directly.

Uh, I kind of assume you’re trolling at this point since a) you got notably more unpleasant in a hurry, and b) if you think exes work the same way every time you have lived a weirdly blessed life.

I hope you sort out your package management problems sometime but this has clearly gotten unproductive. Cheers!

The discover store comes with KDE nowadays. GNOME has a similar store. Most recommended distros will preinstall one of those two. Ubuntu has a similar snap store, I think.

I guess the steam flatpak is unofficial. Works, though. Very simple, lazy solution. Could have gone through the fedora repos, too, where they’ve gone through the effort of repacking the deb for their users.

Dunno what your package manager problem is. Don’t even know what you’re running. Mine works fine, and certainly better than the windows store 🤷

Appimages sure aren’t recognized as system apps. They’re basically like an exe on windows. I’d rather manually add my rare appimage to the menu than go through the installer hell windows has.

Your point seems a little silly because, honestly, my experience is that developers have largely made the Linux desktop experience so simple and stable that it works better than any windows machine I’ve used in the past decade. I’m sorry this hasn’t been your experience, but in the last couple of years I’ve pretty much only needed to open the terminal because I want to, not because I need to.

I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).

I don’t know what distro/de/wm you’re using right now but what you’re saying doesn’t need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.

Areweideyet is super out of date. It shows that rust is pretty IDE at this point, but the ecosystem has changed quite a bit. Most notably racer has been replaced by rust-analyzer basically everywhere, and most code editors can trivially hook into it for extensive LSP support.

I’m debating making a PR to update stuff but the maintainer looks pretty inactive. Also the changes would either be pretty extensive or replacing the whole thing with “yep.”

Every time I spend four hours figuring out how to get one tiny little thing working better in vim I find another even smaller issue that I desperately need to dig in to, and thus my actual personal projects never get worked on. I should just give up and call “tweaking my vimrc” a hobby.

Ruff is super nice, the speed increase means that I no need to wait a second after saving a file to make sure my linter or formatter don’t confuse me.

Python packaging is kind of a mess where each tool that solves a problem also feels like it bogs down the process. It doesn’t help that I need multiple tools to manage both my python and package versions. It sounds like uv isn’t far enough along for me to bother with yet, but it also has a goal and team behind it that make me optimistic that this isn’t just another packager to throw on the pile.

DRM in many games doesn’t work on Linux. In some cases, like games that use EAC, this is technically just a checkbox at build time where they decide not to support Linux.

There are also some weird libraries and low-level interfaces that refuse to even work through wine/proton, but that’s pretty rare nowadays. You have to be actively trying to find something that won’t work at all on Linux.