SleveMcDichael

Unfortunately most people don't really have a choice in the matter. It's sites like twitter that crunch images to hell and back on upload that choose for us.

They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.

Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?

Absolutely not. Power companies don't get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.

IMO Arch's defaults (especially w.r.t. audio and fonts) are a little nicer than Gentoo's, but that's a pretty minor inconvenience all things considered.

The ability to patch packages with little effort ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/patches ) is the main reason I'm currently considering switching to gentoo.

There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like

*Lists two positives*

If that's the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it's practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn't. Aside from the general lack of polish, I'd argue that there's not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the 'square' style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.

C++ is pretty alright, IMO, but the syntax is kinda clunky though, I think probably because of some historical baggage.

As much as I sympathise with developers over headaches caused by themeing, I believe users (myself included) would be less up-in-arms about it if applications were less ugly by default. And boy howdy is libadwaita ugly as sin.

I'd be perfectly willing to tolerate a mismatched system, if the individual components looked at least okay. Like I'm not going to get e.g. steam or discord to match an e.g. Windows 9x theme, and I'm mostly okay with that because they aren't horrible to look at. But, say, File Roller? Absolutely not. Horribly ugly.

A program that I use often uses an embedded MPV window for video playing, and Wayland doesn't support that, and apparently won't: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/74

So until something changes with that program, MPV, or Wayland, or I decide to rewrite the program myself, I'm stuck with X11.

Personally I quite like zstd, I find it has a pretty decent balance of speed to ratio at each of its levels.

Definitely. As nice as it would be, I don't think it will significantly change any time soon, for several reasons. Not least of which is because several programs would likely just flatly refuse to implement such a change, judging by some of them refusing to even consider patches to implement the XDG Base Directory Specification.

Not really software but, personally I think the FHS could do with replacing. It feels like its got a lot of historical baggage tacked on that it could really do with shedding.