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@stefano Don’t bother filing a bug report. They will act stupid. Probably they are stupid about it. They think it is a bug. Actually the author probably wrote a program he knew was not a solution to the problem but which he could do on deadline and which was good enough for his job at HP.

@stefano Here is something new for you to be upset about, though, which affects everyone, Linux, BSD, illumos alike. I have been upset about it for over 20 years.

Read ‘man 5 fonts-conf’ or whatever your equivalent is. Read it carefully under ‘FONT MATCHING’. What it says is that a font is not chosen as you wished, but instead RANDOMLY. You are only LUCKY if you get the font you wished.

And if you experiment long enough you will find this is true.

Fontconfig is unfixable and must be scrapped.

@stefano As an aside: Outside the copyleft world, I do like to avoid LLVM and Clang. They aren’t on my system. The former is shapeshifting bloatware that destroyed the Pure language by changing underneath it. Anything closely associated with Apple and Google is going to be something you cannot rely on, in my opinion. Clang is lacking much of standard C, has no Ada or Fortran, etc.

I don’t trust CUPS to keep working, either. It will more and more be a ‘Mac-compatible-printers spooler’.

@stefano There is actually at least one person on the NixOS steering committee who claims NixOS is not a Unix-like operating system, and that their job is not to provide me with a Unix-like platform but with a user experience.

(But it turns out you can get a /usr/local working on NixOS by having the init scripts recreate the core of the /usr/local for you based on the latest NixOS generation. The latest libc and such.)

@stefano I ran Slackware at first. It was in those days basically a BSD design with the primitive Linux kernel, still using handmade /dev directories, etc. So that was okay.

Then I ran Gentoo for 20 years. That still resisted a lot of the Linux impulses such as systemd.

Now I am running NixOS. I am perhaps the only person in the world to successfully get a /usr/local working on NixOS. It is LITERALLY THAT BAD. NixOS actually TRIES to make it impossible to set up a /usr/local.

@stefano I run Linux but it is because I have since the mid 1990s. I know darn well there is a much quicker way to say what makes FreeBSD attractive compared to a GNU/Linux.

It is nothing to do with GNU, in my opinion, except as a matter of taste. Some prefer more Unix-like tools, I prefer the more full-featured GNU tools.

But kernels...

Linux is an absolutely HORRIBLE kernel. It is simply atrocious. And the closely kernel-related infrastructure is even worse and getting worse.