NGL, I very much want to just download an installer binary, run that, click through its dialogues and be done.

There's a reason why everyone except some weirdoes hate the Windows & MacOS app stores.

Using Mizutamari to do much the same on FreeBSD is actually pretty nice :)

Oh yes, non-standard repos are an absolute curse. Personally I have stopped bothering with them. I'd much rather just compile from source or something.

Admittedly so far I haven't had major breakage with Mint upgrades, but dealing with withheld, orphan, etc. packages and the occasional times when Apt goes on the fritz aren't fun.

Not saying that FreeBSD is perfect, part of this experiment is to learn more about FreeBSD here.

I mostly use Manjaro these days because it's rolling release and uses the same package manager as MSYS2 on Windows.

Mint does the versions thing, and they basically tell you to 'just do a clean install', because non-rolling Linux distros are just cursed, I guess.

It's a mixed bag, as FreeBSD also runs Linux apps, though having to use convoluted chroot setups for some of them is tedious.

What really gets my goat is that much Linux software would compile with minimal or no changes on FreeBSD, they just don't bother. With a zillion Linux distros what's 1 more?

I follow Prune here, yes. I follow Steve Rosenberg on YouTube where he posts regular video updates of current affairs in the newspapers in Moscow.

He wasn't Australian by any chance?

Thoughts and prayers, Russia-style.

Well, this is based on official Russian information, and it's looking incredibly bleak.

If you follow Steve Rosenberg's 'Reading Russia', you'll know that even the newspapers there are clear about the economic crisis, even if they refuse to link it to the SMO (CBO).

Quite literally too. Russia has run out of liquidity in its national wealth fun (NWF) beyond some gold and a fair bit of Yuan. Meanwhile exports are plummeting and the economy has entered a pretty steep recession, as even the official messaging is beginning to admit.

There'll be no 2027 for Russia.

It's more of a recent thing for me, mostly as a Windows alternative that's less chaos-y than the Linux ecosystem. I like server and desktop systems that are boring and just work :)

Banks: *salivating and peeing self in sheer glee*

My sympathies. No chance of sneaking LTS on there? :)