They don’t in general, but things that do heavily detailed graphics work (like your compositor or browser) or lots of cryptography work on the CPU can get a bit more out of those newer instructions than many other programs.

Very approximately, things that Gentoo offers prebuilt versions of because compiling them is so resource intensive are often the things that can get the best benefit out of your architecture variant. (Not singling out Gentoo here as an example of “doing it badly” - they do the sensible thing by providing these prebuilt binaries, but in some ways it defeats the purpose of optimised source distributions.)

It’s a Hard Problem™ to solve.

Look I don’t have heat in the winter so I compile Firefox for various processors to keep my bedroom warm okay?

The irony is that big things like Firefox can get the most advantages from building for your specific CPU variant, especially if you use them frequently.

As far as I understand, Tailscale (being a Wireguard network) doesn’t need you to flip it off and on - if you’re connecting to the relevant endpoint it gets routed through that, otherwise it just goes the normal way.

Not gonna pretend that means the setup is trivial to nomies, but you could probably set it up for them and not have to worry about it.

It does not “just work” for me and I love it that way. I got bored of using Kubuntu LTS because nothing interesting happened. Now I’m running prerelease versions of everything and get to file (and fix!) bug reports on the reg.

QWERTY keyboard. 2/10

Please don’t spam this post.

sl and KDE plasma

The only reason my last machine didn’t get more than 10 years worth of in-place upgrades was because I decommissioned it as a desktop and turned it into a server, so I wiped it at that point.

Because despite all the people telling me I’m wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I’ve ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.

os.linesep

Lol jk none of my stuff runs on Windows anyway

This isn’t even hard. KDE without a second thought.

I regularly try other desktops, and I regularly come back to the only desktop with any sort of reasonable thought put into it.

Is that usual?

Canonical still licenses most of their stuff under GPL3, including new stuff. The license (other than it being open) was probably not even a consideration in deciding to experiment with uutils.

I’ve got GIMP 3.0 here on my Kubuntu system 🤷‍♂️

Not to mention that I can’t find any indication that Mint has a fixed version of ffmpeg at all.

That’s not quite accurate. The community can still upload fixed packages to universe, just as the community runs universe in the first place.

Does mint ship with a fixed version of ffmpeg?

I’d much rather see RISC-V take over.

Why mess with perfection?