There's all sorts of philosophical arguments as well: government services shouldn't need to turn a profit, all citizens need to be able to interact with the State and the post office provides a way to do that, mail-in voting, Post Offices can offer stuff like general delivery for those without permanent addresses, etc.

Mason was always just a package manager for LSP servers. It used to be you needed the nvim-lspconfig plugin to properly configure LSP servers to work with neovim; to help with that there was the mason-lspconfig plugin that basically mapped LSP servers (as installed by mason) to nvim-lspconfig LSP configurations to make it all Just Work.

Now nvim-lspconfig and mason-lspconfig are no longer required thanks to the `vim.lsp.config`/`vim.lsp.enable` setup so you don't need them unless you want the little bit of automagic setup. Mason you can retain if you find it easier to install LSP servers through it, otherwise you can drop that too. Personally I manage my LSP tooling through distro/mise and replaced the lspconfig plugins with just a few autocommands and manually grabbing the config files from nvim-lspconfig git repo as needed.

Linux distros that are updated with full system snapshots instead of package by package, similar to Android. The key difference is most of / is mounted read-only[0] and is only changed by distribution provided updates so you and the distro team always know exactly what's running.

> What are the advantages to the alternatives?

Greater control and stability since its essentially always running in a supported configuration. Easy roll-backs to a previous update if something goes wrong. You always know exactly what your system is running if you want to keep it in sync across machines (more useful in a server setting).

> What other projects are similar

Kalpa is a "sibling" project to AeonOS, which is atomic OpenSUSE but with Gnome (and other changes, which I'll get to). There's also the Fedora Atomic line of Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue (KDE and Gnome respectively), U-Blue, Bazzite, SteamOS, and more. I think most major distro lines have an Atomic variant at this point.

> What is the motivation for this project in particular?

For Kalpa specifically, it's to offer a KDE alternative to AeonOS. Originally there was just AeonOS, which was OpenSUSE MicroOS (an atomic version of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) with GNOME installed. Aeon has diverged greatly from MicroOS though and I think it no longer uses it as an upstream. AeonOS also refused to support KDE[1], so Kalpa was created. Kalpa still uses MicroOS as its upstream and I'm not sure if there's any plans to change that.

> Most importantly, why should I want to use it?

I use it on my personal laptop because it lets me have all the benefits of a rolling distro (up to date packages) without the stability concerns. Updates apply automatically in the background and I know when I reboot I'll always have a working system available to me.

[0] /etc is mounted as an overlay FS so you can still make changes to it. /var, /usr/local, and /srv are also still user-writable. I think /mnt is too but I forget off hand.

[1] Aeon is generally anti-customization and does its best to only offer one way of doing things. This is to prevent configuration drift and reduce the maintenance burden per snapshot. GNOME also has a more regular release cadence, which makes it much easier to integrate than KDE (or so I've been told..)

I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.

That seems different from what you originally argued but either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of milling technology, and during the latter end you start getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and other metallurgy.

Where all of these done in one or two specific places? No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a still a variety of advancements happening all the time without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.

> It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.

I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.

> If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.

A very pointed date to choose.

> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.

1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe. The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so between 600CE and 900CE.

2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.

3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century, long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended. Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages since the whole point of it as a historical context is "rediscovering" the Classical works.

Quadlets are just a systemd generator: all `daemon-reload` is doing is running `podman-system-generator` which looks at the Quadlet files and turns them into systemd unit files with a big honking `podman run --rm --blah container:tag` as the `ExecStart` property. There's nothing else to it, no daemons or what not

If you ever feel like bothering to give it another shot check journalctl to see if there's any generator errors. Or run the generator directly: on my OpenSUSE box it's at `/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator` , Run it with `--dry-run` to just output to stdout and `--user` to get user quadlets.

Just a note, you actually can't turn off PR's on Github repos. At least not permanently.

[0] A mile is essentially the farthest the average person will comfortable walk versus driving a car for travel that does not require carrying anything back. Once you add in carrying things (e.g. groceries) it drops to half a mile. Anything less dense than that and people won't want to walk, anything more dense than that and you're into standard city planning.

[1] Assuming you're American of course and obviously I'm not about to ask you to dox yourself, considering this type of thing can vary right down to the neighbourhood level.

Podman was changing pretty fast for a while so it could be an older version thing, though I'd assume FCOS is on Podman 5 by now.

A few things in the article I think might help the author:

1. Podman 4 and newer (which FCOS should definitely have) uses netavark for networking. A lot of older tutorials and articles were written back when Podman used CNI for it's networking and didn't have DNS enabled unless you specifically installed it. I think the default `podman` network is still setup with DNS disabled by default. Either way, you don't have to use a pod if you don't want to anymore, you can just attach both containers to the same network and it should Just Work.

2. You can run the generator manually with "/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator --dry-run" to check Quadlet validity and output. Should be faster than daemon-reload'ing all the time or scanning the logs.

And as a bit of self-promotion: for anyone who wants to use Quadlets like this but doesn't want to rebuild their server whenever they make a change, I'm created a tool called Materia[0] that can install, remove, template, and update Quadlets and other files from a Git repository.

[0] https://github.com/stryan/materia

Other bands with similar[0] vocals off the top of my head: Summerlands, Night Demon, Sonja, Crypt Sermon, Visigoth, Eternal Champion

Halford, Dio,Dickinson, and the other greats are going to be hard to replicate exactly but there's plenty of singers out there that are just as skilled andactively playing music.

[0] in the traditional clean vocals sense

Or just listen to any of the easily available fantastic metal albums released in the past year? I could see the argument for incredibly niche genres (though in the age of Bandcamp I'd love to see a genre that doesn't have at least a few artists producing music for it) but there's plenty of heavy metal being made these days in both the general and the traditional (i.e. the heavy metal genre versus general metal genre) sense.