The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.
I've been very happy with Aurora-DX, which falls under the Universal Blue umbrella. I reboot it once a week to apply updates and I can roll back if I need to.
.NET has always been both the biggest blessing and the biggest curse for F#.
We have access to millions of libraries. I look at BEAM languages and OCaml every once in a while but can’t quite drag myself over there, knowing that in .NET, just as an example, I can choose between a dozen JSON serialisation libraries that have been optimised and tuned comprehensively for decades.
But then, those libraries are also our curse. If you consume them, everything is OO so you either give up on functional purity and start writing imperative F# code, or you have to spend time writing and maintaining a F# idiomatic wrapper around it.
Similarly I was working recently on project to develop a library which was going to have downstream consumers. The problem lent itself really well to domain modelling in F#. But I knew that my downstream users would be C# devs. I could invest the time and write my library as “functional core, imperative shell”. But then I decided that since the interface would be OO anyway, I might as well just write it in C#.
Thankfully what keeps F# going is the wonderful community around it, not Microsoft. I know some people (outside of Microsoft) have worked on a standalone F# compiler but it’s still very early stages. Maybe one day.
Although you inevitably end up writing some OOP code in F# when interacting with the dotnet ecosystem, F# is a really good OOP language. It's also concise, so I don't spend as much time jumping around files switching my visual context. Feels closer to writing python.
I work at a large enterprise where most of our backend js .NET and I can tell you that the dev team is nearly half and half split between Linux and Mac, and nearly half and half split on using VS Code and Rider.
Most of our code is deployed on Kubernetes and runs on AWS.
Developer experience means many things to different people. Personally for my most recent project, I used F# and the IDE was Rider and my OS was a form of immutable Fedora (Ublue OS) with devpod and devcontainers and the whole system was the most joyous developer experience I think I have ever had.
What are you talking about C# being tied to Visual Studio? This is 2025 not 1995.
I do my hobby .NET development in Zed and my serious work in Rider. .NET is open source and MIT licences. I do most of my development on a ARM MacBook Pro, or using my workstation which runs Fedora.
We deploy our code on kubernetes clusters usually on AWS.
All of the tooling, compiler, libraries etc are open source and cross platform and free. Not a single one of the developers in my team uses Windows or Visual Studio.
You know there are people.. programmers.. who are not C# developers... and likely refuse C# because of various reasons.. right? It can be based on the fact its Microsoft. My comment is based on startups and, from my experience, people like go all in on C# because decisions have been made to go all-in Microsoft.
C# has come a long way in the last 10 years. This much is clear, providing better support outside of the Windows ecosystem. However, many outside of the Windows/Microsoft ways are likely to be using languages like Go.
> What are you talking about C# being tied to Visual Studio? This is 2025 not 1995.
There was no C# in 1995.
(See it's easy attacking a sentence)
VS Code with Ionide is okay but has many limitations for example in debugging or lack of support for F# fsi scripts.
If you’re serious about F#, investing in Rider or Visual Studio makes a lot of sense.
Having said that I wrote a Neo4J data extraction tool a few months ago and chose to write it in F#. At one point I observed how funny it was that I was developing in a Microsoft language and yet my dev workstation runs Fedora and my IDE comes from JetBrains and my code is running in kubernetes on a Linux cluster and there is not a sight of a windows machine in this whole pipeline.
I remember the days when the language, linker, compiler, IDE, the GUI components, everything was tied together. If you wanted the next version of VB you had to buy the new version of Visual Studio!
People used to say this about Amazon all the time. Remember how Amazon basically didn’t turn any real profits for 2 decades? The joke was that Amazon was a charitable organisation being funded by Wall Street for the benefit of human kind.
That didn’t last. People in the know knew that once you have a billion users and insane revenue and market power and have basically bought or driven out of business most of your competitors (Diapers.com, Jet.com, etc) you can eventually slow down your physical expansion, tighten the screws on your suppliers, increase efficiencies, and start printing money.
The VCs who are funding these companies are hoping that they have found the next Amazon. Many will probably go out of business, but some might join the ranks of trillion dollar companies.
If you’ve got nearly a billion users, and are multiplying your revenue on an annual basis, then yes. You’re effectively showing that you’re in hyper growth trajectory.
Hyper growth is expensive because it’s usually capital intensive. The trick is, once that growth phase is over, can you then start milking your customers while keeping a lid on costs? Not everyone can, but Amazon did, and most investors think OpenAI and Anthropic can as well.
20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on.
I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.
Interestingly, my country turned off 3G before 2G.
I think the reasoning was that the heavy data 3G users had already upgraded to 4G and beyond, and low data 3G users could fall back to 2G, so retiring 3G would have negligible impact - while opening up a lot of bandwidth for 4G and 5G.
On the other hand, there were plenty of 2G-only low data users around, so retiring that early would break stuff for a lot of people. Keeping it around longer gave people more time to upgrade.
About 12 months ago I was looking for a SSG for our documentation website and after trying many different options settled on Material for MKDocs. I had a list of criteria such as Mermaid.js and PlantUML support which no other option easily supported, but Material for MkDocs had a plugin for everything.
Since adopting it, I’ve also grown fond of Mike, the plugin which lets users see the various different versions of a doc (without needing to resort to git).
But I’ve also experienced plenty of pain points when pushing the customisation envelop. Weird bugs appeared in many places which were clearly due to MKDocs’s poor architecture and performance was also never stellar.
Congratulations on launching Zeniscal and I’m quite excited to see the future of it, but I do very much hope that in 12 months time, one way or the other, I’m able to still have similar functionality to what the plugins provide.
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