As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer. The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available. I’ve always tried to use as many “packaged” gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly Debian and Fedora Linux, along with OpenBSD.

There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014. CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still Nux’s Stella from the CentOS 6 days.) There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop operating system. Most of them are not owned by corporations that can limit their distribution on a whim.

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.

Update: On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows: I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled— was very out of datein the Debian Stable repository.

I can’t believe I didn’t learn this earlier because now I do it all the time: If you close a file, as I often do with :bd, to open the last file you closed, type e# in command mode: :e# The last closed file opens in your current window. This is great for me because in my editing workflow, I have a story budget from one directory in one window, and I work on stories from a different directory in another.