Yup, same here. Never really understood the G-Shock thing until I got one. The 5610U is truly one of the best watches hands down, and they’re cheap. I find myself using timers and alarms much more because I may not have my phone at all times (around the house etc). Solar to boot? It really doesnt get much better, they’re fantastic.

I don’t remember the specific article I read that dove into this but it was essentially sold due to it being one of the first large data collections (user data). I’m not sure the extent its traweled now but before the social media machine took off, it was the largest if not one of the largest concentrations of actual data points to run algorithms against.

They both achieve the same thing in different ways, but it comes down to philosophy if that even matters to the user. You can build gentoo for example with openrc or systemd, and depending on what you do you’ll need to integrate things differently (using elogind with openrc since logind is systemd specific). In gentoo it affects how you’ll compile. Its really a non issue, but it all depends on what level folks wanna spend on something that could potentially be different. I use openrc daily on multiple setups and it took maybe a week of using it to get the hang of it. Its just operationally different.

Does it really matter for most folks? No. But if its something you find interesting, it can be a nice change based on personal views and principles. I run openrc because I personally as a programmer don’t believe in how “proprietary” systemd is designed, nor agree with the decisions the maintainers have made. That’s just my opinion. At the end of the day it doesn’t technically matter.

This is a more hardcore viewpoint but it covers a lot of the issues folks have with it. https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/

It’s pretty memed on at this point (arch users, gentoo users, NixOS et. al) but I’d make the point - truly without being pedantic - sometimes you just want stuff the way you want them. Should everybody deal with portage on a daily basis? God no. Is it a viable option for folks to keep their build in check and know exactly what’s going on down to their flags/libs? Absolutely. Same reasons with why some folks jive with the AUR.

It’s all about finding use case, just like any piece of tech. Yes there’s dick measuring and all else that comes with that, but there’s a good amount of merit to “I like how this distro revolves around x, it makes sense to me so it’s easier for me to maintain”. If those are some of the things that get Linux on the daily driver aspect, I’m all with it.

“How I created a god complex for myself, part 1”