Depends whether you go with Tumbleweed, Slowroll, or Leap. I believe the Kernel Of The Day repository is only available for Tumbleweed. By 'latest' kernel you did mean bleeding edge nightly builds, right?

No, I mean latest non-RC kernel (currently 6.18).

I want to have VMs that are kind of like Arch but a little bit more stable, yet have very latest versions of everything I need with minimal risk (no need for the bleeding edge at all times; Manjaro does this semi-okay with its two weeks grace period).

Latest also means latest bugs. So unless you’re waiting for some drivers for your hardware, I’m not sure that it’s really needed for general usage.

I don't need 100% of all software. Just a tiny fraction and they're modern tools that are heavily iterated on. Is it possible they have bugs? Very much so!

But "stay on an older version to be safe" is not the panacea many try to pretend that it is. Way too many bugs and security vulnerabilities on old versions as well.

If you’re on debian, there’s the backports repository, And stable means stable in terms of feature. They still patches for bugs and security, and quite fast for the latter.

I seem to recall Jitsi working pretty well.

Jitsi is great but the element integration felt clunky. Maybe I'll have to revisit it.

I don't know for certain that it can compile and run SQLite, but the smallest C compiler I know of is SectorC: <https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html>

Hot seat multiplayer games?

Did you deliberately leave out Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, or did you just forget it exists?

Console only fallout game? Fake. Can’t be real.

[edit] but really, I was like “man, I feel like there’s another one…” but figured I must have just been thinking of the never-made sequel that got as far as some planning (Van Buren).

You're thinking of Unstable (Sid). It's also not like Arch or Tumbleweed because it gets locked down during release freeze and then gets a ton of updates all at once.

I'm fairly certain that the GNU/Linux percentage dropping has more to do with the Simplified Chinese and Russian language percentage rising. I.O.W. more Windows than GNU/Linux users joined.

Not every compiled language has a de facto standard compiler, but with SBCL Common Lisp compiles pretty quickly. The Pascals (and Delphi) also tend to have rather fast compile times. I believe Jai is supposed to compile quickly but I'm not in the beta so I don't know. C can be quite good if you know what you're doing and use a decent compiler.

I should really have specified fast compiling implementations.

It does make me wonder why Pascal never became more popular. Fast compiling is a big advantage.

Because FP is useless so there aren't any practical examples. ...but all kidding aside, I kinda feel like an astronomer talking to an astrologer when it comes to this stuff. Like I'm scanning the night sky with my telescope while he's talking about Mars being 'in the house of Jupiter' or whatever. It's the old Abelson quote about computer science all over again.

Don't forget about branch prediction (GCC may have __builtin_expect, but that's not standard C).

The compiler usually can't do anything about branch prediction. Expect is more about keeping cold paths out of the cache.

Actually that was one of the problems with EPIC architectures, where compilers are expected to be the ones doing those kind of optimizations.