Actually, much of that description, perpetuated by dystopian novels, is pretty far off the mark - and it’s the kind of mischaracterization that makes it harder to fight back against authoritarian governments.

The fact is, the vast majority of people in authoritarian states live ordinary lives, just like everywhere else. That’s part of what makes these governments so resilient. If everyone in there lived a nightmare, they wouldn’t last for decades, they’d collapse at the first sign of instability. After all, there are a lot more people than government officials.

For example, a canny authoritarian government won’t disappear anyone who steps out of line. Instead, they’d provide a “safe, legitimate” way to step out of line, that’s well regulated and doesn’t pose a threat to the government, but serves as an outlet. And most people will be satisfied with it. That’s both more subtle, and more effective, that instilling fear in everyone’s heart.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

Technically, “enforced pay it forward” is called credit. Your debt would then be “the amount you still have to pay forward”.

Of course, this defeats both the spirit and the purpose of a pay it forward scheme.

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

:D.

Fixed

Indeed. Linux audio also allows control characters like backspace to be part of a file name (though it is harder to make such file as you can’t just type the name). Which is just horrible.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

Boeing’s next big solution could be a strike by 32,000 workers

Fixed.

It’s not an article about LLMs not using dialects. In fact, they have learned said dialects and will use them if asked.

What they did was, ask the LLM to suggest adjectives associated with sentences - and it would associate more aggressive or negative adjectives with African dialect.

Seems like not a bias by AI models themselves, rather a reflection of the source material.

All (racial) bias in AI models is actually a reflection of the training data, not of the modelling.

It’s certainly good, I’m not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it’s good, and helpful - but not really a “donation” to winehq.

I guess it’s simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they’ve decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that ‘donation’ is a bit pushing it

I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

It’s good, but it is corporate.

TesseraC+

Very well counsel, as a favour I’ll make sure he gets prison instead.

And who hasn’t contributed any code to this particular repo (according to github insights).

In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.

They are major concerns, but they aren’t the only reasons people would use Linux, and also not everyone who uses Linux does it for these reasons. For example, while I care about them, my most important reason for using it is utility features such as my tiling WM.

That only works if the main reason someone uses Linux is personal privacy.