lily33

My bet is, it'll be Saturday that goes, finally achieving a 6-day work week.

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 those 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.

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?