That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers.

And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.

I’m pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.

That’s actually surprising to me, but I’d argue that Suse offers more products, it seems like Rancher, Longhorn, etc. have no canonical equivalent.

Reboots after three days and then disappears in the cloud.

And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming? Sure, there’s that one confused dude, but you also have people asking Facebook where they left their keys.

OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise. Why would you give that away?

Suse is not a huge company, it has neither a large enterprise backer nor any killer features, and its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical. Throwing away free marketing while alienating a relatively passionate community is a kind of brainrot only MBA can come up with.

Is there even someone left?

I only tried it around 2008 or so and it was extremely slow paced back then while looking like the interface from a sci-fi movie.

Every system will get gamed by bad actors.

At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.

For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.

The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.

No good solution, really.

Maybe because the original post seems awfully arrogant, if you don’t know the context - and the post didn’t provide any context.

I’ve seen a ton of responses like yours. You’re implying that everyone gets the context, if they don’t, you assume everything is “hostile” if it’s not the exact line of thought you happen to support.

Accept that other people live different lives from yours and have different experiences and knowledge.

As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.

I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.

The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.

Hitler was inspired by the US exterminating it’s Native population and by the US reservation system.

Don’t act like being American gives you some unique perspective. Wow, that looks stupid, right?

There’s a clear difference between living in society and ruling that society.

Sure, but you’re implying that not being part of the ruling class absolves you from any guilt or responsibility. And that is literally what all Germans said after the war. What was I supposed to do?

And you’re living in a democracy.

Are you perhaps under the impression that all Americans in 1776 were Founders

Are you perhaps under the impression that us stupid Europeans don’t know what you’re talking about?

Comparing that to bystanders and voting and buying local and being complacent is absurd

Again, I’m German. I’ve heard that excuse before.

The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.

Dude, I’m German. I know a thing or two about facing the past. So don’t act like I’m defending anyone.

I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them.

As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves. The other two thirds didn’t choose that either. Yet most of them got complacent for a pretty long time.

Also, you do have a choice. You can buy clothes that are maybe not morally pure, but at least better. You could buy a Fairphone. You could become politically active or at least vote for the better candidates/parties. Sure, that won’t turn the world into utopia over night, but at least you can make it a bit better.

We all have to face the fact that our actions and inactions cause suffering, and some of that is indeed not in our power to change. But your stance of essentially giving up and pointing at the other crime as ever worse is hypocritical.

As Adorno said: there’s no right living in the wrong. And we are so wrong currently the slave population in this world is higher than ever in the US: https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report

Of course it is. Today’s slaves get raped and tortured as well. Just not by us directly.

Essentially we outsourced the cruelty so we can live in blissful ignorance.

We do too.

We just call it outsourced labor and are happy about cheap clothes.

It’s fine, since we’re also stored in countless private databases for advertisement purposes, and statistically speaking at least one of those is so insecure, that it’s practically public knowledge anyway.

Yeah, no.

You can almost always add more layers, so unless we’re talking about literally Siberia in winter, you should be fine.

But if it’s too warm for shorts and shirt, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t run around naked or remove my skin (not in an easily reversible manner at least).

Yes. The first woman that approached me in a club. I was a fat boy most of my life, lost a bunch of weight during university, but was still very very insecure due to trauma and some residual skin/fat.

She simply came up to me and said “Hi, I find you incredibly attractive.” - very simple statement, but this was the first time I had seriously considered the possibility that a woman would be attracted to me.

Isn’t that true for almost all of pop music? It’s intended to be aggressively meh.

That’s actually how the comment above interpreted the ellipses. The difference is more, why the words are missing.

The “modern” interpretation is that you are too annoyed or afraid to finish the sentence. In the sense of “son of a …” in case of annoyance.

The “old” interpretation is either temporal (I’m not finished writing) or simply an acknowledgement that the fragment is just a fragment.

So the modern reader will interpret much more context into the missing words, leading to the exchange above.

I mean this subtitle right here gave me a pretty good idea what’s this initiative is all about already, but that’s just me I guess

But what does that mean exactly? Fairphones with long support duration? Solar powered software developers?

I get a rough direction from that, but nothing else, but it’s a headline, that’s ok.

What really bugs me is that the body of the text doesn’t really explain it either, but needs hundreds of words for that. It’s just fluff for a press statement that should have fit into a tweet.

Also, keep in mind that people from different countries work on KDE, and English is not their first language, I don’t know what are your expectations… on how the writing should be…

Well, given that I’m from Germany and English is not my first language, and also given that I’m neither very good at it nor do I have a PR team, I would expect writing at least on my level, I guess?

But here’s the thing, take a look at Google or MS posts about sustainably and being green, and you’ll realize, truly realize how one could say so much without saying anything… this wall of text that you’re talking about is full of insights

And these companies are the benchmark? I mean, can’t we expect more from a nonprofit? There are some insights, yes, but they’re drowning in the wall of text.

Just as an insight for you: a news article is supposed to increase in detail level from top to bottom. The headline shows the rough topic, subtitle slightly expands on that, the first paragraphs tell the actual story, the next paragraphs provide more and more context. The idea is, that a reader can stop reading if she feels like there’s been enough context.

Look at the article here and ask yourself if it fits this description.

Why would I not say that?

Clearly they can’t get their point across. And I don’t know, why people down vote me for that.

KDE starts a new initiative, and does so by creating a giant wall of text that says very little about the initiative itself. So little in fact, that people here obviously don’t understand what they’re actually trying to do. That is bad communication. Simple as that. And given that this is not a random blog post, but a press statement, I’m pretty sure a bunch of people read it before publishing it.

I’m not sure, if you’re involved with the project, but if so: you really need to work on your communication.

You want hardware to last longer by providing software for it. That’s it. Great goal, but you don’t need half a bachelor’s thesis for that, and you also don’t need to tiptoe around the point.

Without fail, every Linux installation I had destroyed itself after a while.

Be it a full boot partition, some weird driver compatibility, etc, etc.

My Windows installations (granted, all work laptops) never destroyed themselves. Yes, some bugs here and there, but it worked well enough for home usage. You can’t discount that.

… And then something happens and they want you to install Windows again.

As much as I like Linux, compared to Windows and Mac OS it’s high maintenance. Once in a while, things will bork themselves. And you need to have at least a rough understanding of what’s happening to fix it.

Also (and that’s not a Linux problem per se) people seem to think if Windows breaks, MS or they themselves are at fault, if Linux breaks, that weird nerd and his hacker stuff are at fault.

What else am I missing?

The fact that 90% of people don’t give a shit about ads, privacy or their operating system in general. They want a machine to open a browser, that’s it. If Windows comes pre-installed, they’ll use Windows.

The only realistic chance we’ve got is that MS shoots itself in the foot once more by all that Recall crap and businesses drop Windows. But that’s a long shot.

Rather the wrong ones.

95% seem to be essentially professional box tickers. They don’t care about security, but only about process compliance. As long as the scanner finds no CVEs, the app is secure.

I want people who actually know, how I can improve my code. I’m pretty sure I screwed up security stuff, but will never know.

I might add to the German column:

Wochendämmerung

Lage der Nation

Übermedien

Piratensender Powerplay

UKW

It could happen here is very hit or miss, unfortunately. For me personally, about 70% is garbage, the rest is pretty good.

Their resident middle east anchor woman (Shirin?) and Andrew are just completely unlistenable to me, simply because of their voices. And there’s a lot of USA internal politics, which just isn’t all that interesting to me.

If hardware/budget allow it, you might want to throw in a cheap SSD and some more RAM. Something like 50€ could greatly improve usability.

Well, I would say it absolutely is possible, but it costs money directly, up front and in an accountable manner. Security incidents vanish in the fog of responsibility diffusion and nobody specifically can be blamed. That means for each individual responsible party, it is the rational choice to do just enough not to be blamed, pull off theater to seem engaged, but avoid anything that would actually cost money.

So, you’re kind of right, but for the wrong reasons. It’s a systemic issue, that almost inevitably happens in large organizations, but at the root is not inherent complexity, but a perverse incentive structure.

The reality is: security is often non-existent in larger corporations. It’s all about optics and insurance. Hardly any project I’ve been involved with actually did something for security. It’s a cobbled together mess with just enough security theater to not be legally liable. That’s it.

Case in point: I know of a database that holds data for pretty much all adult persons in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and some people from surrounding countries. The root password contains the company’s name and the year the DB was initially set up.

500nits according to the store.

Ok, now I have to assume you’re trolling.

Look at my comments above, that they’re not the first is exactly my point. They re-invent things instead of investing a tenth of the effort in the existing solution and their solutions are worse.

And please don’t come with that corporate apologetics. You make it seem like a corporation never makes any errors whatsoever and even the stupidest error isn’t just stupidity, but corporate genius we mere mortals just don’t understand. That’s not the case. Canonical simply is not very good at this.

Yes, maybe they do have some products that do work and are actually better than the competition, but again, actually read my comments and you’ll see that I already covered that.

Seriously, are you paid by them?

You obviously don’t understand my point. If we want to flex, I have a combined CS/business degree, so I do understand the system quite well.

What canonical is doing is essentially a make or buy decision. Make our own solution or “buy” an existing one. Since in the foss world buying is almost free, you have to have good reasons to invest quite a lot of money into developing your own solution. Good reasons would be better technology, better integration into the existing ecosystem, lower costs, etc - or vendor lock-in.

Canonicals solutions are never better than what the community already agreed upon. They are not cheaper for Canonical, since they have to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They don’t integrate better, since the rest of the system is more or less vanilla Linux.

So the only remaining rationale would be vendor lock-in. Canonical wants its customers to build upon their products so that it can retain those customers easier. This might actually be a valid reason for snap. Canonical has kind of cornered the market here, but it’s definitely not true for Mir, Unity, etc. Those were doomed from the start and a huge waste of money.

You see, wasting money is not productive. It’s kind of the opposite.

They “think” that, but it’s definitely not the case.

Apart from the obvious vendor lock-in, their solutions were never the better approach from a technical or usability standpoint. Snaps aren’t that great, their Wayland competitor wasn’t particularly good, Unity was divisive. So they put tons of work into bad solutions for problems that have been solved elsewhere and better. Not the smartest business move.

I still need a cable modem. And as far as I know, none of the ones that can be used with my provider support any other OS.

Or, I keep using my Fritzbox, which is a single device and does everything I want.

As far as I know, there is no cable modem/router integrated device.

What’s the deal with / as tmpfs about? I’m so trying to understand nixos.

Then you’re still looking at a mess of devices and a relatively power hungry system plus you still have your ISPs modem

I need my Internet for work, so I just replaced my ISPs modem with a FritzBox, which is not ideal, but serves me well, gets updates for quite a while and works pretty much always.

Dell Precision, HP Probook for example. There are probably more, but these are the ones that I know of.

Honestly, the value proposition of old business computers is almost unbeatable.

Yes, it’s not the most recent hardware, but decent enough, especially the chonky boi ThinkPads are very easy to repair/upgrade and built like tanks (though only Russian ones, they barely withstand an RPG hit, which is a shame).

How about Chromebooks?

You can put Linux on most of them and they’re perfectly capable of (even designed for) running Chrome and Firefox.