...And the fact that the PET came earlier than all the 40-column computers that popularized computing in the 1980s.
Of course, Commodore could have done some things better. Hell, the number of things Commodore did wrong in the 1970/80/90s is just not bigger because they dug a bottomless pit and jumped in it. But the products they had were absolutely revolutionary.

I have used Zoom via the web client for Linux on ARM. I never liked Zoom (I prefer WebRTC implementations)... But it works reliably enough for my standards.

As for the programs open, yes. Its older sibling, the C630, can do it.

But not with external monitors: The device tree does not yet have support for displayport-over-USB-C. It should not be too complex... but it requires somebody knowledgeable to put more effort into it :-(

I am now going back to in-person teaching at the university, and am carrying along a Raspberry, to connect to it via Ethernet, using VNC, so I can beam my slides to the students :-(

I don't expect Linux support to appear overnight, but it will land. And when it does, I am sure it will show the same way support for the C630 did: In AArch64-laptops. Most patches have been upstreamed, and mainline support is almost to the level of the project's. When I got my laptop, the latest supported kernel was 5.10; I'm now running 5.16, compiled at most a couple of weeks after upstream released.

Right. The price is deceptive, and it will kill this model. When Lenovo offered the C630 I currently own, it was at half this crazy price; I bought it for US$300 two years later, and it is a very pleasant laptop to work on. But now Apple sells expensive ARM laptops, so Lenovo will try to get some easy machines sold for much and delivering too little.

My main laptop is a Lenovo C630 (ARM Snapdragon, built in 2018).
I didn't use much Windows 10, but I did give it a spin -- and it feels snappy and responsive. Of course, I dont have any Windows programs, and I'm sure I'd have hated it after a couple of days. But I downloaded a couple of free programs to get my Linux install started (i.e. putty)... and they worked transparently.
It was funny to me to find that the emphasis was all in the battery life -- and the fact that the architecture was different was almost completely hidden. But yes, end users... well, they just don't care! They just bought an always-on laptop with long battery life. Why do they care whether the instruction set is RISC?
As for Linux usage -- it shines for interactive work, it feels always quick and responsive, *but* it does lack kernel support for many quite-basic bits (i.e. audio or external monitor support). It is _slow_ to compile. But that's, after all, expected.
FWIW, I *love* my ARM laptop.

I have (FWIW, I'm typing this on) a Snapdragon 855-based laptop, the Lenovo Yoga C630. I cannot say that installing Linux was as easy as doing so on x86; I did have to refer to the AArch64-laptops repository for a modified version of debian-installer, and copy some firmware bits off the Windows partition.
But all in all, the install was quite easy, and other than a few quirks I had to go through, I am as happy as can be. Yes, there is still some missing hardware support (i.e. for external HDMI via the USB-C port), but the aarch64-laptops IRC channel is top-notch and super friendly. This computer has become my main laptop; I'm just keeping my old x86 around because I'll probably go back to in-person classes around February, and not having HDMI support is sadly a tangible possibility.

I remember writing BALANCE.BAS in BASICA (yes, I cut my BASIC teeth on a PC, not on a C64) somewhat over 35 years ago.
Now, are your finances as complicated as they were back then?

My father used to take me on Friday nights to the university so I could use the computer, back in 1983. Yes, the computer -- there were a couple of PCs around, but everybody prefered using the mincomputer (a Foonly F2) in the terminal room. I was eight years old.
He taught me how to write in Emacs. What did I write back then? TeX, of course. No, not LaTeX, as Leslie Lamport had not yet published it -- It was just TeX, installed by Donald Knuth in person, on his visit to Mexico in 1977.
Cue to 2021. 38 years later, four published books, several articles, and countless not-published things later... My tools of the day-to-day trade are still TeX (well, LaTeX) and Emacs.

Just try and enable a traslucent background in a terminal, and I'll point the rest of the people at somebody who is not used to working on a terminal.

Sure, it looks kewl, but it is not useful. And, in many ways... it gets in the way of work.

[Citation needed]

(and yes, I've been to what you'd call "Soviet-installed dictatorships". Only that Cuba and Nicaragua were not Soviet-installed, but aligned to Soviets after they fought and won their revolutions.)

But anyway, do you think the right-wing dictatorships required papers just to prove who you are? Very far from the case.

Well, besides the obvious Nazi - Fascist - Falangist systems of the 1930s... I happen to be most familiar with the USA-instated dictatorships we had in Latin America during the 1960s-1970s-1980s (i.e. Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay). Prevalence of an always-with-you national ID is very, very high in those societies to date. Thank the militar regimes!

Every time when a story about USA student loans pops up on Slashdot, I play back the WTF tape. How can a country not invest in its higher education? How come it has to be funded by the kids themselves? How come you have to start looking for a job with a debt amounting *years* of salary? It just does not make sense.
I live in Mexico. Yes, Latin America is not known for its great study levels or highest-in-the-world quality... but still, I am proud to be a university worker for >17 years already. I am a Computer Engineering teacher. The university –most universities, and all of the best universities– is State-run. Do we have our troubles? Hell yes. But students that are admitted don't have to worry about how many years it will take them to pay for their tuition — Professional education is basically for free (some universities do charge, up to US$100 a semester). Postgraduate studies? Most programs will grant you a tuition so you can devote full-time to your studies. I am doing my PhD, and had to explicitly deny this right.
In Europe, I understand, universities (even State-run, which are a majority) do require payment, but it's relatively (to the USA) affordable.
Just thinking about the hoops a young professional has to jump through in order to kickstart their productive life... Makes me sick.

Lets... see! Going over the published statistics,

- 611 ballots were received, but only 609 were MIME-decoded. I have no idea what those two ballots had

- From those 609, only 474 passed the signature and LDAP checks, this means, were from valid, identified Debian people

- From those 474, 11 were bad ballots -- We are asked to preserve a given format for devotee to parse, 11 people didn't. There were 463 votes tallied, and 463 acks created.

- (611 ballots received + 11 bad ballots)=622. 463 acks were created. So, 148 rejects sent.

- I am not sure of the acks sent/unsent bit, but I think it's because Devotee works with gpg v1, so it does not send acks to people with elliptic curve-based gpg key. I cannot assure this, but IIRC that's what happened

- There were 420 unique voters. And where is the 43 figure between votes tallied and unique voters? It is not published. Every developer can (and should, given how close this election was!) check their vote to be correctly tallied.

Also -- we are not a country, we are a project. There is a high trust on Kurt, the project secretary.

We discussed whether the vote could be held anonymously, but it would go against the Debian constitution, particularly given the vote was started _before_ that discussion arised. So who voted which way is public.