>"All I got from that is Plato was such a prick that he needed a slave to play him music."

Then you missed the point, completely. I came to look at comments only just to validate what I was *sure* to be the case- that the first comments would be about slavery. So predictable.

Slavery was common across essentially all cultures and all areas. Most probably every one of us had many members being slaves in our family trees.

>"In a historical context, were I the slave girl, I would have punch the guy right in the face."

You have absolutely no idea what you would have done in "historical context." All you can do is try to do is to constrain your CURRENT moral context/experience and examine the entire societal conditions at the time.

Would I rather have lived back then? Hell no. We have so much to be thankful for now. And we should be amazed we even survived, much less prospered, despite the unbelievable challenges and conditions our ancestors had to endure.

>"Snap or Flatpak , they are all the same buggy"

It isn't just buggy, they are HUGE and COMPLICATED. Some of them even have their own dependency hells, and updates are much slower and riskier. And due to those complication, it makes customizing and maintaining stuff a lot more of a pain.

No distro should be dependent on containers for anything. It is a nice option to have if you need something unusual or you are running an older distro and need a newer package. But forcing them is really awful.

>"I kind of wish Mandrake was still around, Mageia is a good tribute"

I couldn't agree more. I used Mandrake for many years, then Mandriva, then Mageia. Best KDE distros ever. Well-configured, pretty, great management tools. But I left Mageia for Mint on my home systems because development continued to slow and mindshare had shrunk enough that it was too painful to get things I needed when it wasn't in their repos.

As for desktop, when I left Mageia for Mint, I decided to force myself to try Cinnamon. I thought for sure I would end up installing KDE/Plasma a few days or weeks later. Nope, it is actually good enough for what I need. I was surprised.

>"If Ubuntu shut down, there'd be no Mint."

Wrong
https://linuxmint.com/download...

>"if Debian shut down there'd be no Ubuntu."

If Debian shut down, a crap-load of distros would disappear.

https://wiki.debian.org/Deriva...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I, too, am also using Alma. Seems we are much alike.

But I think Redhat is going to continue to get more aggressive. Plus there are fewer and fewer supported packages. One of my main uses is an application server (yes, for actual thin clients) and that can be difficult at time with *EL, since it is much harder to find desktop apps. Sometimes I steal from [old] Fedora. Sometimes I compile myself. The destruction of X is particularly threatening and annoying.

Exactly my thoughts. For desktop, Mint is great. But I am struggling with what to use on servers now that I refuse to use *EL. Debian stable isn't updated long enough. No experience with SELS. That leaves just Ubuntu. And, like you, I think they are headed down a bad path like RedHat, they just don't have enough leverage yet.

Yep. Install Mint. Problems gone. No forced Snap, actual native packages for all the important stuff, plus support for Flatpak (if you really want those huge/complex containers).

And the next Mint, based on 24.04 should be out in a few months, as well. Plus, every in-place upgrade I have done has been flawless, so far...

LOL, I still load and use Audacious on EVERY system I have. And with the "Refugee" skin :)

It JUST WORKS. I don't want a database or "auto scanning" or anything else complicated and annoying. All my music is local and I point Audacious at it and use random and I am happy.

>"Back From the Dead: Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released "

It should stay dead. All of us moved over to Clementine when Amarok design went "stupid."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Tab Session Manager has the ability to automatically "remember" all tab sets that have been opened and edit/restore previous points in time. Although it can't sort.

Still, that person needs to understand the concept of bookmarks :)

I am unconcerned about default search settings - that can be changed to DDG.

I am far more concerned about things where there is no option at all to disable. Windows 11 doesn't allow turning off telemetry, for example, only turning it down. Actually, Microsoft in general is far more of a threat than Google/Alphabet is to privacy. All of Windows 11 is spyware. They bought Github and trained their LLMs on GPLed code and use it to produce derivative works without having the resultant code be GPLed. They bundle their products together, taking advantage of their monopoly status in the OS area to push dominance in other areas. Why does Windows 11 need a key shortcut to launch LinkedIn? Oh, Microsoft does. Why is it near impossible to remove OneDrive? Why does Office increasingly push all of your documents into the cloud, where they can violate your privacy? We know the answers to these questions, but I guess the DoJ is happier now with 2024 Microsoft than they were with 90s Microsoft, even though what they are doing is much worse, now that Microsoft is doing what they were supposed to do all along - bribe politicians with campaign donations.

>"The problem is "free for non-commercial use" doesn't define "commercial use" in any context."

Well, that isn't part of his proposal.

But since you mentioned it, I have never been that much of a fan of the terms "non-commercial use" because, like you said, they are rarely well defined and can lead to confusion. Plus, it tends to ignore non-profits, not-for-profit, and charitable organizations, which might be considered "commercial use" and yet maybe shouldn't be.

> "So, in my ideal world, we'd have an OS entirely without SUID"

In *his* ideal world, he would have an OS with every service, even kernel functions, running under systemd... SystemdOS.

>"I use one instance of a piece of software covered by this license - why would that software warrant 1% (or any other percentage?) of revenue of the product?"

+1

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read it. Just because you used, for example, gzip, along with millions of lines of custom (non-open code), 1% might not be fair at all. And especially if that fee is based on TOTAL revenue. Or is this revenue on just that particular product (because they may sell many)? And why on revenue and not profit? What if they aren't making any profit? What if they are, themselves, a non-profit company?

If anything, it would need to be on from-profit only companies, and on profit (not revenue) and only based on the percent of how much and how important the FOSS contribution was to the overall project. But how in the world could anyone compute that?

>"Note that Wikipedia is a private organization with its own rules, "

True. Now imagine how much even worse sites like this would be with the government stepping in to declare what is "truth" or not. Well, we don't have to imagine it, Russia is a perfect example.

>"and happens to be leftist-liberal-oriented"

Leftist, yes.

Liberal, not really. True [classical] liberals would welcome and expose all sides of arguments and having such arguments. That no longer really occurs on Wikipedia. Just about every article I see has a huge left-slant in content and wording any any attempt at neutral wording or balance is immediately reverted and then cloaked in a careful network of so-called "reliable" sources which all just feed off each other.

>in MAGA parlance

In any parlance. So-called "MAGA" was a reaction to leftism, not the cause of it. I, for one, would be glad to be rid of both.

>"Roku is considering how to get video ads embedded into the home page as well"

At that point, I will probably look for a different device or try to find a way to block it. I specifically chose to buy Rokus because they are ubiquitous and not annoying. Even shelled out for their top-of-the-line models.

I don't care much about a static image. But I simply can't stand videos or motion, of any type, in my field of view when I am trying to focus on something. I know it is probably something wrong with me, but I can't be alone. I wish I could throw this affliction at anyone designing stuff like that so they could get a taste of the hell.