You can pry Firefox from my cold dead hands slumped over a GNU/Linux desktop.

Well, Chimborazo in Ecuador is the widest from the centre of the earth due to the elliptical nature of the equator.

Let's not girth-shame the Andes.

Bro, is that Icelandic?

or some sort of Leibnician musical scale?

The kickstart Shuttleworth did was the free CD mailout to most anywhere on the planet when much of the world was still on dialup or ADSL. Prior to that, local companies with a CD burner would charge $10 or so to mail out a CD in a padded envelope.

Some missteps along the way, notably trying to compete with Red Hat and Gnome with Unity and launching a phone platform without a sustainable business model (Kudos to the UB Touch community for keeping that dream going).

But they seem to be finding their niche in the cloud by pairing with the evil empire, MS. :) Management at the company I work for went with Ubuntu hosted in Azure, ha ha the worst of both worlds. But no, it ain't too shabby with 24/7 support and certainly not like the Ballmer era.

I have since migrated upstream to using Debian for personal use but Ubuntu was part of that journey. Mainly because I have no need in the articles' summary of snap or flatpak as an alternative to the native .deb and the Debian packages are sufficient for my needs without a 'spin' such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint or whatever the current flavour of the month derivative is.

I take your point, language models on embedded devices, I am sceptical on battery life, privacy concerns aside.

To me it's a signal to skip Android 15 series phones. Wait a year and the budget Pixel will have this as a standard feature.

I do like how the investigative officer's rank is a "major general", it's like they've just mashed two Latin adjectives together to sound vaguely important.

Having watched far too many episodes of the The X-Files, my advice would be to trust no one. I want to believe but Alex Krycek and the cigarette smoking man are clearly withholding information. :)

This is why I loathe installing apps.

Deliberately mangling the mobile experience so they can install unsolicited bloatware on your handset? No thank you.

A web forum shouldn't require an app.

Still on XFCE... It works on low end hardware and doesn't get in the way.

I gave Wayfire a try recently. As a compositor it works well enough but as a desktop environment it would need some polish.

So I'm confident that if xfwm4 adopted a wlroots-based solution as a drop-in replacement then it would be relatively mature enough.

Perhaps the solution is to accept only handwritten submissions.

In my day they were called 3 hour exams. No computers, no mobile phones - just pen and paper.

NB: You can still grade them with computers using handwriting recognition.

Well just on the India stat, 'developing' nation and all, I imagine there's an abundance of perfectly good working hardware that doesn't run Windows 11.

(TBH none of my 5 x86 computers, some in various states of disassembly in storage boxes, are supported by 11. Just waiting for MS to release the NPU hardware requirements for Windows 12 Copilot - there will be sure to be oodles of freshly obsoleted equipment to shove Debian on!)

It will be a great day for sci-fi nerds when the GenX members of the faculty retire and Alexander is promoted to Professor.

Well to the extent that corporations engage in the security theatre of 2FA via messages sent to a phone number then RCS might be a better option than SMS.

In reality, there are no open source client implementations of the RCS protocol, if you want to use that feature, you abide by their restrictions.

Forgive me for being naive but they're both legacy connectors.

USB-C was *supposed* to obsolete all of them by carrying multiple protocols including DP and Thunderbolt, no?

Star Trek 4 - human chauvinism to think that these aliens aren't already communicating with the intelligent species on our planet; the whales.

Arrival - Amy Adams deciphers the communication of giant squids.

The aliens are probably debating on their version of Slashdot as to whether they should use their sun's planetary alignments to create a slingshot to send faster than light communications back in time to warn us of our demise and thus avoid WW2 in the first place.

Such an alternative timeline that diverged during the great depression might have its own issues, e.g. the Soviet Union would still today in 2024 control vast chunks of Eurasia but notably not China nor Korea under the thumb of the Japanese empire. The German language would still have prestige in the scientific community, Islamism would never take route because the oil states would still be under the thumb of the western Europeans (England, France, Netherlands), consumer electronics would be manufactured in the Indian colony, which leads us to everything is controlled out of London because the British Empire never fell. Europe never unifies - Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania and Greece are still monarchies (plus Iran) while Spain is still a republic because the civil war peters out without the support of Germany and Italy that occurred in our own timeline. We're all using ARM64 because the biggest computer company in the world is Acorn Computers. On the upside, the USA might still have an African American president, an 81 year old Jimi Hendrix. And intellectuals of Warsaw and Thessaloniki are still discussing the possibility of creating a community in the holy land and reviving the Hebrew language because thankfully, the Jews of Europe are still living their best lives.

But we're still in this current timeline because those discussions on alien Slashdot are still debating their version of the Prime Directive.

Why would a video streaming service need to go through an application store in the first place?

Surely any self-respecting European would just pin a PWA to their home screen...