It won't make too much of a difference here, the six month minor releases are updates to the Mint-specific features like Cinnamon. It is built on top of Ubuntu LTS and still uses those packages for most things.

The major releases are big updates, they move between Ubuntu LTS base versions. Those are every two years. They waste a lot of time with the minor version releases they do. On Mint the minor releases are mostly Cinnamon feature updates. They set up a brand new repo, compile packages for it even if they haven't changed, and do a whole release management things along with complicated "Update Your System" functionality that ends up mirroring a lot of the work they'd need to do for a major release.

LMDE does not do it this way and seems much more manageable. The Mint parts are essentially rolling release, no point releases.

Oh, and they do the complex upgrade thing because the repository for each point release is completely separate. As far as apt is concerned you are updating "zara" packages to "zena" packages even if they are the same. This doesn't affect the whole system, since the Ubuntu stuff stays the same, but adds complexity.

It's another piece that doesn't happen in LMDE. It's all "gigi".

The base is based on Ubuntu LTS, the point releases are primarily larger upgrades of the desktop environment and some of the associated programs. When you change from 22.1 to 22.2, some things will look different.

On LMDE, they don't do point releases - they use Debian Stable and just do the desktop updates periodically without all the fuss. I wonder if they're going to move closer to that model for everything. It would make sense.

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

Thanks.

Did you forget about Sidekick? Microsoft bought a trendy phone and then it died it because some manager thought they didn't need to backup the SAN before upgrading the drive firmware. You can read the story here and here.

Not necessarily. Cellular problems are often a back-haul issue and that is something Starlink does much better at. The flip side, is that I would not want to use a Starlink in even a moderately dense area.

They might have cell service, but it is often a weak signal that is then sent by microwave from tower to tower and those links often don't have enough bandwidth for anything useful.

I have some friends who lived on a property that was only 10 mins from the nearest town of 83 000 people and the reception was so bad there that they had to go by satellite dish which had latency so bad that they could not video conference. They signed on as soon as there was a Starlink beta program in their area and I heard from them that getting StarLink was a life changer even with the early glitches.

Why should Netflix care if you are actually watching it or not? You pay for a subscription and for whatever reason that was the content you played. Netflix will therefore keep playing that content. When it comes to revenue, it just doesn't matter what you do with the content.

At any rate, whatever flaws there are in the stats, they are far more accurate than TV viewership numbers.