Does anyone besides Leannart Poettering think Linux's current home management is broken? Really?

Every time this man's name comes up, there's exactly one thought that comes to my mind: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. He keeps 'fixing' things anyway and I have, for all practical purposes, been driven away from Linux in significant part because the distributions keep buying into it instead of fixing things that are actually broken, like printing.

I guess my question about this reaches back to the incorporation of SELinux in the kernel and in many distributions: when the NSA, along with many three-letter agencies, is the preeminent threat to personal privacy in what Privacy International has labeled an endemic surveillance society (yes, that's the U.S.), how can it make any sense to rely on the NSA for security advice?

The argument I've seen in the past essentially comes to seeing the NSA as not a monolithic organization, that there there are pieces of it doing legitimate work. But given the pervasiveness of this surveillance, does that really make sense, and more to the point, does it really make sense in the context of this thread?

I notice that the story linked above doesn't substantiate the claim. The only reference appears in a teaser (above the byline) which I'm guessing might have been written by an editor rather than by the reporter. It's a helluva rumor to start--I've been seeing all over the place all day.

Finally, the beginnings of a correct approach to this question.

First, we can't really answer because we don't know specifically where you would be backpacking. The comments about line of sight are, of course, correct, but repeaters may indeed exist where cell sites do not. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) publishes guides to repeaters and a Windows program (which I haven't recently tried under Wine) that can somewhat automate the process.

N4RKY

It is true that the Skype client works great with ALSA. At least on my laptops, however, pulseaudio removes the ability to configure audio devices within Skype. Skype's audio configuration allows you to configure distinct ring, audio, and microphone devices. I'll probably get flamed by pulseaudio advocates, but getting pulseaudio to configure any audio devices appears to me to be more in the realm of magic than actual function (which is why I now routinely uninstall pulseaudio).

I'll agree with the open software advocates on one point though: I'm basically looking to phase out Skype and use Twinkle more. As far as I've heard, Skype still hasn't made their code available even for a security audit and still hasn't satisfactorily answered questions about any possible back doors for three-letter government agencies.