Plenty of people are ok with ads and such, and that’s fine. People who don’t want that may need to pay for the infrastructure of having an alternative platform. It all comes down to what you value more, and there’s no inherently right or wrong answer.

Time for nethack.

If the money is freely given as a donation, then I’m with you. If lack of money is what is stopping someone from making things that others are willing to pay to see more of, then sure. But if the only way to do it is to have ads or selling our data etc, then I don’t want that.

I’d rather have one unix surrealism than a thousand influencers with lots of followers. These days, I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way. If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?

The way I understand it is that the security team supports releases for 5 years. If you are running an older version of ubuntu than that and want security backports, you need to get the extended support. The difference in Debian is that when a release is too old, the security team simply doesn’t backport security fixes. You can pay someone to do it, but it’s not a part of what Debian as a project does.

Yes. You can get it with proton too, but you need your own domain for that iirc.

You also get SMTP with posteo, if that is important to you.

Aha! I did not know that.

It’s a fictional and real religion from a book called the illuminatus trilogy.

That card game isn’t called that anymore, but 20 years ago it was the standard name for a well-known card game.

The current government promised they would be “tough on crime” but have been largely unsuccessful in reducing gang related criminality. Now they are trying to find new tools to get to the leaders of those gangs. Sadly, they don’t understand technology.

Exactly, we both get what we want, everyone is happy. I’m just saying that it’s important for both of us to have the relevant information so we can make our choices. Which this app provides. So that’s good.

As long as there is transparency, users can choose. Personally, I would rather not use a service at all than have ads or tracking.

Penultimate? Which one is the ultimate then?

The follow up question then is, how do we deal with that as a species? If we assume that humans have tribalistic tendencies, I don’t want to say inherent, but, deeply rooted? Can education and external pressure make it go away? Can we direct it into something else? It seems like sports teams with their fans is an outlet at least preferable to war, for example.

How did it go? I use ed once in a while, but honestly just for fun, I wish I had time to learn it better.

I have a cycle that goes like this:

1. I just want a system that works. (Fedora)
2. The UNIX philosophy is cool. (OpenBSD)

Repeat every 6 months or so. I’m never happy with my current system.

I wonder how much is philosophy and how much is not wanting legal troubles. Those things aren’t contradicting of course.

I am also on team old thinkpads. What I use computers for doesn’t require recent hardware.

That was an interesting read. I am even more confused about the community part. When Debian switched to systemd it was a very… lively public discussion with lots of people stating their opinions. It seems to me like the opensuse world is different.