It’s amazing how quickly they get it.

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

dye a hero

Yes… but what colour?

The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Army_(United_States) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Army

So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.

Yeah I see it (as a not American looking in from outside the country). Every time I visit the USA, the changes in things are more and more visible.

There’s probably not going to be a civil war.

So… there’s still a chance then…

They manufacture and sell the buses in Canada… There are BYD buses in operation in at least Toronto, Victoria, Longeuil, St. Albert and Grand Prairie (and probably more by now). https://en.byd.com/news/byd-opens-first-canadian-bus-assembly-plant/ If you’re in Montreal, there’s a decent chance you’ll see BYD E6 taxis.

There’s been rumors of the cars being prepped for general sale in Canada… but I can’t find any proof of that right now.

Generally, you use the radio network from mobile phone to cell tower, and then fibre optic to the switches. Sometimes they use microwave line of sight for surface-to-surface connections where fibre doesn’t make sense, or is unviable (terrain, distance, cost, difficulty of laying fibre, etc.). It’s possible that there could be a satellite connection in the process, but unlikely unless you’re on an airplane, a ship, etc.

The GPS on the mobile phone definitely does use satellite (receive only though, no transmit).

It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.

Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?

Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.

Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.

Personal experience on my part. I deleted 13 years of contributions on Reddit. They are ALL back. My account was deleted… but every single comment (that I checked anyway) is still there. I checked after I deleted them… and they were not visible for almost 2 months after I did the pass to delete… now they’re all back.

And if you deleted all your comments… they undeleted everything.

Lol. You’re not a parent are you?

It’s not lazy, it’s being involved as a parent. I teach them. I council them. I explain the good and the bad.

They don’t have unfettered access to the internet either. I carefully limit to what is appropriate to their ages. As they get older and are more able to understand the implications I relax the restrictions.

My kids will survive just fine not playing in an environment that encourages bed behavior.

Roblox is filled with “quality” content like this: https://www.roblox.com/games/8110845141/POOP-WITH-FRIENDS

My kids used to play on Roblox… then they invited me to try it… and I started watching what is going on in there. It’s pretty bad. LOADS of grooming going on… shitty games… games that encourage anti-social behavior… horror games targeting under 5s… now they aren’t allowed to play it anymore.

The company I work for is one of many in the IT world that “gets it” that WFH is an advantage and makes employees happy.

No Windows boxes anywhere. Windows is banned as a base OS (allowed in VMs only). It’s OSX or Linux only. I’m good with that :-) Oh that generous budget was $3000 USD to spend as I wanted on whatever equipment I wanted. Since I already have a desk, chair, monitor etc, I spent almost all of the budget on the laptop :-) It’s a good’un. Hehe

But you’d have to install it yourself in a scenario where you manage your company machine yourself.

I’m permanently remote in my job. When I was hired, I was given a generous budget to buy whatever home office equipment I needed including whatever laptop I wanted. I was free to either buy a MacBook or a PC - if I bought a PC, I was required to wipe the OEM Windows OS and install whatever Linux distro I wanted (which is the choice I went with). I and a LOT of other employees run whatever Linux distro makes us happy. IT tracks the asset number, and that’s it. There’s no spyware…

Linux needs more GUIs for managing complex settings.

openSUSE has YaST which covers almost all complex settings… it’s not perfect, but it tries

I wouldn’t go with Opensuse or Fedora for gaming.

Why? I use openSUSE Tumbleweed for gaming and it’s been rock solid. Seriously, I’ve never really had any issues. It has its quirks, but they are easily “fixed” by adding Packman and the Nvidia repos… and running an update.

I’ve tried Ubuntu multiple times and it was always a shitshow disaster. Mint was OK-ish, but had Ubuntu-related silliness.