That’s great optics.

Not sure how workable it is to define how you would define “confidential information” without having already viewed the content. But the whole thing isn’t very clever on a technical level anyway. Technically competent people will always find a way around such censorship.

I don’t think Snowden’s endorsement is the positive you think it is. Even if you can ignore treason, he’s a pretty toxic person, by all accounts.

Instead of you installing linux on them, why not make it a project for the kids? Give them a bunch of distros to try and see what they learn.

Linux: 1995, Sco (At work), then got a copy of Slackware on a Cover-CD around 2000. Shortly after found Debian and have been using that at home exclusively for over two decades, now onto desktops and laptops as well as a couple of home servers. (I use EL distros, Ubuntu and OpenSuse at work nowadays)

Longer history: 1981: ZX81. 1985, Dragon 32. 1988 Amstrad CPC. 1991 an XT. 1992 A 386 sx25 with 1mb ram, and so on.

So you’re using Kodi as the OS on the TV itself? Not the Kodi App or Kodi backend?

I’m still struggling to understand how that would work, and still have Jellyfin in the mix - could you please explain exactly what you mean?

No, and never did - but I don’t understand your point. Facebook started only a year after Myspace did.

I think you’re reading more into that than there is.

Why use kodi *and *jellyfin? Jellyfin is its own thing, and without all the awful cruft that comes with Kodi.

It also has native apps for windows, linux and… FireTv.

IRC’s not as popular as in its heyday, and while once it was the main choice for multi-playing gaming chat (Quakenet et al), that’s largely gone elsewhere, but it’s still very good for certain technical channels.

IRC has also proved to be remarkably resistent to commercialisation, mostly due to the users. Even when one of the biggest networks, Freenode, got taken over by a drug addled mentalist Reference who started insisting all all kinds of strange things, the users just upped sticks and created a new network. A bit of fuss, but the important stuff stayed the same and it’s continued much as before as a new network, Librenet.

Others have answered your question - but it may be worth pointing out the obvious - backups. Annoyances such as you describe are much less of a stress if you know you’re protected - not just against accidental erasure, but malicious damage and technical failure.

Some people think it’s a lot of bother to do backups, but it is very easily automated with any of the very good free tools around (backup-manager, someone’s mentioned timeshift, and about a million others). A little time spent planning decent backups now will pay you back one day in spades, it’s a genuine investment of time. And once set up, with some basic monitoring to ensure they’re working and the odd manual check once in a blue moon, you’ll never be in this position again. Linux comes ahead here in that the performance impact from automated backups can be prioritised not to impact your main usage, if the machine isn’t on all the time.

Some of the cheaper Thinkpads are terribly poor quality. Once a by word for ruggedness, now just another name.

Hopefully they escalate it to our MPs, who certainly have plenty to worry about when it comes to not wanting others seeing what they’re doing online and might actually do something to protect privacy for once.

The way I help, as a Sysadmin, is primarily by using foss software in my job and feeding back with bug reports, issues and so on. I’ve raised several hundred issues on Github this way, and try to do them concisely, accurately and with as much relevant information as I can.

“We’re shocked” - nobody.

But companies are crawling everything like mad - I’ve noticed a 400% upturn this year alone in bot traffic on a low traffic web forum and a few sites I host, so much so that I’m having to do some fairly heavy filtering upstream to keep them out. (They don’t resepect robots.txt, obviously)

When bot traffic outnumbers legitimate traffic at least 10x, it makes you wonder why you’re paying to host stuff.

I like this perspective, but it’s the developers who get to choose in the world of FOSS software, and I suspect most would rather develop than package.

Learning the different formats, methods and then committing to re-packaging every update for eternity when you’re often a single person or a very small group is a big ask on top of developing the software too, so they’re going to select a method that’s easiest for them.

So if there was a user-led method, it would still need to appeal to developers as well.

That’s really neat, and in the Debian main repos.

micro looks very impressive. I’m too invested in vi to move away from that, but it’s great to see alternatives, especially those focused on being easy to use (like jed)

Only weird thing from the cap I saw was that you need to edit a json file to change keybindings - doesn’t that go against the ‘easy to use’ edict, or is that something that’s planned to be changed?

This is exactly why I never buy Early Access games. The biggest thrill for me is starting a new game, and if that isn’t as good as it can possibly be, then that opportunity has been wasted.

Sure, it /may/ get better at some undefined point in the future, but there’s just so many games out there that are complete, and won’t require re-visiting at some point because they got better. Once that first play is gone, it’s gone.

And it was a good design - it’s universal (aha) adoption proves that.

Those of us old enough to remember the pain of using 9 and 25 pin serial leads and having to manually set baud rate and protocols, along with LPT and external SCSI and manufacturer specific sockets probably agree this was a problem that needed solving, and USB did do that.

I’ve had to scroll down eight pages to find a post that seems to actually address the good points raised in the article.