Why is this downvoted? If it’s true it’s a valid criticism, and if it’s false, I couldn’t find a mention of anonymity either.

Well, he didn’t even buy the original (I guess it has spoiled by then), but a DIY replica and a certificate.

Wary reader, learn from my cautionary tale

I’m not sure what to learn exactly. I don’t get what went wrong or why, just that the files hit deleted somehow…

I guess technically that makes them “not in Ukraine”, but it is the same war in the end. At least for me that’s the important part, not where exactly on the front line they are.

Well, NK and Russia have a defense treaty which obliges NK to sent military assistance to Kursk. So if they aren’t, they’re breaking their obligations.

My impression from the article was, The Onion bid contained both a monetary sum, and partial debt relief. The total value then - the sum + the debt relief - was higher, and that’s how it won. So, it wasn’t just the victims’ backing weighing in, they actually put money on it.

Such a cute kitty snail! Can you post just the picture?

I’m sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort…

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn’t do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

My bet is, it’ll be Saturday that goes, finally achieving a 6-day work week.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

Technically, “enforced pay it forward” is called credit. Your debt would then be “the amount you still have to pay forward”.

Of course, this defeats both the spirit and the purpose of a pay it forward scheme.

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

:D.

Fixed

Indeed. Linux audio also allows control characters like backspace to be part of a file name (though it is harder to make such file as you can’t just type the name). Which is just horrible.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

It’s certainly good, I’m not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it’s good, and helpful - but not really a “donation” to winehq.

I guess it’s simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they’ve decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that ‘donation’ is a bit pushing it

I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.