Have there been problems since 25.10 released? Real question. I have not seen those articles. I thought it had gone well.

Yes you can.

Regardless of who you owe it to, a lot of it has a date that it needs to be paid back. The normal process is that governments reborrow to pay off old debt. But if nobody will lend it to you, you are fucked.

Of course, what happens first is that they will lend it to you but for much higher interest. So, you have to borrow even more to pay that. And then your interest goes up again. Repeat.

But at some point, nobody will lend it to you.

“Printing money” just means borrowing it from yourself. It just crashes the currency.

The US has been somewhat immune to all of this because it is a reserve currency and “the safest economy”. But it is doing its best to change both those things.

I have had multiple systems with no updates for a year.

The biggest pain is always that the keyring is out of date and it does not want to install packages signed with newer keys. Once you have dealt with that once or twice, it is quick and easy to resolve and the rest of the update generally just works.

I agree with you completely. I am sure you deal with these minor issues quickly and barely notice them half the time.

But users of other distros would find it intolerable to have to deal with these small tweaks on any given day. “My computer is a tool” they will say and “it just needs to work”.

Fair enough. But then they turn around and fight bugs and limitations that were solved for Arch users months or even years ago.

And they fight to install software not in the repos, often making their overall system less reliable in the process.

I prefer the stability of Arch over the stability of Debian thank you.

The problem is that “stable” means two different things in Linux.

It can mean “reliable” as in it does not crash. I think that is what most of us think of.

However, It more often mean “static” or “unchanging”.

Take Debian Stable. It is “stable” because the software versions rarely change outside of security updates. This does not mean it does not crash. It does not mean it does not have bugs. It means you can depend on it to behave tomorrow like it does today. Design problem not the software installed? They are not getting fixed. As an example, you will see that the people saying Wayland does not work are almost always Debian users because they are using software from 2 - 3 years ago. Debian 13 has improved things but the NVIDIA drivers are from 2 years ago even now. And if KDE has fixed a lot of bugs, that does not mean Debian gets those updates.

Arch on the other hand updates its packages constantly to the latest to very recent versions. The behaviour of your Arch system changes all the time as new versions of software are installed. You may like this or you may not but this is “unstable” using Debian’s definition.

From the point of view of robustness, Arch users often have a better experience than Debian users. Things more often “just work” due either to new features or because issues have been resolved in recent versions. Rapidly developing software, let’s take Wayland or NVIDIA again, will often work dramatically better on Arch. However, every update has the potential to break something. And so, on Arch, you are certainly more likely to encounter breakage. Often these problems are very short-lived with fixes appearing quickly. This means that, even if something did break, many Arch users will not even know.

Anyway, this is my take Arch vs Debian:

• Arch is more “robust” (fewer problems on a typical day)
• Arch is very reliable but less reliable than Debian (updates rarely break but they can)
• Arch behaviour changes much more often (more features sooner but also more learning required and occasionally features lost or “get worse”)

So, it all depends on what we mean by stable

Mint has two kernels: a “stable” one and a “hardware enhanced” one (HWE). The HWE kernel is newer to improve support for newer hardware.

Many distros allow you to pick from multiple kernels.

Yes, all Linux kernels come from kernel.org

That said, kernel.org maintains not only a latest but also multiple “stable” kernels that maintained versions of previous kernels. There are usually about a half-dozen kernel versions to choose from.

One you have code from kernel.org, you can change the configuration to get kernels with slightly different capabilities and strengths.

Finally, you can patch the code you get from kernel.org to add or remove whatever you want. For example, you may add in filesystem support or drivers missing in the mainline kernel.

So, in the end, any given Linux distro may have a Linux kernel slightly different from what other distros use. You can probably run any Linux distro on the kernel from any other Linux distro though. In fact, this is what you are doing when you run something like Docker or Kubernetes.

Governments do not have to be involved in projects to pass laws that impact them.

I would argue greater EU participation in FOSS would improve the situation. One, the number of people in the government that understand how FOSS works may increase and frankly ignorance is often the problem. Second, if lawmakers themselves or the things they care about rely on FOSS, they will be much less likely to kick the legs out from under it.

From a code perspective, the risk is low. If it is just that they add back doors (not because it is the law), we simply create versions without those back doors and use that instead.

I do not think that developers have any greater insight into social or legal issues than you do.

I still use VirtualBox but a version built to work with KVM.

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

It does not need a kernel module or DKMS because it uses KVM.

Oracle is accused though.

You can use VirtualBox with KVM as well.

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

You are probably not recompiling the kernel but rather just a kernel module (DKMS). Still annoying.

You do not need a kernel module for the version above as it KVM is already in the kernel. That is why QEMU does not need a kernel module either.

I seem to disagree with almost everybody here.

Canada is a natural place to locate huge data centres because it is cold. A huge expense for these data centres is cooling. They need less cooling in northern climates. They can be air cooled instead of liquid cooled. This means northern data centres are not only less expensive to operate but less expensive to build and also quite a lot simpler which means more reliable.

Let me pause here and say something to the environmentalists. They are going to build these data centres. Would you rather they build them somewhere hot where they need to consume far more energy? Why exactly? I do not understand that logic. And it is not just power. Water consumption is a massive problem in hotter climates as well? If we want to help the earth, build these in the north.

BC is a source of inexpensive renewable energy and plentiful water. It is the reason we have an aluminum industry even though we do not have the ore.

Finally, we have A LOT of space. We could have the worlds biggest data center and nobody would even know it was there.

So northern BC is an attractive place to build data centres.

Data centres are not huge job creators but they have other spinoff benefits.

But the real reason to want them is precisely that they demand so much electricity. Electricity is a product. That is taxable. We should build out our renewable energy capacity and sell it to them. We do not have to subsidize the electricity to be an attractive location (see above). We can make money.

We understand that money underlies all our other priorities right? You cannot think of something you would like funded?

And we could require or advantage the use of Canadian technology (which this demand could advance). Doesn’t Tenstorrent make their LLM cards in Quebec? Their R&D Center is in Toronto. Having big customers in Canada could bring more of that North.

And we should really have sovereign infrastructure to boot. I for one do not want all this information being shipped, processed, and managed abroad. We should keep it here.

This post is too long to have this argument but LLMs are also critical to a functioning economy and basic scientific research moving forward. People who think AI means “shitty chat bots” have no idea what they are talking about. Medical science has already been massively advanced as an example. We do not want these discoveries coming out of UBC?

Honestly, I just don’t get this thread at all. But if this is what people think, I guess it makes sense for the government to feed off that.

But this seems like seems like it is really about mining and natural gas. Hard to argue that makes this decision pro-climate. I mean, if you want to sell more natural gas, I am sure natural gas electricity generation for power hungry data centers is a good plan for that. Win win?

But let me sneak in that I certainly do not want to see rates go up for electricity in BC. I just don’t see why it has to. Increase our capacity. Charge the data centers for what the use. If anything, that will allow us to move to more renewable sources overall which should actually bring rates down for everybody.

Have not seen suggested alternatives?

Dinit? OpenRC? Runit? S6? SysVinit? InitWare?

Not many seem to know the last one.

https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare

There are more.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Are you aware that Red Hat alone makes billions of dollars per year off Linux?

I know you are pointing out the irony.

However, the US associates kings with tyrants as that was the basis for the US revolution but Canada does not.

Canadians do not learn about a point in Canadian history where the tyranny of the throne was a problem. In modern times, the monarchy has mostly been viewed favourably. In the fight against modern tyrants (eg. Donald Trump), the English crown is seen as an ally. Canada invites the King to speak on behalf of the Canadian government (throne speech).

So Canada has no problem with kings. Canada takes issue with tyranny though. So there is no “dissonance” as your other comment implies.

In the US, King George III is remembered as a tyrant that the US successfully defeated and declared independence from in 1776.

When Canadians think of the same period in history (the reign of King George III), they think “that is when we successfully fought off the Americans and burned down the White House.”

Those are two pretty different perspectives.

Ironically, the modern US is mostly positive about the Brittish monarchy. Princess Diana was loved in the US. President Trump is a big fan of Ling Charles.

The FSF approach the microcode is just brain dead.

“If Jesus was here, he would join the front lines”, my incredibly Catholic relative that needs to re-read the sermon on the mount.

Most Wayland compositors don not have the concept of multiple windows being one application. And you cannot always control how and where they appear.

This is not a Wayland complaint. Just pointing out that old GIMP was just not very compatible with the core Design of Wayland.

Depending on what compositor you use, a lot of this has really improved.

Giving entirely new meaning to the term Brexit

The biggest “Linux” skill would be package management. It is one of the biggest differences.

Most of the rest of the advice here stems from desktop environment choice.

It depends on the distro and how it feels about shipping non-free software. Fedora, as an example, still ships without them.

Good thing GIMP went single window before Wayland popularity spiked.