Promise free cloud forever. Randomly delete it without recourse once people come to depend on it.

Check: sounds pretty evil.

I am a big SQL fan but not all data has to be relational.

Let’s say I want the GPS coordinates of ten million vehicles every 5 seconds. I have a vehicle id, a timestamp, and coordinates. I do not care if a few writes get lost. Why does this have to be relational?

And perhaps I also record other info that may change from vehicle to vehicle. Perhaps just values that are true if present. DoorOpen, BrakeApplied, LightsOn, LightBarOn, EngineOn, etc. I may only be displaying this data in a UI. I may get different values from every vehicle or even every write. There is no “schema”. I mean, I can have a JSON field or something in my relational table? But this is not exactly relational anymore.

It is because it only “gets out of your way” if you like its choices. If you have different preferences, the strong opinions very much get in your way.

There is a reason GNOME extensions are so popular. And those extensions break all the time.

First, Teams works well on Linux. I have been a desktop Linux user since the 90’s and I use Teams every day (week days at least).

Second, that does not mean they use Teams as their preferred collaboration software.

Even on Windows, you use what the meeting organizer used to schedule the meeting. And if you interact with external companies, you are going to be joining Teams meetings regardless of your preferences.

And, if you had to make a reference you thought everybody would get, Teams or Zoom seem like your best bet.

So making reference to something someone one would say in Teams is not exactly Ronald McDonald admitting he eats at Wendy’s.

If Teams IS their preferred solution, I think the bigger deal may be a European company relying on a US cloud provider, even more than proprietary vs FOSS. At least, that is my view.

I would love a great Open Source video conferencing option to emerge and become popular though. As above, this kind of software has network effects and I would rather get invited to Open Source meetings if possible.

I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that they like Debian but dislike systemd.

I cannot wait until GNU HURD is ready and the GNU/Linux crowd migrates to it.

The rest of us can then replace Glibc with musl, GNU utils with UUtils, GCC with Clang and we will not have to listen to this GNU/Linux crap anymore.

I mean, all the GNU stuff is great and I use them all the time. But it is ridiculous in 2026 that people want to brand the entire OS with the makers of 3% of the packages (all of which have world-class alternatives). Especially since almost all of those packages are majority authored by Red Hat.

GNU is great and massively important historically. But the end of the GNU/Linux nonsense cannot come fast enough.

Devuan objects to some of the engineering choices in Debian, like systemd.

The authors of this project are clearly not systemd fans.

Most of the fundamental packages in your Linux distribution are primarily written by Red Hat. Do you use Glibc, GCC, gnu utils, systemd, GNOME, podman, pipewire, Wayland, Xorg, or Flatpak for starters?

Red Hat is hardly a free rider in the open source world.

It is also worth noting that Red Hat created the Fedora Project. They created it so they could have RHEL (corporate) and Fedora (community) instead of just Red Hat Linux which they had before.

It always makes me laugh when people worry about Red Hat “taking Fedora corporate”. Fedora was created explicitly to be the community offering and is a key part of the Red Hat strategy. I guess not everybody knows their Linux history.

Many of the Fedora leaders and maintainers are Red Hat employees.

As for US influence, that has always been a thing. US law dominates the thinking. What you really need to worry about is the Linux Foundation.

Arch should have this in a few days to a couple of weeks.

What did you replace Xorg with 10 years ago?

I am not the biggest Richard Stallman fan, and this was also my first thought. But in the interest of truth, it is very unfair to portray him this way.

What Stallman argued for was correctness. He is guilty of pedantry, not pedophilia. Did he do it badly. Yes. Was it a socially risky position to take? For sure. Is he a child predator? Not based on any evidence I have seen.

There are actual child predators out there. Let’s focus on them.

By “shares some of the same codebae”, I assume that you mean both COSMIC and Niri use the Smithay Wayland support library? Or that both Niri and GNOME use xdg-desktop-portal-gnome?

Interesting that you are using PaperWM but recommending Niri.

Have you tried COSMIC yet? Maybe PopOS is worth a shot.

Some packages are a bit old at the moment but they have a release coming in April / May that will bring them right up to date.

Perhaps LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is worth a look as well.

Both options are similar in that they take a very stable distro base and layer on a quite up-to-date desktop.

They also feature clear direction and a predicable release schedule.

Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.

Ok. Very exciting. But is it actually available for purchase anywhere?

Can an SBC maker even buy it yet?

Probably not a universal answer as you are optimizing for different things.

I will say that EndeavourOS is essentially vanilla Arch once installed. If you really love configuring everything yourself, vanilla Arch is what you are looking for. If you like Arch but just want to fire up a system with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS adds a lot of value without corrupting the purity of the base system.

So, my vote is for EndeavourOS.

Cachy adds the most additional functionality but also changes the base system the most. If you have a T2 MacBook, this is the best option for sure.

I would avoid Manjaro.

Garuda has fans. A bit much for me.

X11 desktops work fine and will continue to work fine. But very few people will be using them in 5 years.

Why don’t you just stick to X if you think it is better?

Of course, the rest of us have moved on to Wayland because we disagree with you.

No need to fight though. Have fun.