All Discover is is a graphical front end to your repositories, so the real question is “is everything in my repositories safe?”.

There are no guarantees in life, but if you’re using only the default official Debian repos you’re just about as safe as you can get. If you add extra repos, whether deb based or flatpak, Discover will only be as safe as whatever you’ve hooked it up to.

That’s pretty lore accurate, though, right?

Most Links are portrayed as being either kids/teenagers or very young-looking adults, and Zelda is often portrayed as being a more experienced character, still young but often already embroiled in the politics or conflicts that are core to the story’s initial setup. Link usually shows character growth as he rises to the challenge, but Zelda is often a more static character, who starts the story fully fledged.

I’ve never heard of either actor, but a cursory Google to look at their various photos and I can see them working in the roles. Obviously assuming they can act, too.

Sure, but the specs aren’t directly comparable.

They also still manufacture the RPi 4, which starts at £33- which is £23 in 2012 money.

but they’re not cheap any more

People say this, but they really are still cheap.

The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that’s only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.

People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.

I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is.

Maybe a controversial opinion here, but the one thing that everyone says about it is that it looks gorgeous, and I really don’t see it. Never have.

Even back when I first tried it out, maybe 15 years ago, I thought it looked strangely retro. Nowadays, compared to the eye candy that is completely standard in GNOME, KDE, MacOS, Windows etc., it looks incredibly dated.

It’s all hard edges, low res icons, ugly fonts, and eccentric design choices. Yeah, it can make window elements transparent, but you can’t dine out on that one trick for ever.

Good advice in general; even contractual fuckery aside, you can’t guarantee a company will even still exist this time next year.

What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple?

People in the FOSS community constantly talk about the best ways to minimise use of Google, Apple and Microsoft products. That is an absolutely valid motivation for choosing to use one project over another.

If someone is willing to use the behaviour of a company or its owners as a factor when choosing a software stack, presumably it’s valid to apply the same sentiment to development teams of smaller projects too.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).

So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.

“We don’t like the proposed new Coke recipe, so we’re switching to drinking raw undiluted sewage instead”.

Ubuntu Touch is such a nice user experience. If it had an Android-tier app ecosystem it’d be a very nice daily driver.

You don’t know that. The people of Kepler-452b might well be suffering under a truly awful automobile industry.

Ubuntu’s software updater updates both deb packages and snaps. To my knowledge it doesn’t do flatpaks, though, as Ubuntu officially doesn’t support them.

Fair point.

Redirect it to Blue Sky instead.

I’m not sure I really understand the point of this. Even if you hate Mozilla, the Gecko engine is excellent and it would make far more sense to fork it than to start a new one from scratch.

Building and maintaining a browser engine is hard. FOSS means that everyone is of course free to pursue the projects that interest them, but this doesn’t seem like a great use of effort to me.

Perfectly readable white text on a black background on my devices. The problem must be on your end.

Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.

There are already several Rust Kennel From Scratch projects that are reasonably progressed. Redox is one, Asterinas is another.

The latter is I think aiming for Linux ABI compatibility.

where [it] comes from

You imply it comes from:

The “thin blue line” symbol has been used by the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which emerged in 2014

But you link to a Wikipedia article that says:

New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show The Thin Blue Line. Parker used the term “thin blue line” to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.

The Oxford English Dictionary records its use in 1962 by The Sunday Times referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The term was used for the title of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood.

I have no idea about this guy’s politics, but it’s a pretty well known phrase with a lot of different contexts.

Technically not really e-waste, as it’s just the same cycling computer you were buying anyway, and presumably would have a similar lifespan.

The waste part is the non-electronic bits, i.e. when the computer needs replacing you need to bin off the attached bits of aluminium and rubber that make up the rest of the handlebars.