Quakers were

Are. They’re still around. Still a relatively big minority Christian group in the UK.

Still everyone’s favourite Christian denomination. Cool bunch.

Local/national banks with their bankcards and payment platforms

I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but here in the UK all banks use Visa, MasterCard or Amex for their bank cards.

How the fuck do you know my PIN number?!

If only the biggest problem was messages starting “I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:”

A far bigger problem is people using AI to draft text and then posting it as their own. On social media like this, I can’t count the number of comments I’ve encountered midway through an otherwise normal discussion thread, and only clocked 2 paragraphs in that I’m reading a chat bot’s response. I feel like I’ve had time and braincells stolen from me in the deception for the moments spent reading and attempting to derive meaning from it.

And just this week I received an application from someone wanting work in my office which was very clearly AI generated. Obviously that person will not be offered any work. If you can’t be bothered to write your own “why I want to work here” cover letter, then I can’t be bothered to work with you.

Unfortunately it’s a combination lock, and the code is written on a post-it stuck on the front of the drawer.

Don’t forget Tizen too; MeeGo’s other bastard offspring.

I think Tizen is still around?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Every single time. I know how I’m supposed to read it, I know what it means and where it comes from, but I physically cannot read it any other way.

Worst name ever.

For me it’s MATE.

For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).