(6.9-4.2)/(2024-2018) = 0.45 “version increments” per year.

4.2/(2018-1991) = 0.15 “version increments” per year.

So, the pace of version increases in the past 6 years has been around triple the average from the previous 27 years, since Linux’ first release.

I guess I can see why 6.9 would seem pretty dramatic for long-time Linux users.

I wonder whether development has actually accelerated, or if this is just a change in the approach to the release/versioning process.

If you include ChromeOS that’s very likely.

You can restrict what gets installed by running your own repos and locking the machines to only use those (either give employees accounts with no sudo access, or have monitoring that alerts when repo configs are changed).

So once you are in that zone you do need some fast acting reactive tools that keep watch for viruses.

For anti-malware, I don’t think there are very many agents available to the public that work well on Linux, but they do exist inside big companies that use Linux for their employee environments. For forensics and incident response there is GRR, which has Linux support.

Canonical may have some offering in this space, but I’m not familiar with their products.

Tbf 500ms latency on - IIRC - a loopback network connection in a test environment is a lot. It’s not hugely surprising that a curious engineer dug into that.

Zsh is a nice balance of modern features and backwards compatibility with bash.

Crostini is an official feature built by Google that allows you to run Linux on a tightly integrated hypervisor inside Chrome OS. You keep a lot of Chrome OS’ security benefits while getting a Linux machine to play with.

That said, no, it’s not illegal to install a different operating system on your Chromebook hardware. They are just PCs, under the hood. You might lose some hardware security features though, e.g. the capabilities provided by integration of the Titan silicon.

If you had a job at Google, corporate IT would definitely not be happy if you wiped the company-managed OS and installed an unmanaged Linux distro :)

In the very unlikely event that the Starship makes it to a nominal trajectory and survives re-entry, will it be attempting the flip-and-burn manoeuvre in the Pacific? Or are we talking a true hard splashdown/bellyflop?