Seems a hard sell to go subscription on such a niche platform. I wish anyone luck that could challenge the Apple/Android duopoly though.

As an aside, can we get back into desktop cubes again? With all the upheaval in Windows land it’s the sort of eye candy that can win over new Linux users.

Any distro should be fairly stable and supported on an older Thinkpad.

I’m currently using Debian stable on my X220 and it’s rock solid.

Using nano as a vim user is a lot less clunky than trying to use vim as a vim non-user though.

Or so I would imagine, all of the vim novices are still too busy trying to exit vim to share their experiences.

What is with Linux projects and confusingly pronounceable names? Even the name “Linux” itself has a fair bit of spoken variation.

Then there’s Ubuntu, and GNOME with the hard G to name a few.

You will struggle to find anything decent at that price new.

Plenty of good used options though, a used ThinkPad will have great Linux compatibility and be serviceable. They can be very cheap depending on how older hardware you can tolerate. There are other business grade laptops from Dell, HP etc that have good refurb deals too.

If you familiar with Ubuntu and its derivatives, just use Ubuntu.

Ubuntu provides a server version called Ubuntu Server alongside the desktop versions if needed, and Ubuntu provides easy access to things like ZFS.

You can always switch in the future if you find you have server needs or preferences the Ubuntu doesn’t suit.

Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.

But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.

One model that seemed to work well was the pre-social media internet old people might remember: bulletin boards, forums, blogs.

Ouch.

The video makes an interesting comparison between online and offline communities, but I think it’s missed how common identities that gave offline communities cohesion have also broken down in the modern age. Increasing pressure for jobs and housing, among other things, have forced many societies to become a lot more internally mobile. This has resulted in a much diminished sense of local community because so many people rarely stay in one place long enough to form local bonds.

Supporting the local sports team and attending the local church together once helped us overlook our differences, but those shared experiences are shrinking. That loss of offline cohesion is contributing to the alienation and polarisation alongside the troubles online.

The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.

I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.

Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.