Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

The Linux kernel (the code) is open-source. Linux Foundation (the people who write said code) is headquartered in the US. The US can decide what Linux Foundation can and cannot do, who works there, etc. They can’t control who uses the code.

I’m guessing most IoT devices are made in China (or increasingly Southeast Asia), so yes.

Wouldn’t this violate the EU’s DMA?

Mint has three prebuilt options, Cinnamon is just the default. Beyond that you can also install other desktops.

I thought it was a Dragon Ball Z reference.

But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.

For the reasons you described, I won’t run VLC as root, and I don’t think 99% of users would need to. But if someone wanted to do it, the software shouldn’t stop them from doing it (beyond giving a warning and asking them to confirm).

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

What is the reason we don’t run as root?

We are human and make mistakes. Not running as root means the computer will ask us to confirm when we are about to do something major (like a software update, or formatting a partition). This reduces the chance of making big mistakes. (But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.

On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.

Older Redmis allow bootloader unlocking from Developer Options. Then some seller installed malware this way so newer models require you to register as a user.

The sun powers the water cycle.

Shit list?

Yes, because tomorrow you may face the same bug.

The government distros (BOSS and IT@School) are for government offices and schools, respectively. Also, both are open-source. Mostly they add better support for Indian languages, and some educational software.

Android uses the Linux kernel, so it is Linux (but not GNU/Linux). This isn’t just semantics - Android has a UNIX-style filesystem, shell scripts, etc.

But yes, desktop per capita is probably decreasing as well.

If they’re moving to smartphones, that’s still (mostly) Linux.

That being said, I am less skeptical of the growth in users in India, but not for the reason the author listed. I think it’s more likely that it is growing in popularity due to its cost (ie, free), as well as the fact that many distros are more lightweight than Windows, which especially benefits older or cheaper hardware.

Most Windows in India is pirated. Microsoft doesn’t care unless you’re a big company. The second point is true. Another reason is that schools shifted to Ubuntu 10-15 years ago, and government departments are now shifting to Linux.

The first rule of coding is that you don’t re-invent the wheel.

Not sure about this particular textbook, but ours did explain what open-source is. So I’m guessing it might have been covered in a previous chapter.