Bug-free Skyrim. That’s the only thing in the last decade I miss.

You mean just like Windows?

We could say that about every single general decision that anyone in the world has ever made. It’s a truism which tells us almost nothing about this situation.

No, it isn’t a double edged sword. Even a mediocre distro would be better than Windows, any distro would be cheaper than Windows, and there’s no reason to choose a bad distro anyway.

What would people recommend in the short run as an alternative?

It has to be there, because politics is connected with lawmaking, and open source software is dependent on laws.

A lot of people like to say that politics isn’t in their life or that they keep politics out of their life, but the reality is that’s just not true. The rules that govern society affect you, always, either with or without your input, either with or without your acknowledgment.

You’re probably trying to say that we should keep pointless politicking out of open source software, and I agree, but that’s going to come down to personal definitions of pointlessness.

In recent years I’ve found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.

I probably wouldn’t describe them as flawed, because the goal wasn’t and couldn’t ever be perfection, so then everything is flawed, but then is it really a flaw? It sounds like more of an issue of what’s useful in what type of situation.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

I know. And many of the comments are coming from the US, so I’m trying to help American readers see what US law would dictate in a similar situation, because they might have instincts that are inconsistent with US law.

In the US, the 4th Amendment says that’s unconstitutional. Fortunately. Too many dirty pigs out there.

In the US, the cops need RAS to handcuff you. The standard was never and is not “until they know what’s going on”. And RAS depends on the current cop knowledge. Even if they had legal grounds to break into your place, what they see in the next ten seconds is still relevant. For example, if someone said you attacked them with a knife, when the cops see no victim, knife, or blood, their legal authority ceases.

Of course it’s all highly dependent on specific details.

(On traffic stops, often they already have RAS. That’s why they pulled you over. So don’t be fooled by other comments about that topic.)

In the US, property records are public records. Easy to find someone’s address online if you know their full name and the county they own property in.

Go try it!

The legal standard in the U.S. is if there’s exigent circumstances. Detailed 911 calls are typically sufficient to meet that standard. Not always.

Right now, we cannot tell if the officers did anything unlawful. Need the call recording or call logs, plus the body cameras.

(I think the exigent circumstances standard is BS, easily abused, but that is the current law of the land.)

It’s not a question of what’s the better option. In reality we have a lot of software that already exists and works, and you can’t replace it all in bulk at the same time. So the question is whether the implementation of Rust makes logistical sense, given the difficulties of maintaining currently existing software while replacing some parts of it.

No seeds no stems no stress my guy. The Internet is a great place for complaining. Readers can downvote and move on, everyone gets what they want.

My company will let me purchase software, but it won’t let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it’s “unnecessary”. So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)

This one is very obvious. It’s not specific to the tech world. Companies know that changing jobs is stressful, that there’s value in remaining where you are, and quite obviously many people are willing to accept smaller raises so that they don’t have to go out and apply. For most jobs in the world, you can’t work remotely, and renting a different place or selling and buying property is time consuming, stressful, and expensive. In other words, this is common sense economic reasoning.

One side point is that if you can work mostly or entirely from home, that gets rid of some of the pressure to stay where you are, which in turn should create more mobility, which in turn should create more pay raises for employees who stay. But work from home is relatively the recent phenomenon, so old company pay scales are unlikely to properly account for it.

Another point, that the author completely overlooks, is that some people don’t contribute as much as the author thinks they contribute. If they know that, of course they don’t want to move to a place that does contribution-based pay. They could get hired on somewhere during a probational period of some kind, and their new bosses might think they’re not good enough, and now they are out two jobs. Of course the turnover on their second job makes their resume look weaker, so they’ll have more trouble finding a decent third job.

None of what I wrote is new information. It seems like the author of the article did that standard thing in tech circles. They decided to reinvent the wheel and write about it, and try to make it exciting when it’s not. Good for them for examining the problem, but they should be slightly embarrassed for publishing before doing basic research to see if someone had already addressed the question at hand.

If you really are so hopeless with computers that you can’t figure out a modern popular Linux distribution, then you should not build your own computer, because that’s much more complicated.