“The discussion continued for quite a while without making much headway.”

I think Debian is interesting, being such a large project of collaboration. I want this democratic, volunteer, non-corporate backed, free project to show that 10000 eyes make bugs shallow. I wish this model produced new ways of doing things, bringing people together in the spirit of creativity and playful productivity.
I’ve used Debian in different ways for around 15 years now, and I really want it to succeed.
Having said that, there is a “but…” looming in the back of my mind. But… it’s difficult to ignore that other distributions are the ones pushing Linux forward. The innovation from Fedora and the distributions still called OpenSuse explore new areas which become the standards.
This is not criticism of Debian, I just wonder if we humans are capable of collaborating freely at that level without some top-down force directing work forward, or if we are bound to being one step behind, always trying to catch up to what others have already done?

One project goal of OpenBSD is: “We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”
They are not being taken advantage of, this is a desired outcome.

Historically, it seems like the legality is a bit fluid, and depends on how much money someone is willing to spend to stop you. What the Pirate Bay did was legal in Sweden until the big companies applied pressure and resources to stop them. I wish we lived in a world where laws could be interpreted clearly, but at least it seems like big money can have its way regardless. So, in your hypothetical website scenario, would someone powerful be very upset, or would it not be worth it for them to go after you?

Are we actually converting people or is the desktop platform just less popular for other OSs in favor of phones etc?

Debian + Flatpaks has been very reliable to me.

The Dijkstra way.

I agree. Maybe this is because Debian tries to be everything, the universal OS, server or desktop or whatever, while for example Fedora Workstation can be preconfigured as a workstation. Back in the day around 2008 this is what Ubuntu was to me, a Debian Workstation. Now it’s different, they’ve diverged so much. Maybe Spiral Linux could be a preconfigured Debian Workstation now.

I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.

I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?

The last time my grub was broken was around 2012 when I ran Arch. After that I have rarely thought about grub at all.

Could you give us your opinions on what you would change about bash if you could go back in time and just decide how it was?

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian

What about the proposal to just drop the name openSUSE with no replacement? And let each distro just be called Tumbleweed, Leap, Aeon, etc.

Fedora/Redhat is a good example. It could be argued that the Linux distro scene was different 23 years ago, making it harder to be seen today.

The thing I’m pondering is what the openSUSE community actually is. Does it exist as a group, or is it separate projects, each doing their own thing… for who? What is the overlap between people in the various distros, overlap in technology used in packaging and QA etc? Is it meaningful to talk about openSUSE as a distinct community separate from SUSE?

When I hear openSUSE, I think of german engineering and resources from SUSE, with a history of innovating great infrastructure.
With a new name, distanced from the SUSE part, I’ll probably feel more like if this is yet another random derivative created by a small group who might soon lose interest.

So, part of this is (I’m thinking) that supporting the companies selling Linux phones would be a good thing. Expanding the market, funding research and prototypes for future products, etc. Is there a user consensus of which companies/phones would be the best bet for this? I’ve read a lot of conflicting reviews. Or, which are popular phone models people use?

This is what I don’t understand, how will the EU enforce Chat Control when we can use software that doesn’t implement backdoors? Maybe the EU will be happy to get the majority of messages from the mainstream proprietary apps, but what if they want to get the rest too? I’m worried that this will lead to very bad places. Could they ban F-Droid? Will I end up on a list if I use unauthorized software? Who knows.

Badness 10000 usually indicates that something is very wrong. Usually overfull hboxes. If the text is spaced out to the point where it immediately looks bad, that could still be like badness 5000. What I have seen mostly is macros not playing well with other macros, and in LaTeX there’s a lot of macros under the hood, so it’s very hard to troubleshoot.

If you don’t want an image to float, don’t put it in a float environment.

The reason is that you’re reading TeX, not LaTeX. The latter has abstracted away the fundamental building blocks so few people know how an hbox is set anymore. So, an hbox is a box where the content is in horizontal mode. Between the things is glue. Glue can stretch and shrink. Depending on how you have set your tolerance and penalties, there’s a maximum percentage of stretch allowed. If the glue stretches more, it becomes bad, this is called badness and can effectively be up to 10000 bad. So why not just put more things into the box? Well, (La)TeX probably tried to do that, but came up with worse badness. TeX always chooses the least bad option on a paragraph level. In practice, the usual suspect is often that you have something else that can’t fit the last part of a line, like a really long word. If you can look at it and manually hyphenate it, things might be better.