wow 10 months flew by since this was posted and since then the United States had a surprise privacy bill that is bipartisan that sort of addresses the issues you and I mentioned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/

This bill was proposed around the same time the TikTok ban was announced. I speculate that law makers had a difficult time framing the arguments against TikTok when “the data of citizens have no protections so there was no easy legal grounds to forbit the likes of TikTok to harvest it”

From what I’ve heard, this bill is pretty good. I need to educate myself more on it, however.

For backup and sync I use Syncthing. I can specify which folder on which devices I want to sync to which folder on the server.

I use a folder based gallery on my phone so when I move stuff around on my phone (or on my server) it gets replicated on all my devices.

I also have a policy to sync specified folders (and subfolder) with my family’s devices. No more " hey can you send me all the pics from the XYZ trip"

We take a trip. Make a subolder for that trip in a shared folder dump all our pictures there, get home and open the folder on the computer and prune together.

Debian has the advantage of not using snapd like Ubuntu does. You have to not only remove snaps but also instruct the package manager not you pull in snaps as dependencies and not to favor snap packages.

I have fond memories of Ubuntu being my first distro many years ago but pushing snaps onto users to compete with flatpak is a nuisance.

When I was in college, two older classmates whom I respected got into a hilarious argument of why Gnome was awesome and now eats rocks (their views, I had no views).

Their elaborate and very specific descriptions of functions and inconveniences drew up a picture of functionality and a e s t h e t i c I had never experienced on windows. So I proceeded to install a distro and take it for a ride

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American’s data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to “legally self identify” as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American’s data.

I will admit reading the reasons against Linux made me a bit butthurt given how much it has accomplished and the ubiquity of it running on servers that host our services.

However, a (real time operating system) RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which manages the sharing of system resources with a scheduler, data buffers, or fixed task prioritization in a multitasking or multiprogramming environment. And a time-sharing kernel is likely not suitable for the demands of real-time feedback that airplanes, especially fighter planes, are under. Admittingly I don’t work on the kernels so I might be out of my league talking about it if there are ways to optimize them for RTOS applications. And I also don’t work on airplane but hobby learning about them.

In an airplane, the pilots are voting members. If they they are nose diving and tell the airplane to pull up, the airplane will calculate how much of the full range of motion to allow the flaps to “bite” the air so that the plane doesn’t desintigrate. This takes into account speed, altitude, air density, load on wings, load on frame, G forces pilots would experience, etc etc.