That teapot is orbiting somewhere. I have no idea if my universe is the one.

Saying that you “know” there is no God is an extraordinary claim. Do you demand extraordinary evidence from people that make that claim? Or do you only demand it from people following a philosophy that requires them to believe independent of evidence?

Honestly, this is about as smart as religious people demanding miracles before they will believe in Science.

As everybody else has said, Debian is working as intended. To respond to the actual post though, Debian is working exactly as it always has.

If you think Debian used to be good, you must really love it now. It is better than ever.

Unlike in the past, the primary drawback of Debian Stable ( old package versions ) has multiple viable solutions. Other have rightly pointed out things like the Mozilla APT package and Flatpaks. Great solutions.

My favourite solution is to install Arch via Distrobox. You can then get all the stability of Debian everywhere you need it and, anytime you need additional packages or newer packages, you can install them in the Arch distrobox. Firefox is a prime candidate. You are not going to get newer packages or a greater section than via he Arch repos / AUR ( queue Nix rebuttals ).

It is not about security at all. They do not want to test or support old browsers. So, they set a minimum version and tell you that you need to upgrade to that.

If they only support one browser, it is going to be Chrome. Chrome has more zero-day vulnerabilities than any other project I can think of. It is not about security.

It is just as easy to point to the ideas of the extreme members of the “new atheist” movement as evidence that they are a dangerous cult.

Using the Southern Baptist Church as your example of religion is not a very good argument. Implying that atheists are somehow more rational as a group is not really a great argument either.

By the way, I am an atheist. I do no consider my beliefs to be unassailable scientific conclusions though. I recognize that many of my beliefs and preferences lack the robust rational foundation I would like them to. I doubt I am the pinnacle of morality or ethics ( more than doubt - but I am not looking to trash my own reputation here ).

Voting against your own interests or scapegoating others for what you see as damage against yourself or even just plain old hate do not require religion. Humans have lots of ways at arriving at those and being manipulated into them.

I agree with you. Using religion to manipulate people for political reasons is not really a religion problem. If you eradicate religion, there are many other levers to pull. In fact, manipulating religious groups these days also requires using these other weaknesses against people and then convincing them to ignore the conflict with their religious teachings.

Let’s say we agree.

Do you find this post more scientific or more religious?

Because I will agree with you if we can agree that the position being taken here is driven by treating science as a religion ( one they poorly understand ).

Spoken like a scientist. I doubt that is the answer they were looking for.

In my view, there are two components to “religion”.

1 - it typically starts with an attempt to explain why and how things are

2 - it becomes a human administration - this becomes more about politics than “religion”

Most of the problems with religion stem from the second part. I see the politics as the far bigger problem there. So people that want to create political movements around “science” are absolutely no better in my view.

If you read the question being asked in this thread critically, do you find it a scientific question? A political one?

I am not even remotely religious. But I take science pretty seriously.

Please tell me, scientifically, why you are so sure that people of faith are wrong?

There is some decent science that prayer does not work. I am not aware of anything offers anything at all testable concerning God.

And if we are simply pushing our preferences on others, I think a more important question is what makes people that claim to be evidence driven to adopt such strong opinions on things ( without evidence ) that they feel comfortable publicly slamming the preferences and values of others ( again with no evidence at all ).

As a science fan, you can say that absence of evidence means you do not have to believe. Correct. You cannot say that an absence of evidence proves your guess correct such that you can treat people who believe otherwise as stupid. Incorrect.

And “they have to show me the evidence” is a moronic stance. As a fan of the scientific method, evidence is YOUR burden of proof. For people that adhere to a religion, their standard is FAITH. So, they are holding up their end and you are dropping the ball. So what gives you the right to be the abuser?

So, I guess my answer to “why do people believe in religion would be”, “well, people still have faith and tradition and science has not produced any evidence that credibly calls that into question”.

Why are people not arriving at this conclusion on their own in 2024? Why have we failed so badly to explain the scientific method that people can still make wild pronouncements like this one.

I don’t like religion because it makes people easy to manipulate. People that treat science like a religion exhibit the same problems. I am not a fan of that.

They would go bankrupt.

No matter how anti-capitalism you are, I hope you can see how broken the argument being made here is. The absolute reality is that, without protections, things like pharmaceuticals would never exist at the scale that we enjoy them.

Of course examples of things that require years of research would exist. However, there would be far fewer of them than there is today.

Patents and copyrights have become corrupted. They need reform. We have to remember though that when they were created, it was to improve the world that existed ( the world that this commenter thinks would be better ).

Patents and copyrights were not invented because making companies richer was a goal. They were invented to better society. They were created with the recognition that, if we wanted companies to invest in innovation, and if we wanted individuals to commit to a long, intensive creative process, that they needed protection. The downside of capitalism at the time was that evil corporations and unscrupulous entrepreneurs could steal your hard work. Patents and copyrights were created to right that wrong and to promote a culture of creativity, invention, and innovation. And it worked wonderfully. We all benefit.

Now, things have of course been corrupted. The idea of “intellectual property” has emerged and we get nonsense like calling copyright violations “piracy”. The protections have been extended far. The penalties have become too great. The idea of public benefit has taken a backseat to profit protection. All this is bad. Throwing out the baby with the bath water is not the answer.

I have been using Linux since 1993. Maybe it is time to move on.

Wouldn’t you have to get GNUstep working first? That seems like a limiting factor in your otherwise admirable plan.

macOS and Linux could indeed have had a common Desktop API. GNUstep was started even before Cacoa and could have kept compatibility with it.

The other problem is that no GNUstep desktop environment ever really got off the ground either. WindowMaker ( really just a window manager, not a DE ) is not written in GNUstep. I imagine it is written in C against the X11 libs.

I like your dream though. I used to dream of the same.

I am pretty sure that GNUstep is cross platform though. At least we have that.

Have you seen NextSpace?

https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace?tab=readme-ov-file

I have never really been an Ubuntu user. When I started reading your comment, I was thinking “well that seems like a prettt small nitpick”. Then I realized the problem and now I am 100% behind you. You are right, they elate throwing away one of the greatest strengths of the distro in that releases ( numbered releases ) have easy to understand and very meaningful names.

So much information thrown away just to be cute.

Is there a reason? Do the dots in the release numbers confuse things? Or is it purely historical?

Somebody needs to create a fork of APT that does this ( uses release numbers instead ). It could translate the release numbers you use in your sources file to the code names before making the request. I mean, they are unambiguously convertable.

Chimera?

I think the biggest flaw in Arch is the “keyring” package that can go out of date between updates. EndeavourOS makes it worse since it has two of them.

EndeavourOS ships eos-update that somewhat fixes this and can be used in place of pacman or yay. It always updates the keyring first. How many people use that utility though ( or even know it exists ).

Pacman and yay should “just work”.

Isn’t that one of the benefits of LMDE? I think that the DE related packages and maybe things like browsers get updated more often.

For applications these days, there is Flatpak for anything you want to keep more current.

Sure a lot of the rest of the distro will get old. Does that really matter to most users though? If the DE is up to date, the system will feel current. If your key apps are up to date, you are productive. An up to date browser keeps the web working well ( perhaps the main criteria for most people these days). Having the rest of the system be stable could be a good thing.

Devs would probably want more up to date versions of some things. Most regular users are probably just fine though.

I remember Corel Linux. It offered one of the nicest Linux desktop experiences at the time. If you wanted WordPerfect, it was also a great deal.

Leveraging your word processing market share to establish an OS presence is the opposite of what Microsoft did.

What is amazing about Corel these days is the museum of once market leading software that they still somehow sell. In addition to WordPerfect, who is using Quattro Pro ( spreadsheet ) or Paradox ( database ) these days? Who ever used their Presentation software?

For that matter, who is using CorelDRAW? It was right up there with PhotoShop at one point but you never hear about it anymore.

Like Nortel and Blackberry, it seems like Canada is able to grow massively successful tech companies but it just cannot hold on to them.

The only GNOME 2 desktop environment is MATE.

MATE is a continuation of the GNOME 2 code after GNOME 3 came out. It literally IS GNOME 2 just with a different name.

Cinnamon was also a reaction to GNOME 3 but it is an alternative desktop for GNOME 3 ( and newer ). It is mostly modern GNOME. It was never based on GNOME 2.

The only thing XFCE has in common with GNOME is that they both use GTK. XFCE was originally based on XForms ( the XF in XFCE ). It certainly has nothing to do with GNOME 2.

I am a pretty big fan of Open Source and have used Linux myself since the early 90’s. Most governments are not going to save money switching to Open Source. At least not within say the term of a politician or an election cycle. Probably the opposite.

This kind of significant shift costs money. Training costs. Consultants. Perhaps hardware. It would not be at all surprising if there are custom software solutions in place that need to be replaced. The dependencies and complexities may be significant.

There are quite likely to be savings over the longer term. The payback may take longer than you think though.

I DO believe governments should adopt Open Source. Not just for cost through. One reason is control and a reduction of influence ( corruption ). Another is so that public investment results in a public good. Custom solutions could more often be community contributions.

The greatest savings over time may actually be a reduction in forced upgrades on vendor driven timelines. Open Source solutions that are working do not always need investment. The investment could be in keeping it compatible longer. At the same time, it is also more economic to keep Open Source up to date. Again, it is more about control.

Where there may be significant cost savings is a reduction in the high costs of “everything as a service” product models.

Much more important than Open Source ( for government ) are open formats. First, if the government uses proprietary software, they expect the public to use it as well and that should not be a requirement. Closed formats can lead to restrictions on what can be built on top of these formats and these restrictions need to be eliminated as well. Finally, open formats are much, much more likely to be usable in the future. There is no guarantee that anything held in any closed format can be retrieved in the future, even if the companies that produced them still exist. Can even Microsoft read MultiPlan documents these days? How far back can PageMaker files be read? Some government somewhere is sitting on multimedia CD projects that can no longer be decoded.

What about in-house systems that were written in proprietary languages or on top of proprietary databases? What about audio or video in a proprietary format? Even if the original software is available, it may not run on a modern OS. Perhaps the OS needed is no longer available. Maybe you have the OS too but licenses cannot be purchased.

Content and information in the public record has to remain available to the public.

The most important step is demanding LibreOffice ( or other open ) formats, AV1, Opus, and AVIF. For any custom software, it needs to be possible to build it with open compilers and tools. Web pages need to follow open standards. Archival and compression formats need to be open.

After all that, Open Source software ( including the OS ) would be nice. It bothers me less though. At that lobby, it is more about ROI and Total Cost of Ownership. Sometimes, proprietary software will still make sense.

Most proprietary suppliers actually do stuff for the fees they charge. Are governments going to be able to support their Open Source solutions? Do they have the expertise? Can they manage the risks? Consultants and integrators may be more available, better skilled, amd less expensive on proprietary systems. Even the hiring process can be more difficult as local colleges and other employers are producing employees with expertise in proprietary solutions but maybe not the Open Source alternatives. There is a cost for governments to take a different path from private enterprise. How do you quantify those costs?

Anyway, the path to Open Source may not be as obvious, easy, or inexpensive as you think. It is a good longer term goal though and we should be making progress towards it.

On the consumer front, I think the wild card is gamers. There are many that care more about their games than their desktop.

If people come for the gaming and stay for the desktop, we may see a real surge in Linux desktop share.

More and more of what we use is cross-platform as well. There are fewer and fewer apps tying us to one desktop or the other.

It is getting easier to move. The question is why to move. I think gaming could be the driver.