Or they could use a distro that’s already been created by a European vendor, maybe even create a competitive tender. There’s no point in creating a new distro, add a new repository if you must.

It was already a challenge back in those days. I ran the Nokia N9 for a while, and within a year it went from being amazing at messaging due to its messaging app mixing different XMPP providers in one interface (Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, SMS, etc in a single interface) to everyone in the industry suddenly giving up on that and only supporting in-app messaging.

There were valiant attempts to create open source versions of popular apps, but those efforts were always intentionally sabotaged by those providers.

Yeah, I’d rather the distro be as boring as possible while the exciting stuff happens upstream.

And election campaigns only last a few weeks as opposed to the seemingly constant campaign in the US.

And parties publish manifestos with their positions on everything, as opposed to what both major parties are currently doing.

Yeah, why the hell is OP using SMS?

Yeah, those security agents can become attack vectors themselves, so running them kernel level is nuts.

Ok, from what I gather, they want to play games with keyboard and mouse, and also don’t want to use windows any more. Steam OS is designed to be controller friendly and while desktop is nice and usable, Steam OS is probably not the best desktop distro out there. The obvious solution is to install any distro (Ubuntu, Mate, PopOS, even some gaming optimised ones), but yet they seem hung up on installing steam OS for whatever reason.

Offline mode is still kind of an issue with some stuff, unfortunately.

You can use any Linux distro and install steam on it? I really don’t understand the issue you’re having. It works perfectly on pretty much any modern mainstream distro.

Still funny that there’s a Microsoft Linux distro. Didn’t think that would ever happen 20 years ago.

My issue is that the only time I use vim or nano it’s because I’m logged into some server where you’re going to be stuck with the defaults anyway. I guess it’s nice on your home machine, but customising a bunch of servers with your personal preferences isn’t really something you can do in most work situations.

I guess the thinking is that in the past economic growth has been the way governments dealt with paying back debts (or making them look smaller as part of the GDP). Instead of raising taxes or issuing currency to pay back debt, you’d grow the tax base by growing the economy.

MMT is currently challenging this thinking obviously, and the answer to this (as with every other challenge we’re facing, like inequality, pollution, corruption, …) is taxing the rich, not somehow procreating more.

If managed well, a slowly shrinking population can be managed without too much issues and would allow us to live within our planetary means, which are the real contraints on the economy and our survival.

Does anyone know where you can get the Thunderbird branded package?

I used to use it back in the day, but I switched to streaming and don’t really have a use for a desktop music player any more.

It was good (smart playlists being a killer feature), but didn’t quite look like other apps.

Canonical has wasted so much dev time trying to reinvent the wheel, only to go back to using the thing everyone else is using years later.

If he wants to use it for gaming over steam link, he’ll need a graphical interface. I use a PC this way as well: headless most of the time, although realistically you’ll want to use a monitor once in a while to configure steam and figure out gfx issues (and in my case, if it boots it defaults to a 640x480 display, which I need to fix by attaching an actual monitor, I’m sure there’s a way around it, but meh).

It’s a real shame that generally lefties don’t really care about or ‘get’ software freedom. You should be pushing for free software on all levels. In your personal life and in government. It’s crazy how much power a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google has over everyone.