Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk

Yes. If vendors in those states want to then preinstall Linux on a device they would have to find a compliant distro…

Doesn’t matter much. At least those of us who aren’t engaged in the business of selling computers are unaffected.

Considering SteamOS includes Valve’s proprietary bits for the Steam client, this likely still applies to Valve and any hardware shipping with SteamOS

Where is the line? Most Linux distros have some nonfree software too, does it apply to them?

IMHO the correct legal and constitutional analysis ought to be: distributing software, in either source or binary form, is free speech protected under the US constitution as well as state constitutions. Therefore the government cannot pass laws requiring that operating systems, in general, implement certain features, doesn’t matter which.

What the government can do is engage in product regulation. It can require that operating systems preinstalled on devices sold in their jurisdiction have certain features. The correct thing to do wouldn’t have been to distinguish FOSS from nonfree operating systems, but operating systems preinstalled on devices from those distributed on the Internet which the user needs to install. That would have covered Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, which is obviously what the legislators were thinking of.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.

It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.

When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)

If things could change once, they can change again.

On the terminal yes.

On GUIs I generally use an IDE or VSCodium with vim keybindings.

I see. Not familiar with any good interface for that.

No, I thought that was a separate question precisely because I don’t see a connection between merge requests and mailing lists.

I don’t currently use mailing lists but when I did, I found Thunderbird very usable. Just set up a filter to move each list’s messages to a separate folder.

For merge requests, doesn’t the default GitLab web interface do those things already …?

That’s why IntelliJ shows you, in these kinds of cases, the names of the parameters where the function is called…

There are also languages, like Scala and Swift, with named parameters, which also solve this problem.

Windows becoming a Linux distribution.

not what I want, I want Windows (as in, the existing Windows codebase) to become FOSS, if that happened, we would no longer need to care about anyone switching to Linux, in fact I might then install a FOSS Windows myself

I remember already playing it through Wine in like 2009 or so, so all that is new is that it’s now a decompiled version.

Alcohol damages the body, phones definitely don’t do that.

I remember being a child and early teenager before anyone I knew had mobile Internet. Many of us engaged in highly disruptive behavior, including behavior harmful to others, when bored.

Researchers believe that the students, especially younger ones, may have turned to more disruptive behavior when they no longer had access to their phones.

Yeah, no shit? Phones tend to serve as a distraction that kills boredom; disruptive behavior is frequently (maybe usually) the result of boredom.

“One conjecture is that this resembles, to some degree, withdrawal symptoms,” he said. “Students are unhappy and disruptive the moment their phones are taken away.”

They’re understandably bored and then, understandably, try to kill their boredom in other, more disruptive ways. I for one very much prefer students being on their phones (or other devices) to beating each other up, damaging property, or insulting each other in psychologically damaging ways out of boredom! No idea what about this is supposed to resemble withdrawal symptoms.

I haven’t seriously used it myself, but maybe Qt Quick is somewhat like you’re looking for?

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlapplications.html

The main question I have is this: is it going to be replaced by something better (such as federated services)?

Or will this just mean the Internet as a whole will lose lots of users? That, I think, wouldn’t be desirable. Whatever one may think of Meta, they’ve definitely done a lot to popularize the Internet as a mainstream technology, which by itself is a good thing, though if they use Meta platforms, it ought to be only the first step.

I’ve never bought VPN access, so am not sure; but don’t you need to have a bank account or even credit card to pay for VPNs anyway? How many very young people are even capable of paying for VPN access?

Does it really seem to you like the forces of freedom are winning? Not to me. :(

The second one is the one they’re (at least mainly) concerned about…

A fairly well known German news site that specializes in digital policy certainly published an article https://netzpolitik.org/2026/phishing-signal-unkenntnis-allerorten/ that expressed the opinion that switching to Wire because of this is complete nonsense and pretty much everyone in the decision-making process has no idea what they’re doing.