And you needed to find out the scanlines of your monitor before X would even display anything, and then that was a black and white grid. Then you needed to spent another day or two getting a window manager working.

Cloudflare are the cheapest domain registrar since they take zero profit from the sale. You will not find anywhere cheaper. (If you do, then look very carefully for hidden charges since that registrar will be subsidising your domains)

They’ve got some pretty useful free tools to help you manage it, and use it effectively too.

(For the Cynical, CF’s MD was very open about why they don’t charge for domains - it’s to get your goodwill. The only restriction is you can’t use third party nameservers for domains you host with them for free, you have to use CF’s. I’ve never found that a problem in many years of both private and commercial domain hosting there)

I did this and regretted it.

Many professional services withhold their number for obvious reasons. Turns out my doctor was trying to contact me and couldn’t.

Great, but that doesn’t really help OP.

ecological compatibility,

The what now?

Absolutely.

These services are also used by many governments around the world and considered critical infrastructure.

Terrifying, right?

Canonical is UK based, so scrub that.

But Redhat, Rocky, Alma are all owned by US legal entities and can absolutely be legally forced to do as you describe.

Technically blocked is something else, mind. We’re clever, resourceful and motivated people and US laws wouldn’t directly affect us.

However - you’re thinking small. US influence of IT is massive. Routers, servers, hardware of all levels. The most enterprise level software is US led. All of these things can be restricted, or tarriffed heavily, or sanctioned entirely. If the US wants to hurt the rest of the world, it just has to tell Broadcom to turn off vmware outside of America. Ditto Cisco, Ditto Dell, Ditto… etc etc. Sure, it would be illegal, but does the American government care about that?

Anyone telling you that “Y won’t happen because it’s unthinkable” clearly hasn’t been paying attention this year.

Coo - I’m a big David Mitchell fan and never even heard of this. Thank you.

I’m not going to answer your question directly - others have done that already.

I will say that, as an older man, my brain has thrown up random things from my childhood multiple time, so the same may happen for you. I’m no psychologist, and I’m also late-diagnosed autistic, but it seems that the brain can lock away memories from that period because it didn’t know how to process them. Then, much later in life, it’ll dig one up, dust it off, and put it at the forefront of your mind and say, “Go on then, you’re all grown up and know so much now, what about this then?”

This has happened to me at times of trauma (like I didn’t have enough to deal with at that time already - and may be the same for you with your OCD), but also at times of peace. I had a traumatic childhood which I won’t go into, but it’s provided a rich seam of suppressed and painful memories to randomly spit out and obsess over throughout my life.

I think my point in writing this is… Just to say that you’re not alone in having random thoughts from your past take over, and that overall I don’t think it means much that it’s come back to mind.

Kind of - a personal website that I post articles on for various things. I like to share what I’ve learned, but it never gets much interest and less now. It’s something I’ve been doing in various forms for over two decades.

“Good” or “trust my life with”? The two can be mutually exclusive. If I was in the wrong, would a good person defend me?

I’ve met a few people with genuinely good morals in my life. They do exist and are almost incorruptible. Most people are flexible in that we can make justifications for almost anything.

You’re right, but sometimes you need someone to hold the other end of the rope when you lower yourself over a cliff.

They are literally undermining human rights, including the rights of LGBTQ people.

There’s a new country to add to this list from this year.

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“Surely you can’t be serious.”

he people making these decisions have no idea what life is like for a poor person.

It’s worse than that, they actively despise anyone who isn’t at least a millionaire.

They’ve been very blatant about that, and it reflects every single action they’ve taken since getting office.

Debian stable is as hassle-free as you’ll get.

It sounds like your issue is more with having to migrate to a new laptop. Firstly - buy laptops that are more linux compatible and you’ll have fewer niggles like with sound, suspend and drivers.

Secondly - use “dpkg --get-selections” and “–set-selections” to transfer your list of installed software across to your new laptop. Combined with transferring your /home directory, user migration can be speeded up.

No, because it never was.

Kids confused it with good because it was the equivalent of running around an abandoned building throwing dog shit and broken glass at each other while spraying paint on the walls, because no adults told them not to. But when you tire of that, it’s just an empty husk full of dog shit and glass.

Special interest forums still hold.

For me, the Royal Enfield motorbike forums are exceptionally good, and that’s largely down to the admin. There’s also a Series 2 Land Rover forum that has a unique collection of people with a phenomenal combined knowledge about that car.

I’ve hosted a few in my time - since the early 90s and Fidonet when BBSs were the thing. But things change. Facebook killed of a whole bunch way before Reddit and Lemmy just because that’s where people were already, and it was easier for them to feel involved. Facebook is impossible to search, though, so the post history of a forum that was so useful has gone entirely.

It’s sad, but things change. What’s constant is people’s desire to socialise and discuss topics they are interested in. I’m kind of curious what that will be next.

I think you make a good point, but it’s one that affects any anti-malicious protection. How do you know that the anti-virus warning you get on Windows is legitimate and not a false alert? Or that the Apparmor block wasn’t a misfire? Selinux is no better nor worse in principle than those.

In all cases, you need to stop and figure out what’s actually going on. That’s one benefit of all these things - they make you pause and, hopefully, think, when something is outside the norm.

And yep, they can be bypassed and they need to be able to be bypassed. If someone is lazy or not knowledgeable enough to make the right decision, or even just in a hurry, then they are at risk. No automated system can protect entirely against that.