Cubuntu is also a thing.

The SSN is likely to appear in multiple tables, because they will reference a central table that ties it all together. This central table will likely only contain the SSN, the birth date (from what others have been saying), as well as potentially first and last name. In this table, the entries have to be unique.
But then you might have another table, like a table listing all the physical exams, which has the SSN to be able to link it to the person’s name, but ultimately just adds more information to this one person. It does not duplicate the SSN in a way that would be bad.

Those regex crosswords ain’t gonna solve themselves…

(Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)

See, I disagree on that. If I know something I could (help to) build will only ever be used by a few folks and can never help most people, then my motivation is significantly lowered. Well, unless I’m truly just scratching my own itch, but even then I might choose to not scratch my itch, because I’d rather quit using the platform, if possible.

And then, yeah, what the other person said about financing.

For Android, there are various small efforts in terms of forks, with the biggest being LineageOS. There are even some commercial efforts, like /e/OS. I think, Huawei also wanted to do a fork or something. No idea what happened with that.
But yeah, none of these efforts are hard forks, which can change more than superficial stuff. And it’s not for a lack of desire, but because it’s just such a ridiculous uphill battle to try to get anything noteworthy changed. Many times, LineageOS (and its predecessor CyanogenMod) had some cool features, which they later had to scrap, because they needed to follow what Google was doing and their features wouldn’t work with that anymore. If they would’ve seen any chance of a hard fork working out, they probably would’ve tried to go that route.

Well, any software needs to include a license of some form, if you want it to be usable by others. But if it’s not an open-source or libre license, then it’s a proprietary license. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point, it depends on what’s actually written into the license. But it’s also not a good thing, as you miss out on various open-source benefits due to there being no proven legal compatibility with open-source licenses. Well, and if I remember correctly, FUTO’s license actively prohibits reuse of the code anyways.

I also like to use log statements or error messages as a way to describe what’s happening.

Comments are only visible in the exact spot where they’re written, whereas decent names or log statements become visible in a second place, which makes them more valuable, but also increases the chance of them being kept up-to-date.

Personally, I’m at the point where I try to only use community-developed software. I’ve seen it too often that even projects which are nominally open-source start becoming cunts…

Android, Chromium.

The problem is that:

1. Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
2. These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
3. Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.

Oh, that is actually the part I do agree with. I don’t think everyone will, but I do actually think JSON is easier to read and write (correctly) than YAML. I specifically wrote that JSON cares the least about that, because it was designed to just serialize JavaScript objects into strings and back. As far as its original purpose is concerned, no one would ever need to hand-edit JSON. Which is also why it doesn’t support comments (which is still somewhat of a dealbreaker for a configuration language, although I guess for your proposed workaround, one could potentially use a JSON flavor which supports comments; potentially, you can even write your JSON in the YAML file with comments directly and then not convert it, since YAML is a superset of JSON).

As for documentation, yeah, it is possible to convert, but it makes it more annoying, particularly also if you then can’t easily re-use configs in another project. And if you’re working in a team, having to explain to all your team members, how they can convert the official documentation, is also not really acceptable…

I love this comment. JSON is by far the format that cares the least about being human-readable or -writable, but you’re seriously proposing writing it rather than YAML. And I kind of don’t even really disagree. But a big problem with that strategy is that you won’t find documentation for how to write the configuration in JSON.

What comes sort of close, is that you can define so-called “schemas”, at least for JSON, TOML, YAML and XML. Here’s what that might look like for JSON: https://json-schema.org/learn/getting-started-step-by-step

I don’t know, if you can actually generate a GUI from such a schema, though. They’re intended for validating existing data, so I don’t know, if they give you enough data to work with to actually provide a GUI. For example, you don’t really have a human-readable name in these. The fields are rather called e.g. “productName”.

Yeah, some distros have GUIs for system settings, like openSUSE and Mageia, but advanced users will often even take that as a reason to not use those distros, because they themselves don’t need that on their system. And because not many advanced users use these distros, it’s hard to recommend them for noobs, because it makes it more difficult to find help resources. Kind of a stupid situation…

Just had an owl hoo-hoo-ing outside. I do now imagine, that’s how it felt when I started cooking my 1 am dinner. 🙃

That’s not a typo: https://k3s.io/

It’s basically a Kubernetes cluster, which you can run locally on your PC. Really useful for playing around with Kubernetes before you move to a ‘proper’ environment.

Even just the choice of programming language makes a big difference. Running a JVM language or NodeJS, Python, Ruby etc., you can be bottlenecked by a Pi. Meanwhile, Rust or C/C++ will use barely a fraction of those resources.

I do like the picture, too.

Option 1: echo 1
Option 2: echo 2
Option 3: echo 3

I have a feeling how it came up with that 3… 🙃

Is this how it works for you guys? Like, do you have to wait for a thought like that to occur?

I can just make such a thought happen instantly. I do have a tendency to become obsessed, because well, whenever I need a dopamine hit, I just do a think of a given cute person, which is addictive. And yeah, now I’m wondering, if that’s why I have that tendency…

Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/

I still don’t get why the backslash is on keyboards to begin with. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone write a slash backward with a pen. And even if folks do, you could’ve had only one slash anyways. Like, people are going to understand what it means, whether it’s / or \.

I guess, it not being used for much else, does at least make it useful for escaping stuff and for Windows to use as path separator.

You might be seeing posts from the 196 community, which recently split up (personally, I had the old ones blocked and then due to it splitting, the new 196 community showed up in my feed).

The 196 community is very much about quantity-over-quality, when it comes to posts, and as such reposts do happen often, too.
No shade on that, but it’s also not for everyone, so yeah, you might want to just block those communities.