I don’t know. Probably. The world’s a big place with a lot of people.

There’s a guy who sits out in front of my cafe every day. You wouldn’t think he was homeless if you saw him, but I see him out there all day every day. He goes to the gym a few doors down for showers and to the laundromat around the corner to wash his clothes. He doesn’t look like he’s on drugs or anything. He’s in his 50’s, his hair is always combed, he’s always clean, appears lucid, etc. He looks like a regular guy you would see at an office job.

The weird thing about him is he does absolutely nothing. No book, no phone, nothing. He just sits there and stares into the parking lot for hours. I don’t know how he does it. We used to say good morning to him and, after he never responded, we kinda just stopped paying him any attention.

Most of the homeless people around here are drugged out zombies. They literally look like they just came off the set of The Walking Dead. This guy in front of my place is the one I notice all the time because of how normal he looks.

Nobody is buying this and I don't think they are trying very hard to sell it either. Notice that this pricing is only in the U.S. This seems like a ploy to bolster their case for damages and/or royalties in a settlement. Or maybe just part of their patent defense strategy. This company is primarily in medical tech. Even if they aren't so interested in the consumer market, they have to protect their patent or someone in a market they do care about will get away with it too. I would assume it strengthens their case if they can demonstrate material damages in a market they participate in. So quickly unveil a prototype, price it so there's little to no demand, don't bother manufacturing a product nobody wants, win the case, cancel the product.

Nothing but regrets. What I imagined and what I got are two very different things. I was thinking party time and sexy date night with the wifey. Instead, it’s a big ass chemistry set that also attracts pests.

I never saw a rat outside until they set up shop inside where the pump and all the plumbing is. I have no idea how they got in there. I smelled something dead and it took a while to figure out it was in there. Unscrewed the panels on the side and found a whole nest in there and a decomposing rat. Another time, a bunch of nasty frogs got into the water even though it was covered.

Aside from that, it was a nuisance to maintain. There’s always something a little off with the water. I spent more time maintaining and cleaning that damn thing than I ever spent relaxing in it. Then the cover eventually wore out from being in the sun. That was like $500 to replace.

That hot tub was nothing but an expensive mistake.

On the surface, the biggest difference between distros will be the package manager and the update cadence. Most package managers are generally comparable so I won’t get into that. The cadence has to do with release type - rolling or fixed - and the speed with which updates are released. Do you want the newest packages, LTS or somewhere in the middle? This is probably the first big decision to make when choosing a distro. The only real must-have here is you want a distro that provides timely security updates. Even a highly stable LTS should be pushing out security updates asap.

Then you have default package choices, which are often superficial like DE or default apps. This can all be changed so it’s not much of a concern. But there could also be more impactful choices like whether a distro uses systemd or glibc vs musl. The mainstream distros tend to use systemd and glibc, which is generally good, but know that you have other options if your specific use case requires it. There’s also package availability, meaning the number of packages available in the repository, although this is less important than it used to be because you have options like Flatpak or Nix for getting packages that aren’t in your distro’s repository.

There are also some distros created with a specific use case in mind, such as Alpine for containers or Kali for testing network security.

Finally, you have structure and governance. Some distros have corporate backing, others are community supported and still others aren’t much more than a hobby. The ones with corporate backing typically have options for paid support. In general, you want something with stable and competent governance where it will continue to thrive even as team members change. You can find examples of this in corporate-backed distros as well as community distros.

So your biggest choices are going to be cadence, structure/governance, and whether you may need paid support now or in the future.

As for what distro developers actually do… First, they build the tooling and infrastructure to make their distro work - package manager, packaging tools, repository, etc. Then, they are responsible for packaging everything available in the distro. They are pulling in source code for all these apps, compiling it and putting binaries in the repository. They rebuild packages as required when there are updates to the source code. Some distros like Arch will build vanilla packages, meaning they don’t make changes to upstream code. Others may apply their own patches for various reasons. Some like Red Hat will provide patches to upstream apps requested by customers as part of their paid support services. So let’s say something isn’t working the way you need it for some random FOSS app included with the distro. You can put in a request and they will change it for you.

As for your specific question about simulating Ubuntu on Fedora, that is not possible. They each use their own distinct package manager and repository. They generally have similar packages, but they are not interchangeable. However, there are tools like distrobox and distros like VanillaOS that have mechanisms for using another distro’s packages. These use containers under the hood so it’s not quite the same as just installing .deb on Fedora or .rpm on Ubuntu.

I don’t think so. The man is truly stupid.

To my knowledge, they did not violate the GPL. The sources are still available. They just don’t organize it in a way that it’s easy to build an exact clone of RHEL. If you want that, you have to have a RHEL subscription.

SUSE is going in a similar direction and not getting much heat. Leap is apparently going away in favor of Slowroll, which is similar to CentOS. If you want stable, you have to pay. Meanwhile, they are taking shots at Red Hat and throwing a little money at making a RHEL clone.

Because they can glide a long way and are stealthier without propellant. It’s still a standoff weapon. The B21 is a stone cold killer. It can get in fairly close undetected and drop from high altitude in still relatively safe airspace. The bombs are away without anyone ever knowing it was there. Then you’ve got a stealthy bomb gliding in silently. It probably shows up on radar like a raindrop.

Things could be better, but it’s a far cry from the IE monopoly days. It’s amusing to hear Microsoft complain. DDG and Kagi are both very good search engines and DDG is a built-in option on iOS. Kagi even requires a fee and it’s still blowing up in popularity. I think the real issue for Microsoft is nobody chooses Bing.

He behaves like he already has one.

This actually was the advance payment that he didn’t pay. He agreed to a $1.5M retainer and only paid a couple hundred thousand of it. I guess they got pretty deep into the case anyway. I doubt the next firm will make the same mistake. What a bum.

“We put a bigger number on the box.”

You would probably get more sound medical advice from your optometrist. Shit, I know chiropractors with more credibility. I wouldn’t trust this dude to check my blood pressure. He is a quack. The fact that he graduated from Harvard only means they made a mistake.