Excuse the ignorance, what am I actually reading about here?

I read the first few paragraphs and an out of my league.

What are 'we' trying to achieve?

Yes. I'm British.

I live these old stories. Kinda gave up programming by 1996. It was a short-sighted thing to do!

Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don't remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn't realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).

I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.

I agree. I used it to move my vocab on enormously.

Thank-you. Thought so but wasn't sure.

Does prevent side-loading effectively cause problems for open source F-Droid? Apologies for ignorance.

Foot in mouth*

This got me wondering about lionising Go in films. I think I need to start a such a movement amongst directors or screen writers.

I'm hilariously bad at chess. I learned the fools gambit and never progressed.

Oh ok.

I haven't been to a circus recently. My knowledge in that area is wanting, I'll admit. 😳

All good!

It's actually not that pricey for what you get from it. The problem is that they have a tendency to be closed mouthed about their plans.

I bought a 2.5 GBE router, to replace my elderly and difficult USG, and was about to buy a 2.5 GBE WAP - there was a problem with them having issues with only one chipset inside the first version, so I didn't pull the trigger immediately. Within a month there was a 10 GBE WAP being sold. A 10 GBE Router appear soon after. Damn.

The only viable alternative, IMHO, is pfsense (mostly US users) and opensense (not US users) and you need your own hardware.

I run my Gateway without a UI login, a local account. I lose some of the features, but that's ok with me.

Debian Developers are prone to add their own bits with the upstream package. Sometimes it is very useful, sometimes not. They add the relevant systemd units in and turn them on for you and also set up the cron jobs according to which dev prepared the package.

You don't have to install systemd with Debian (I think?). The row when systemd started to gain traction and DDs debated its inclusion for ages lead to a strange set of decisions, IMHO, about the filesystem layout, which is quite different to what a systemd person would expect, to make it work with the other low level system that is being used.

I thought I saw that sysv stuff is being marked for being removed from the kernel at some stage. Am I imagining that? I don't know what the alternative init systems are now.

Anyway, Debian is a fine distro.

Suggest you run a desktop with prioritised apt-pinning on Testing and Sid. It makes it semi-rolling and it's stable as anything. The community makes sure that less than an hour goes past before someone posts a solution to a package error and for that reason I suggest that you always install the apt package scripts which provide the change logs and known bugs with that package before you hit install.

The feedback from the community upstream to the DDs is amazing.

I hope aptitude - an apt TUI - is still being used as that's one of my favourite ever Debian utilities; a lot of the packages show as hard dependencies when you install them individually but are actually covered by other packages already installed; you can reduce the unused packages in your system by marking the packages auto installed yourself in aptitude very easily. There are several other packages in the repos to do all manner of interesting things. The community spirit is very very strong.

Good luck and have fun.

I found that starting with a debootstrap minimal install from a live distro (I like ArchLinux as a rescue usb, but there are plenty of others on distrowatch.com) and adding a kernel was the best way to go to try to keep the numbers of packages down in my Debian systems. YMMV. My experience was coming up to a decade ago now though, although lots of hardware vendors always love their Debian; UniFi was a Debian fan last time I looked at the controller.

The irony of using 'Z' in the title.

It's our language; you broke it.

[grin] I get that!

I'm sure that there are others I used to like - I'm an old fart - but this is the only one that occurs to me now.

For some reason, my long term memory stopped in the late nineties. I'm convinced that there are series I've watched that I loved that it's going to take a replay to remember that I loved the incoming theme.

There were several cult shows on BBC2 and ITV back then: Thirty-Something, a few about UK barristers, Moving Story. Damned if I can remember any of the theme tunes.

Cars younger than last century have two modes of indicator available.

[ BMW, Merc and Audi drivers: nothing to see here. Not in this whole post and comments. ]

A soft push in either direction gives a brief - I don't know what the definition/legal requirement is - period where the indicator flashes before cancelling itself.

A harder push has the indicator stay in that position until the steering wheel or the driver cancels it and it stops.

Maybe you're complaining about people using the soft mode.

In my country, there is no requirement to indicate when moving back to your lane after moving into the/a overtaking lane. I think that's a little weird tbh. I've always indicated, wherever I'm going, on the basis that when I don't, someone will sideswipe me through my own negligence.

Of course, these days the sodding lane-change Nazi in my car won't let me pass any line, but happily forcefully steers me into the hedgerow/ditches on country lanes where there are no road markings. You can turn it off every time but not generally.

Hell, I remember a time people just said "um", "er" quietly and paused between words when they hadn't thought the thought through.

Instead now they use 'like' as a space between words whilst the processing is still taking place.

It gets real confusing when what they're explaining is the concept of similes.