canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African
Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.
The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.
Not quite the same thing I think.
My understanding of "no contingency" is more to do with inspections, certifications etc. I.e. an offer has been made that isn't going to be cancelled if the structural survey comes back with a load of issues to fix.
"Chains" in UK real estate lingo are about whether your sale is tied to other sales. For example, if you're buying a house from an owner-occupier who won't move out (and give you your new house) until the new house that they're buying is ready- that's an onward chain. A chain in the other direction would be someone who says that they'll buy a house, but will only have the money to make the purchase once they've got a sale locked in for their current house. Selling a house with "no onward chain" is telling the buyer that they can have it as soon as they've got the money, and that the seller isn't waiting for anything.
Chains can get very messy and complicated, as you can end up with s dozen house sales all tied up with each other waiting for one house in the chain to be ready to go before any of the others can go.
I've just discovered that the vets in my town are owned by Mars Inc.
You know, of "Mars Bars" fame.
Who knew?
It probably isn't legal most places. EULAs are already considered fairly flimsy in terms of enforcement, but changing an EULA after you've already bought a device, in such a way as to reduce your statutory rights, is almost certainly a complete non-starter.
It's also loud.
I don't need or want everyone sat in the same room as me to know every little thing I do on my phone. Leaving aside things that are actually private, that's just a level of inane garbage that we all don't need to know about each other.
Sometimes I just want to glance at the football scores without announcing to everyone: "OK Google, what is the current score for the football match between Swindon Town and Harrogate?".
Edit: It's currently nil-nil, if you're wondering.
We don't have a monopoly on one class of device, we have monopolies on five different classes of device. That's definitely different and better!
Fortnite uses Easy Anti Cheat, which is made by Epic (that is, Fortnite's own developer). EAC works fine on Linux; it just needs the developer to enable it.
I've been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it's baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There's lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, "is this thing pleasant to use" stakes, they just never manage to get it right.
Windows 7 was...fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.
When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can't get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.
Use an alternative, or
Use Wine/Proton, or
Use a web app if it exists, or
Run Windows in a VM.
For me, the first 3 options covers 99.9% of my usage. It's been a long time since I had to worry about installing Windows in a VM.
But to be fair, my requirements to use Windows software are very limited and non-critical. If:
A lot of programs I work with very often are Windows-exclusive
...then I would certainly consider keeping a Windows laptop around. Right tool for the job and all that.
I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of "ew, snap", but it's a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical's dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
There's so much to dislike, but I think the thing that irrationally bugs me the most is the fact that they chose a 6 panel door and just chopped the top off it right through the panels. Instead of, you know, just buying a different kind of door.
I'm currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can't be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.
If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.