I'm gonna keep it real with you, I'll take "weirdo CEO and optional AI tools" over "corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation" any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they're not viable options.

It seems to me that you've just made up your mind and as such are not invested in even trying to understand other arguments.

We don't have time to spin up enough infrastructure to match current production with renewable energy. Consumption must come down until then, and only scale up once the new infrastructure can handle it.

But one thing I always thought should be obligatory was that during installation of such programs, only the resources absent from the system would be added to the installation/system and any other resource bundled would be automatically discarded, thus saving disk space and avoiding redundant libraries present on the system.

Do flatpaks have such working structure?

It's possible, but rarely allowed because that would produce instability. Linux programs are built to rely on a specific version of a library. Depending on how much actually changes, you can sometimes get away with using a different version than the one it expects, but the more it changes the riskier it gets.

One of the major goals of flatpaks was to create a way for developers to ship one build that was guaranteed to run the same regardless of distro or environment. The isolation is very much the point. It does use more storage space, but in most cases it's not enough to matter. When storage space is at a premium, yeah, you generally want to avoid containers. They trade space for stability.

Pretty much everything in the Linux space is converging on this concept. Desktop is moving to immutability with flatpak apps. The server space has been entirely taken over by containers. Even Valve has shipped a separate Linux runtime for as long as they've officially supported it, and they're progressing on deeper containerization. You can direct it to run against your native packages instead of the runtime, but it's rarely a good idea.

The point is that it gives developers a single target that they can all rely on, instead of having to account for 20 distros with multiple still-supported versions each. And believe me, these efforts have made Linux so much easier as a user as well. It used to be that lots developers only targeted Ubuntu. Trying to get anything to run on another system was off like pulling teeth. Now, you can almost always expect to find a flatpak instead which runs on any distro.

What does known-good mean?

Known-good meaning a tested and working configuration approved by the developers/maintainers.

What if a security vulnerability is found in one of the dependencies. With an old-style distribution there is a security team that monitors security reports and they will provide a fixed package.

Flatpak is just another model of distribution. There isn't really anything that needs to change here. The bugs are fixed upstream and they get pushed via the method of distribution, which is Flathub in this case.

The security team in a given distribution is charged with getting upstream fixes backported and shipped. There's no need for this role because they're just shipped directly in most cases.

With flatpaks it's not clear to me if those developers will monitor each dependency for security vulnerabilities and how they will handle that.

The developers are usually the ones doing the fixes in the first place.

Will users even be informed about a security issue, will a fix be backported or will it only be available in the latest version?

Well, fixes don't normally need to be backported because flatpaks are usually fresh. They're just built normally in most cases.

For notifications, you'd have to follow the relevant projects directly.

What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first.

I'm capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.

Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.

Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I'm sad that Chomsky's age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.

That's what I do. All my IOT stuff that I can't get wired or via Zigbee/Z-Wave goes on a separate VLAN along with my Home Assistant server. I have an mDNS repeater for ease of access to TV stuff via apps (might spin TVs off into its own VLAN, just haven't gotten around to it) but a 1-way firewall rule that only allows the main network to initiate connections. Certain devices which don't need internet at all get static IPs and completely firewalled.

The reason Linux only grew with the Steam Deck is because an operating system only grows if it's preinstalled on a popular device. Average users do not install their own OS. If you were actually in tune with average users, you would know this. It has nothing to do with Linux users making jokes amongst themselves.

Brief disruption of a single large-scale pollutant out of a million more just like it, before being thrown in jail for decades on terrorism charges, is not "actual disruption". Statistically it doesn't even rise above random noise in terms of effect, and people would hate them more, not less. They would be branded violent terrorists trying to destroy our infrastructure. You would be sacrificing everything and all other forms of effectiveness to have the tiniest, barely-detectable impact on the root issue.

The problem is systemic, and so must be the solution. You cannot break a system by destroying one of a million nodes in the system. If we had the power to stop this via direct action, we would have already long been capable of solving this with political action well before that point.

This is already the case with your motherboard firmware, which fTPM is a part of. You are correct in that you have no real way to handle malware in it except throw it away. This doesn't change in any way if you get rid of TPM.

I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next

I'm not talking 30 minutes. There should be options that let the player do it in a few, depending on the scale.

Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.

You're encouraging bad design in order to facilitate bad content. There also shouldn't be much if any mailman content either, that's just filler.

I will never tire of people who do not grasp linguistics trying to be pedantic about words.

In a living language, words mean whatever people currently use them to mean. This is how "literally" literally doesn't mean "literally" anymore. Most people use Nazi to refer to both 1930s German National Socialists and modern day white supremacists. Therefore, that's what it means. English is not a dead language like Latin, so stop trying to treat it like one with regards to this one word. It just makes you look like a Nazi.