Laser

Military deployments aren't "meat grinders" for your own troops if they're well-equipped and trained. That's the whole point of western militaries.

War is shit. But as an ex-soldier: you know what you sign up for. I also expected it during my service, though it never happened.

It's like saying calling firefighters to rescue someone from a burning house is only acceptable if you ran into it first. It makes no sense.

The fact that this wasn't a three day operation is in large part sure to the US. But your portrayal of the facts makes no sense. Nobody is forcing Ukraine to ask the US for help (except Russia). The US obliges because it does align with their interest. But in the end, all international help at scale is motivated by national interest.

Testing out new battlefield technology before the next Great War.

Should a nation only fight with pre-agreed equipment that is at least of a certain age?

Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine the geopolitical motives and interests of the US don't necessarily align with their interests.

Well, they for sure don't align with Russia's.

Like Chomsky says "we will fight them to the last Ukrainian"

Or was it North Korean?

How was Ukraine "destabilized" compared to other comparable ex-USSR states until 2014?

And it worked. Which is why Russia invaded in 2014

If a country being in US orbit is a reason for Russia to attack it, why didn't they attack Finland? Or the US directly in Alaska? What's the significance with Ukraine?

There's none other that Russia thought it was an easy target, breaking the Budapest Memorandum (and later other agreements). The same memorandum btw granted Ukraine non-military aid from the US and France, so the argument that this was somehow a dirty play makes no sense.

Who hates ChromeOS? Never heard someone say that

I don't know, but probably higher than doing the right thing for the right reasons.

While I do get your sentiment, we currently see in Ukraine what happens if you don't have a defense industry: You're reliant on other countries to supply you in case a hostile nation notices that you're lacking it.

Truly unexceptable

Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

By less than a year judging by the article... and for individual applications, there was AppImage.

Snaps can do things flatpaks can't do. Which is true but also kind of irrelevant if we're talking about a means to distribute applications in a cross-distribution manner as opposed to a base system A/B partition solution.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Everyone should use what suits them best. My negative opinion on snaps doesn't mean Ubuntu shouldn't ship it or that users shouldn't use it. It's Canonical's distribution, they can put into it whatever they want for all I care, and if users are happy with it, good for them. But I can still criticize it for perceived issues. (Edit: kind of a straw man since nobody said I couldn't, I just wanted to stress that I'm not authoritative on the matter)

But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.

I used Ubuntu in the past, from I think 2004 or maybe 2005 to 2008, but switched away because of other issues that I don't remember anymore, but I do remember upgrades between major versions were always pain with an Nvidia card (this was before AMD or in the beginning even ATI cards were well-usable under Linux) and I honestly just prefer rolling release nowadays. But snaps are just not at all compelling anyways.

All that follows is my personal opinion, but for ease of writing, I'm gonna present it as facts.

Once you have grasped the advantage that Nix offers, all the fundamentally different solutions just seem s o inferior. When I first tried NixOS on a decommissioned notebook, the concept immediately made sense. Granted, I didn't understand the language features very well – I mostly used it for static configuration with most stuff just written verbatim in configuration.nix, though I did use flakes very early on because of Lanzaboote. But just the fact that you had a central configuration in a single language that was able to cross-reference itself across different parts of the system absolutely blew me out of the water. I was a very happy and content Arch user, even proficient enough to run my own online repository that built from a clean chroot for AUR packages (if you use Arch with AUR packages on multiple systems, check out the awesome aurutils!), but after seeing the power of NixOS in action, I switched over all my machines as soon as I could - desktop, virtual servers (thanks nixos-anywhere!), main notebook and NAS.

People often praise the BSDs for their integrated approach – NixOS manages to bring that approach to Linux. Apart from GUIX System that I never tried because Secure Boot was a requirement when I last looked at other distributions, none of them have tackled the problem that NixOS solves, and it's not even certain if they actually understand it. Conceptually, it plays on a whole different level. No more unrecoverable systems, even with broken kernels – just boot the previous configuration. Want to try changes without any commitment? nixos-rebuild test got you. Need an app quick? nix shell nixpkgs#app it is.

Plus the ecosystem is just fantastic. The aforementioned nixos-anywhere really helps with remote provisioning, using disko to declaratively setup filesystems and mounts, you have devenv which is a really good solution for development environments, both regarding reproducibility and features, and many more that I can't mention here. There is nothing comparable, and the possibilities are unlike in any other ecosystem.

It's not perfect for sure though, and documentation is sparse. The language concepts which allow one to "unlock" the most powerful features are different from what most people know.

I was lucky enough to have some downtime at work to get into the system a bit deeper (this was still for work though, just not my core skillset) by implementing a "framework" for our needs which forced me to not just copy and paste stuff, though I definitely did get inspired from other solutions, but to actually better understand the module system (I think?), thinking in attribute sets, writing your own actual modules, function library and so on. But in the end, it was definitely worth it, and I'm unaware of any other system that would allow what Nix and NixOS allowed me to build.

I don't like snaps because it's just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

On the other hand, you have snaps, which is being controlled by Canonical as the server component is l non-public. The packages sometimes work worse than normal debs and the flatpak version (steam being a notable example IIRC).

There is 0 motivation for me as a user to look into that. They have solved the problem in one of the worst ways possible. Even Mint, which is Ubuntu's biggest downstream, has opted against including it by default.

In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.

So you have a system that is

• proprietary
• worse than the alternatives
• pushed on users even through unexpected channels

Ubuntu's mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn't.

Which bridge did they build with snaps?

It's a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros

Which in turn have removed snaps by default and replaced the affected packages with native ones because it often didn't "just work"

It's not because they're "natural allies", is to disincentivize trade with Russia and therefore propping them up.