The US is making full usage of the bases in Europe to support Israel, without them it would have been logistically very hard; short of like the invasion of Afghanistan without the collaboration of Pakistan. These US bases fall under the US European Command (EUCOM) but are integrated into NATO’s architecture. The European NATO members, not only provide the bases, but subsidize the costs (e.g., infrastructure, utilities), therefore, becoming participants with the Israeli Campaign.

Countries can have some say. Spain, for instance, blocked some US airplanes destined to some campaigns, but it is just symbolic since the US just need not to declare the intention (or lie) and that is the end of the restrictions. It is not like Spain is going to inspect the vast amount of tonnage the US military is moving through Spanish ports, let alone between US bases. US could easily avoid the bases in Spain and use instead Germany, Italy and Morocco, but why would do so, when you can just humiliate your vassals in their face and have no repercussion at all… same as blowing up Nord Stream 2.

I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:

Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.

Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.

OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.

There are others but for niches.

China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.

We don’t know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know… Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.

Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.

OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years… I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.

Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won’t be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today

The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross… partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don’t see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.

Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!

I have to disagree here. The carpenter would ultimately had a similar quality of life with empire or without… Life in the west would be very different for sure, but i would not qualify it as worse. Consumerism would be replaced by a far more sustainable lifestyle and we would have replaced our incentives based on GDP long ago, but does not mean less quality of life, just a more just one.

I hear you Cowbee! I’ll be be reading that wiki page latter on today. But again, the regular European carpenter does not benefit from an “exploited” cheaper iron ore in the form of cheaper nails… Not even from cheaper wood, if anything, people will appreciate more wood and hire more carpenters to fix wood cabinets rather than dispose after being worn out… It is a complicated economy…Companies like Ikea do indeed benefit from exploitation, but not the Slovenian carpenter with a market with cheaper wood and cheaper nails.

Now, you could go with　that Ikea does benefit, so that those companies pay taxes that the carpenter will ultimately benefit from… I could see that, but, again, we know that these large corporation do not pay their fair taxes, let alone, compensate for the negative externalities they create, so i do see no net benefit to the average EU citizen on the exploitation their countries participate on.

That would be nice to debate, but I hardly see how that is possible. I see you posted that the EU does colonialism in Africa… The EU per se, only finances some NGOs that may have some hidden agenda but hardly substantial in those countries. The other EU’s domain is to assign free trade agreements with the poorest countries, but I don’t think it is conditional and hard to see as malicious. Now, the EU is clearly now exercising power well beyond its mandate and, what it is worse, for evil… Gosh, it is now even blatantly violitig it is own laws. What I do see exercising colonialism is by some member states, usually correlated with its own GDP and that they now shield themselves behind the EU flag.

That is what many “anti-colonial” gets wrong… they see it as a “white” vs “colored”; it is power against powerless. A carpenter in Slovenia does not have anything to do with colonialism in Africa, Americas or Asia, neither does a farmer in Salisbury or a fisherman in Bilbao… but their white vs colored argument is gold for the architects of colonialism since it shovels that carpenter, farmer and fisherman toward the powers be just for the skin color. Let us remember that groups of people, before embarking in colonialism, did not have any problem abusing and killing the neighbor. Racial distinction only became far more prominent in recent history.

When a neighbor to one side of your home actively participates is genocidal intent, and the other neighbor in the other side also does the same but he smiles at you and even lends you a cup of sugar when needed… I am sorry, but there is no “lesser evil” here… I will vote for anyone but any of them, even if there is no chance it will make a difference now!

However… that is not a ‘wasted’ vote, but actually an extremely important one… although for a longer term, for following elections. If Democrats see that they loose an election because they loose 3% of typical votes to a third party, they will try to accommodate the concerns of that 3% next time around. If that 3% keeps voting Democrats, there is no incentive to change. The same applies for the Republican side. If the big political parties don’t address that still, magic can happen, out of the blue, that 3% can become a 13% movement and donations start coming and in two or three years you have a chance of introducing a capable third party… either way is a win.

No voting, in theory, should have a similar wake-up power as a vote for a third party, but in reality it does not… in the mind of politicians it a much costlier vote to get to it ends usually dismissed as a lost cause; they don’t take much reading into 25% or 45% absentee vote… but 1% vote loss to the other side or a third party is watched as a hack, specially in highly polarized elections when it is hard to compensate that 1% loss with voters from the other side!

So mark what is your critical red lines and if no major party respects them, do vote for anyone, anyone that does, no mater how small… don’t try to do short-term political engineering since political parties have thousands of people far more capable than any of us at doing political engineering and start throwing around catchphrases such as “lesser evil” or that the other side is “fascist/communist” that is solely designed to leave you parallelized.

Finally, it is the problem of political deception. When it is so blatant in both sides, the same principle applies, vote for anyone, anyone that has not lied on your red lines so far, make your mark that you are sick of deceptions so politicians know they have to address it. Again, don’t try to find the lesser evil while indicating your neighbor that smiles at you, that you are okay tolerating with his crimes and deceptions.

I have to give it that the Fedora distros are a slightly bit superior to Ubuntu variants but for those that value some degree of not favoring corporate US (IBM/Red Hat) that provides AI resources for Israel’s military to do what it is doing… Myself I tried to like Mint, I really did… but could not… not just it is old-fashioned looking but has limitations with scaling and others.

Now, I do recognize for the initiators is it great! Now, for those that find Mint ugly I recommend TuxedoOS… I find it as good as Kubuntu but without its known limitations with flatpaks. Yes, TuxedoOS was created for Tuxedo laptops but they left it open to use it with others so no problems at all and very well maintained. Now, you may want remove the Tuxedo app that they installed just to free some resources… a 10-seconds thing to do. Drawback is servers in Germany so a bit slower updates than usual for most.

One little fact not known by non-Americans is that In the United States, immigration officers are granted full authority to operate without any warrant within a 100-mile zone from any U.S. border… they can enter in the homes of 2/3 of Americans (200 million) without any explanation!! And now in masks and without visible IDs… It is going to be fun!

Thanks for the info and all references you do in Lemmy. I don´t consider myself with a similar ideology as you, but indeed I am learning lots of info from your posts.

I was aware of the atrocities and agreement violations, but not that perspective that colonials wanted to get free from any agreements the British did with the natives… Is that a common knowledge in the academia, disputed or a minority one? It is not to discredit it at all the idea, just to genuinely know its status at university level?

True… we should identify those users using just the browser and basic word processor operations. Make sure their printers are well connected and they will notice barely any changes at all… Us, power users, are who actually struggle with the conversion so we tend not to persuade non power users because we think we will bring them similar headaches.

If the user uses just browser and a word editor, he/she is ready since 8 years ago without any mayor hiccup.

Glad for you. It is not as easy as they paint it, specially here, but moving to Linux still good in so many aspects and I applaud you for doing so. Hold on tight on the ride, it is frustrating sometimes but worth it overall.

I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…

Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.

I am still no able to get my message through.

Of course, it is easy to fork, is that when you depend solely on a entity that it is prone to abandon you, you wont have the resources to continue the development. US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left. This is not far fetched, this is what happens with Android and Firefox. If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!

I am afraid we are taking different things here… I look in a long perspective view, you in a inmediate future, where, as you said, no big changes if a dominant FOSS project goes hostile. The lack of expertise, culture makes it really hard in fact. Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.

So true eldavi! The “Russian kernel maintainers” event was a big red flag for me. I know Linux had no choice to expel them due to the law, but the fact that Linus Torvalds did not thank them for the job done (if he kept them till then , Torvalds clearly has see their contributions as beneficial), and Torvalds did not try to reassure the audience that hardly any code is posted unsupervised in a open source… that was the main scandal for me, far more than the ban. I had known that Torvalds was a rude person, many maintainers are and I am ok with that, but that event showed me that not only easily folds to government requests, but that also he believes it is ok to do these things against people you don’t like…

In his own words; “please use whatever mush you call brains. I’m Finnish”. I don’t think he referred to the Finland that thrived the most in its history during the period of maintaining a strong military culture yet NEUTRAL (1948-2023) and away from NATO, but he deeply meant the Finland that sided with Germany in the early 40s in order to stick-it to Moscow. Would he stop at firing developers or would be willing to do more for the cause? I bet many wonder.

I feel that I am being misinterpreted here. Of course FOSS if infinitely preferable to most close source, even if FOSS was created by the devil itself! And I am neutral US army branches using FOSS or not, that is not a problem for us civilians per se; the US army just using FOSS when they have unlimited budget and have home-brewed closed sources available and still choose Linux just proves that FOSS is superior! Now, that Red Hat depends heavily on US government contracts (mostly US armed forces) should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics (again, I say ethics and a little bit privacy concerns), not technological, at least no in the short term. However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily). Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them… now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero. That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources. It is just a principle, of course, I tell my audience that they can use Fedora and I understand it, it is technologically a bit better than Mint, yet not quite not as an ethical choice, nor good for the technology ecosystem in the long run either. Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master. This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.

BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)

“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition… this applies to both open or closed software. Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer. IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.

Open software is great and a reassurance that no altering can go unnoticed but let’s be realistic, when is the last time some entity, let alone non-American) audited a entire package of Fedora, let alone every single version of it, or smaller software. Debian is a US based but highly global collaborative distro so malice is far harder to introduce and gone unnoticed. Mint is based on Ireland so hardly with an militaristic goal, either by maintainers, financiers or country. My current OpenSUSE is far more susceptible to tampering than Mint, but it still cannot reach the knees of Fedora on susceptibility. We should look at Android and Chrome… It is free, opensource, but the fact that Google de-facto controls it, uses it to dominate the landscape, first by suffocating competition and then, to steer where it wants the technology to go to. Therefore that it is opensource is great, we can check the code once in a while,

I am one of the very few that recognize Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu deviates yet I think we should steer clear from it. To newcomers, I tell them the reality; in my opinion Fedora is the marginally the best linux distro, now, if ethics (and a little bit privacy) is one of the motives to move away from Windows, you should consider distros not so heavily relying on the US and Mint usually comes first in my mind for them. We don’t want to get to the point that Fedora is so vastly superior to all the rest of Linux distros, that will be the only game in town… like we did by solely go after Android (I really miss what my Nokia N9’s Meego could have become!)

Fedora (and related distros, including Bazzite) are indeed superior. The gap is even larger when comparing Atomic distros… sorry to say… Red Hat’s money does show! Now, for many to use any Red Hat’s variant, whether because of ideology, non-American (hat tip to lemmy.ml/u/eugenia), ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc… I find it concerning. The only one I find it as a valid option, specially if for an corporation in the US, is Alma Linux. I find Mint the most newbie friendly and also extremely stable. Like you, I dislike Cinnamon enormously, (puzzled why they decided to ditch KDE!) but I still recommended to new people in Linux. Personally, I still in the quest to find the one for me (been with OpenSUSE for a few months but with my eyes on TuxedoOS already). I agree that Atomic distros seems to be the future for most users, but beside Bazzite, don’t think the others are equally stable (someone correct me if I am wrong). Bazzite however, as expressed above, comes from a murky parent that many linux fans, specially those in lemmy.ml, should be wary of. Think of it as Android, as a phone OS is great, probably the best there is today, but coming from the corporation as it comes from, from the country it comes from that uses sanctions as it does, should be a ‘no thank you’ for most in the world. Now, Debian also is a US registered distro, yes, but, unlike Red Hat-IBM or Google’s products, it is far more universal and with enough human capital abroad that easily can fork it, it need be. Same apply as the Linux kernel (that is why China went that route). I however, for the future, I like the idea of Arch, and wonder if ever can be made stable and waiting for someone to propel Arch into a stable variant and not just another “gaming distro” (crossing my fingers in KDE’s new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes. [My first post in this type of social media!!]