“CIA didn’t like that”

Project Cybersyn

Closet Land (1991)

For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.

—Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (2012)

(paraphrased) “The user of the illegal service may fund the activities of criminal organisations, says Executive Director Jaana Pihkala from the copyright organisation TTVK.”

as opposed to paying the even more criminal publishers scalping the rights and screwing the creators

• Codeberg
• sourcehut
• radicle
• self hosted

the whole concept of immutable is focused on stability and safety of your system – yes, it is still possible to break an immutable distro, but it’s a LOT harder and takes some actual effort – there’s also a few concepts wrapped up into the “immutable” phrasing:

• immutable filesystem – the root filesystem is set as read only, updates are queued up and applied during an upgrade (some distros require a reboot, some don’t)
  • VanillaOS keeps two copies of the root system (ABroot), upgrades the inactive copy and then swaps them out
  • NixOS has everything defined in a master config file and keeps an archive of previous generations of the config file allowing you to boot into whichever generation you want
• atomicity – updates are applied individually and checked, if the update breaks then it’s reverted to the previous working state (ie. you are never left with a borked system)
• containerized apps – user space apps isolated or sandboxed in some way like Flatpaks or Docker containers or OCI so if they break, they don’t take anything else down with them
• declarative systems – the whole system (and packages and configs) are defined (declared) in one master config file – back up that config file and if something happens to your system, you just need that one file to do a full rebuild (or make an identical copy of your system on another computer) – NixOS and GNU Guix are the two more well-known in this space
  • EDIT: minor side-effect of this is you can easily tell exactly what packages are installed on your system at any given time – no hunting through history or trying to remember what you installed last month when you were testing out video players