fr0g

I’m not even sure Taiwan makes that claim, but if they do then I’m fine with that.

They do. The official government line currently is that they have no need to formally declare independence (which might trigger a Chinese invasion) because they already are an independent country by most meaningful measures (which is true of course)

I had heard they view themselves as the legitimate government of a (unified) China.

That used to be the official position decades ago. But apart from a few old nationalistic farts maybe, nobody on Taiwan really holds that position anymore.

Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill.

Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who’s just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn’t this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?

I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it’s annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.

I just can’t help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I’m just not getting.

It will stop a lot of people from entering random commands they googled up though.

Even most of the Linux apps use Shazam or similar for the backend. Most everything you will find in that area has some proprietary components and I can imagine that being hard to avoid for something that has to interface with licensed content (the music)

How does installing packages or configuring software work, if system files can’t be changed?

On reboot. You install your changes into a separate part of the filesystem that’s not running and then “switch parts” on next boot. Different distros do this differently. Vanilla OS has an AB system which basically works like Android does it, openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots and Fedora also uses btrfs I think but they got a more complex layering system on top.

I get that there’s a security benefit just in that malware can’t change system files – but that is achieved by proper permission management on traditional systems too.

Is it though? All it takes is a misconfiguration or exploit to bypass it, so having several layers of protection isn’t a bad thing and how any reasonably secure system works. And having parts of your system predetermined as read only is a comparably tough nut to crack.

“I don’t really have anything to hide, but you never know whether the government might act authoritarian at some point. So best to be safe and use privacy tools.”

French police: “Hold my tear gas”