Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.

Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?

How does GDPR mandate a public audit of the code base? Is there such a provision in it? (Not a confrontational question)

If customizability is your concern, then Arch might be a better fit. Arch is almost as customizable, without the build step. The recent Gentoo binary repo is also equivalent.

I use Gentoo too. But it’s for another reason.

There are two disturbing tendencies being demonstrated here:

1. Using useless AI to engage and disperse complaining customers. The AI can’t make meaningful solutions to many customer complaints. But companies use it to annoy the customers into giving up, so that they can save the cost of real customer support.
2. Either blaming the AI or insisting that it’s right, when it makes a mistake. AI by nature is biased and unpredictable. But that doesn’t stop the companies from saying ‘the computer says so’.

These companies need a few high profile hefty penalties as a motivation to avoid such dirty tricks.

If you mean the manual installation process, you can use debootstrap in the step where you use pacstrap for arch.

Isolation is easy to achieve. Flatpak’s sandboxing layer is bubblewrap. It’s an independent software. It wouldn’t be too hard to write a wrapper for bubblewrap that acts like flatpak and launches applications in a carefully constructed sandbox.

Flatpak itself is a layer of software. You could do that for regular apps too - to take away the hassle of having to manually set it up for each app. I already have two software that implements that logic in parts.

If you’re interested in sandboxing, then you need just the bubblewrap - not the entire bubblewrap.

Flatpaks aren’t the cause of the fact that different applications don’t function correctly with different versions of libraries

This problem has been solved by Nix and Guix. Nix is as popular among developers as flatpak is. Add bubblewrap to all applications, and you get nearly all the features as flatpaks. Flatpaks, meanwhile are huge and a bit slow to start - problems that Nix and Guix don’t suffer from.

I do use flatpaks extensively. But they are probably not the best solution to the problems you mention.>

I don’t like the monarchy either. But I assume you haven’t seen anyone suffer from cancer. If you did, it’s a misery you won’t wish on your worst enemies.

Why would any other company complain?

Forget making it open source. There’s no other app or platform with so many dark patterns. Their web app is utter crap on mobile in an attempt to push users to the mobile app. The last thing we need is another social media company twisting the hands of its users. People should simply abandon that crapware.

Freeze peach absolutist, ya all!

I don’t like the wordings and insinuations in the article. Ubuntu Linux ‘snuck’ into Dell laptops? Dell - best known for good-quality mass-produced PCs - end up building Linux laptops? What are they saying? Linux is low quality and it being in Dell laptops is bad?

Dell and Canonical have a partnership. And Linux isn’t a choice that’s forced on consumers. That’s hardly what one can say about Windows. An ad-ridden spyware that’s disguised as an OS and forced down everyone’s throat even when we don’t want it. (Not dell, but there are cases where I had to buy a laptop and clean out Windows).

I don’t understand the author’s exact intentions (I read the entire article). Seems like they are trying to say something positive. But the choice of words is bad.

I don’t remember exactly who, but there was one game developer who was all praises for that 1%. The Linux users were the most prolific testers who sent back detailed bug reports with ways to recreate the bug, logs and often core dumps even. That 1% helped the devs, as well as the other 99%.