I heavily doubt Germany could make that change. It’s pretty analog country still on a lot of things and stuff like card payments aren’t available everywhere. My bet would be Estonia. Here in Finland we’re pretty digital on everything already but a crapload of offices (both public and private) are pretty heavily married to M365 (and microsoft in general) environment and workflows and have been for quite a while so even if I would absolutely like to see the change I don’t see it happening any time soon.

And then there’s the plain scale of things. You can find at least half decent windows helpdesk/admin staff everywhere but (at least in here) similar linux knowledge just isn’t around. Plus then there’s areas where linux just don’t have replacements on windows environment. Basic desktop stuff is easy, but replacing AD forests with GPOs just doesn’t have similarily easy replacement. There’s of course workarounds and you can get similar end results but you’ll need a skilled admin and pretty tightly controlled environment to do that.

They even said that if it proves too difficult, they will return to Microsoft

And, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure they’ll decide it’s too difficult. They’d need capable linux-admins and helpdesk personnel, training for employees and someone to deal with the people who just won’t even try to change. All of that costs money (and time, but that’s the same thing), and quite a lot of it at first and benefits will come slowly over time.

I came to suggest HGST but apparently I’ve been living under a rock, it’s been sold to WD over a decade ago. And yes, I know Hitachi is not European. Brand name is still around and the drives seem to be pretty decent, but they (too) are owned by US company and manufactured in China/Thailand.

No. Don’t try to twist this into something that it’s not.

“Up to now, prosecutors have had to show that an attacker used violence or threatening behaviour, or had sexual intercourse with someone who was unable to resist, to secure a conviction for rape.”

“Under the new law passed by parliament, anyone who has sex with someone who has not consented to it by word or deed could be convicted of rape, even without violence.”

The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

No one kept Russia weak when Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia and it was heavily leaning towards west on multiple areas. Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.

And then get screwed over when you’re using another system without said alias. As I need to work on multiple different linux-hosts both as a selfhoster and on work I’d strongly suggest against aliasing any system command to something else and getting used to it.

Yesterday evening I got a pop-up that I should disable ublock from youtube. Refreshing page got rid of that but apparently it’s time for me to run some updates on this thing. I’ve seen that few times, google changes something and as I’m a bit lazy to run updates my system sometimes gives the pop up.

Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There’s been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I’ve also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they’ll run just fine even at -30C as long as they’re shielded from elements other than temperature.

And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.

Also when sodium hydroxide reacts with acid it releases CO2 and it affects growth of at least some fungus. Also, if a brick sized fuel cell can provide 1kWh and single transatlantic flight consumes at least 20MWh you’d need a pile big enough to build a house which doesn’t sound feasible.

But I’m not a chemist either, I suppose it boils down to comparing negative effects between this new cell against kerosine. Plus there’s always the case which affects any new kind of storing energy where it’ll be indefinetly ‘ready for market in next 5 years’.

My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.

So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.

I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.

Edit: Mine is Epson, didn’t know that ecotank term is used by other manufacturers.

I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

I might need to switch over as well, but I really don’t like rpm (or whatever that’s called on fedora, zypper or something? or was that suse?). I’ve been a Debian user since woody was a new thing and then at some point I gradually moved to ubuntu due to better desktop experience and more up to date packages (back then Debian stable really wasn’t anywhere close of bleeding edge) and PPA support was great for my needs. Now I have ubuntu installations which have gone trough upgrades for years and installations I have doesn’t seem to work like I want them to. Some of the issues will most likely stay (as RMS said, nvidia rapes babies or something like that) but in general I don’t like my browser, signal client and whatnot to notify me that I need to shut them down NOW since they’ll upgrade at some point in next 3-6 months. Simple apt dist-upgrade isn’t enough anymore and the systems require more and more TLC than I’m willing to give to them. Snapd is at least related to the issues I have 8 times out of 10.

Ubuntu just doesn’t have the feel it used to and it’s getting annoying enough that the simpler way would be just to reinstall everything and switch to something else, even if it takes some time and effort to migrate 5+ year old installations to new system.