How does it compare to NixOS?

I’d be very skeptical of claims that Debian maintainers actually audit the code of each piece of software they package. Perhaps they make some brief reviews, but actually scrutinizing every line for hidden backdoors is just not feasible.

It works fine for me on Hyprland.

That is why I use just int main(){...} without arguments instead.

I don’t think any kind of “poisoning” actually works. It’s well known by now that data quality is more important than data quantity, so nobody just feeds training data in indiscriminately. At best it would hamper some FOSS AI researchers that don’t have the resources to curate a dataset.

What makes these consumer-oriented models different is that that rather than being trained on raw data, they are trained on synthetic data from pre-existing models. That’s what the “Qwen” or “Llama” parts mean in the name. The 7B model is trained on synthetic data produced by Qwen, so it is effectively a compressed version of Qen. However, neither Qwen nor Llama can “reason,” they do not have an internal monologue.

You got that backwards. They’re other models - qwen or llama - fine-tuned on synthetic data generated by Deepseek-R1. Specifically, reasoning data, so that they can learn some of its reasoning ability.

But the base model - and so the base capability there - is that of the corresponding qwen or llama model. Calling them “Deepseek-R1-something” doesn’t change what they fundamentally are, it’s just marketing.

There are already other providers like Deepinfra offering DeepSeek. So while the the average person (like me) couldn’t run it themselves, they do have alternative options.

A server grade CPU with a lot of RAM and memory bandwidth would work reasonable well, and cost “only” ~$10k rather than 100k+…

To be fair, most people can’t actually self-host Deepseek, but there already are other providers offering API access to it.

I’m confused, isn’t Fedora atomic immutable? Shouldn’t that make it stateless automatically?

I’m sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort…

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn’t do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.

They are major concerns, but they aren’t the only reasons people would use Linux, and also not everyone who uses Linux does it for these reasons. For example, while I care about them, my most important reason for using it is utility features such as my tiling WM.

That only works if the main reason someone uses Linux is personal privacy.

upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment

So when they say “openness” they do put it in the context of open source rather accessibility.