I’m considering getting a Switch 1 now. I can find hackable ones for €100 in my area.

But then again, it doesn’t really do anything I can’t do with my other devices.

Well, IRL hacking doesn’t have exciting gameplay mechanics. So more realistic hacking game might not be such a clever idea.

Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don’t lose out on modern technology development.

(For clarification, with “war time” I mean “being in a war that actually threatens the country”. The US hasn’t been in a war like that for a very long time. They’ve essentially being in “peace time” while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.)

You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.

That’s the same on Git.

10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

(Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I’m sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)

Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.

https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html

Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite

So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.

I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was “just” a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.

The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.

Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep anymore.

But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven’t done it yet.

If you don’t root your Android you can even run a full desktop Linux in a proot container. You can run all Android apps and Linux apps on it. Using Winlator you can even run most Windows apps and there are emulators for most systems out there. If you cann that “barely anything” you are lacking imagination.

Apparently you haven’t used Chromebooks or MacOS, but you clearly misunderstand the topic at hand.

There’s always a balance between configurability and stability, and every single OS, even Windows, falls somewhere on that spectrum. If you allow a user to break their system, the downside is that they can break their system.

iOS, unrooted Android and ChromeOS fall on the “less ability to break your system”-side with Windows and MacOS following rather closely, and different Linux distros are on the full spectrum in between. Immutable distros make it harder to break yous system at the cost of immediate configurability, while running Arch you can do whatever you want and you’ll likely destroy your OS while doing so, if you don’t know what you are doing.

Again, all of that are choices done in user-space, nothing about that comes down to the kernel. You can make any Linux distro entirely unbreakable by taking away sudo rights for the current user and making every non-temporary directories and files read-only. You can do that in 10 minutes and suddenly there’s nothing the user can do to break the system. But the user also loses a lot of abilities. Again: all of that is user-space only and has nothing to do with the kernel.

And yes, there are enough stable and comprehendible Linux distros out there, but if the user has sudo rights and the constant and uncontrollable urge to destroy their system, they will find a way to do so.

Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.

Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.

My car’s entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn’t matter when using it.

MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.

The kernel has nothing to do with this.

In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn’t “come from Unix” is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.

There isn’t even a phone OS anymore that doesn’t “come from Unix”.