Its recommended specs are very low actually, so it’s possible that it will run well without “ultra” graphics features.

If it doesn’t even boot from the USB stick then it’s probably a hardware issue.

I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).

They absolutely can implement China-level censorship right now, they have technical capabilities. In fact there have already been tests of complete isolation from foreign internet in remote regions of Russia.

They just don’t use it much, yet. I guess they are afraid of consequences and prefer to let people live pretending that nothing has changed. He will go slow with it. Russia is still tightly integrated with western culture and economy (e.g. they have a strong IT industry and internet isolation will kill it for good). Russian culture has been aligning itself with European culture for centuries. They watch western movies and tv shows, read western books, half of the memes they use are from anglophone internet, etc. They are much closer culturally to Europe than to China, even despite all the politics.

Also legally the initial versions of this thing are from 2005, I think? Rather old. Just nobody cared.

2014 is when it started for real. At first the laws were rather innocuous (protect the children and stuff). But with each year they were “improved” to become more and more oppressive. Putin is smart enough to realize that if you do it incrementally then there will be less protests and he will appear as a good guy, “protecting the people”. It was the same with “foreign agent” laws.

They don’t even need to force it. Every ISP in Russia has government-managed DPI hardware that filters all use traffic performs such blocking. No cooperation from ISPs is necessary.

Utility is for poors. People who don’t count money want something shiny or whatever their peers have. They can easily replace it if it breaks.

we ain’t never gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop

Yes, but at this point you can’t even blame Microsoft for this. Maybe the issue lies elsewhere?

They are trying to make money to stay afloat. Postmarketos is a community project so it’s not comparable. And neither Purism nor Pine64 seem to be huge commercial successes just like Jolla, though they seem to be doing a bit better.

They have been owned by a Russian state-owned telecom corporation for a few years until recent events (Russia currently tries to push Sailfish OS fork as its “russian-made” mobile OS). Original Finnish management has split off to a new independent company with the same name last year, and this looks like their last ditch attempt to continue existing. I don’t expect they will last much longer (the reason why they were bought by Russia in the first place was that Jolla failed as a business).

Qt 6 has been out for more than three years now.

Owntracks link is broken.

Gconf was text though (well XML actually but not binary).

It is scalable but the icons are still drawn against the virtual pixel grid. If an icon is designed to be perfectly pixel-aligned when rasterized at a certain size, then rasterizing it at 1.25 of that size will cause small distortions if it contains small elements (such as 1 px width lines).

I fear that at these resolutions we will discover that UI frameworks are not really scalable in terms of performance

Even “real” fractional scaling in Plasma with Qt 6 is not much better. Text will look slightly sharper, but icons are still blurry. There is no way for them to look sharp with 1.25 scaling since they are drawn with a pixel grid in mind. Unless you invent some way to stretch svgs so that their individual elements and spaces between them retain their integer-ness while the scale of the whole image is fractional.

The only other solution is monitors with 300+ PPI where blurriness is simply not noticeable (that’s the way Apple went).

If it’s a hundred years or so before book events, and not in Vorin kingdoms (Azir maybe?) then sure. Scadrial during Elendel era would offer a better quality of life though.

Yes it’s possible to do this now. However with further advancement of AI or whatever you call it this can be made even more effective and efficient. And any edge over the “enemy” is useful.

There are many uses for AI that governments are interested in. Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet (by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans), accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc. And if you have an edge over other countries then you are able to influence their public opinions and detect (and possible counteract) when they try to influence you.

AI is very good at analysing human-generated data, as well as generating data that looks human-created. Any entity that deals with (and desires to control) a large number of people (of which governments are prime examples) will find many uses for it.

No, but there are many obstacles. Besides usual ones common to migration in general, due to sanctions people who want to emigrate won’t be able to easily access their money left in Russia. Also if they speak up against Putin everything they left in Russia will be confiscated and returning back (for any reason including possible deportation) will be dangerous (Russia is smart enough to not charge dissenters living abroad so that they won’t be able to claim asylum, but when they return they can be arrested. This strategy was used since USSR times). This makes emigration a risky proposition unless you already have a high-paying job lined up for you, and can receive foreign citizenship in a short time.

There are a lot of people there that haven’t experienced oppression personally and genuinely believe that “strong ruler” that “keeps people in line” is what’s needed for their country to be “strong”.

Also one of the key points of Russian propaganda that has been hammered into them for decades is that “democracy is a sham” and that any alternative to Putin’s regime would be just as oppressive and simply less “competent” (and therefore lead to Russia’s ruin).

Putin supporters do not believe that democracy can work and they don’t want democracy, as simple as that.