Well, except for the fact that code conversion doesn't give you the permission to change licenses or remove copyright. And the small matter of fact that both projects mentioned are Canonical projects, where whatever code that is not directly copyrighted by Canonical, is contributed by someone who signed an agreement with this stipulation:
(b) To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable licence under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3.
"Us" being Canonical of course. So they could actually "re-license" the projects right now, without changing a single line of code.
It's always astonishing how condiment in their ignorance people are when it comes to these matters.
Gnome and KDE currently have the most polished and integrated Wayland compositors, and are the least likely to have any noticeable issues compared to X11
A single microblogger.A single patch.On top of main (read, nightly).
for hard-forking firefox
Forks, hard and soft, always existed.The hard ones are all half-dead maintenance wise. Not to mention the 10s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities, and that's not even counting undiscovered ones in those ancient code bases.
Implementation choices for the VPN protocols varies (e.g. which user-space wireguard implementation to use if the kernel one is not usable for some reason).
Some features would require some scripting/light programming if not implemented by the provider. Not only is that asking for a lot, but errors here can be catastrophic.
...etc
All that, and we didn't even talk about user experience 😉.
Having said all that, if you're not using a service that offers configuration generation, which allows you to use your own clients, you're doing it wrong.
I use one of the services from your list. And beyond private key generation, I do everything with simple scripts on desktop (or using "protocol" clients on mobile). This is trivial since the server list with its addresses and public keys is publicly available as JSON, even without auth. So putting that info and my private key(s) together, I can actually generate all the configs I want myself with ease.
But that's just me. And providers would go broke if they only catered to the likes of me.
Should users who don't self-host start recording themselves while coding just as a precaution, in case their host will ask for evidence of work authenticity?
While it is indeed amusing to think that perma-online often-wrong people are geniuses who perfected the execution of Cunningham's Law. In reality, they couldn't be further from that. And everything they write is second or third hand anyway, often sourced from the bottom-of-the-barrel corners of the internet.
Watch them call me AI again because of the "while..they", after the magnificent leap of detecting my supposed anti-immigrant sentiment (which is a dog-whistle for "fervent racist" of course).
For someone who lurks roams that much, and makes baseless claims liberally, you appear to be missing a lot of basic info, like responsible disclosure, gap periods, or the private mailing list every distro is on which allows them time to ship fixes before the vulnerabilities are announced.
My almost 20 years old experience is that it's the worst of all Debian worlds, and none of them are good in any case.
You would be neither getting distro's promised stability, nor would you be close enough to getting upstream's fixes like sid/unstable.
I vaguely remember Gnome's bug tracker filled with duplicate reports about crashes that are long fixed upstream, but also don't trigger in either stable or sid Debian packages. They all came from Debian Testing. Gnome must have been very happy with Debian enabling the crash reporter in their packaging!
Do note that sid/unstable itself becomes as shit as Testing whenever the next Debian release is around the corner, as the project freezes the world in that period (or used to at least).
If you want the imagined stability you guessed you would get from Testing, you can use Ubuntu. At least with that you won't get packages that are left crashing for everyone. Or honestly, if you're on a desktop, just use Arch. The supposed meme about using Arch exists for a reason.
Manual runtime type classes!
And I thought "stringly typed" couldn't be topped in webshit meme-ry.
Man, webshits are funny 😊