it's more because that shit is there forever. so if it's impossible to inspect and trace payments now, that don't mean it remains so five or 10 years from now. btw, chainalisys had some monero tracing like years ago.
so imagine if we'd have a perfectly preserved crime scene from like 1785 (and multiple, perfect copies of it!) and we can unleash the full power of today's forensics on it.
here's why you're doing beginners a disservice with Mint.
it's an X11 distro. no big deal if you're installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.
if it's a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn't in Cinnamon's camp.
if it's a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.
if you're an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.
there's basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go "hmm, that's interesting. let's try..." regardless if it's a lazy afternoon or they're under heavy artillery fire... and then there are those that invariably go "oh what the fuck now!?"
if you're in the latter camp, you have one option and that's Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it "just works" in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don't need additional ones.
when you've been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what's what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.
but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.
the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody's not using this!?
but then I needed a piece of software that wasn't available and flatpak wouldn't work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there's this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I'm done...
not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core...I can't imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that's 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.
not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.
so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.
I would like nothing more (well, there's a few things I'd like more, but for the purposes of this we'll let it stand) than for this fucker to get hurt and for this shit business to implode.
but nothing close to that is happening. sales that are lower than before indicate that there are still sales, nazi sled image notwithstanding. the P/E multiple is still through the roof. there aren't liquidity issues apparent.
this might be an indication that things might be moving the right way, but at present, nothing is "collapsing".
and even if alla that somehow materializes, this doesn't even touch the fucker in the slightest, it is inconceivable how much he's got.
the true value is in discarded laptops, skylake or newer. a quick search in my local marketplace finds double-digits of those under $40, with busted screens and other failings, which aren't important for e.g. headless deployment.
they got low-power, capable CPUs to boot, you get a shitton of connectivity, storage options, etc. power brick included (gotta buy one for a raspi) and you don't dick around with arm64 packages and SD cards. if you don't need video decoding, you can go even older.
woudn't put too much trust in recommendations from dudes that rely on you constantly buying new shit, as their income depends on it.
yeah, this is a "cope" article from dudes I've never heard of before. nothing is collapsing, the shit is still worth insane multiples of P/E, they still sell HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of model 3s (close to 400K per annum) and this joke of a "journalist" conflates the unpopularity of the (higly impractical and niche) cybertruck with "teslas".
to each his own, but I can't stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject "horror" that's systemd, his "helpful" notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.
so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it's needed in the case of MX.
lol get bent. telemetry galore, from the dudes that brought you "battery has limited charge cycles via firmware, afterwards it's dead", just how their toner division does it.
I'm quad-lingual and it's a mess inside my head. every so often a sentence pops up in my audio output buffer formed from different languages and normalizing it takes a while, so sometimes I come off as an idiot.
I used enpass for years and was a happy user. one day it prompted me for some re-authentication bullshit security theater. although in that instant it was an easy task, took me all of 10 seconds, it demonstrated a scary amount of power they had as I couldn't bypass it and access my data. from that point on, its days were numbered.
the second issue is the export functionality that was seriously lacking and I had to resort to 3rd party converter tools to convert it to keepassXC; no way that flew by their QC, it had to be intentional.
so this person is someone I come across frequently on mastodon, has occasionally interesting takes and every so often I think about following them.
but a quick glance at their frequency of posting is astounding, like if I added their output to my feed, this would be like 80% of my daily intake; "overwhelming" would be an understatement.
along with the above, to me, this post doesn't signal "hey here's a healthy and balanced individual", it's more like a manifestation of a mental health crisis.
what do you do with the scanned ones, put them online perchance?