I was thinking about this the other day and realized something:
Back when the modern Santa character was first being developed, coal was a genuinely useful thing. It was fuel for the stove which heated your house and cooked your food. It was a basic necessity of life.
If you were naughty, Santa didn't just give you nothing. You weren't going to get an awesome toy, but he made sure you weren't going to freeze to death on Christmas, either.
Santa believes everyone deserves to live. That having a warm place to sleep is a basic human right.
This might be /r/im14andthisisdeep material, but I just thought that was interesting.
I'm not saying there's no people trying it, or that the actual number is negligible. I'm just saying I highly fucking doubt that 780,000 people have actually installed Zorin OS in the last month.
All they said is they have a million downloads and "over 78% of these downloads came from Windows". At no fucking point did they imply that means 780k unique users. There's no reason to assume that everyone who downloaded the ISO actually went on to install it.
They also want $48 for their Pro version which comes with a "professional-grade creative suite" consisting of... GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Kdenlive, and... Audacity (?), going off the screenshots they show:
They're shamelessly reselling free software as some sort of comprehensive package, and it's not even their own distro. They're just piggybacking on Ubuntu.
And their premium support only covers... installation?
But hey, they support this edition with updates until 2029!
Of course, pay no attention to the coincidence that the Ubuntu LTS version it's based on also hits end-of-life around then:
So I'm not really sure what you're actually getting out of this purchase besides some extra themes and some really formulaic desktop wallpapers, and a couple proprietary apps. They say they "contribute to upstream Open Source projects" but offer zero evidence; their site doesn't even have any Github/Gitlab links.
Assuming they were using threshold cryptography, they could have easily configured some redundancy into the system, e.g. by requiring 3 out of 5 people to decrypt it instead of 3 of 3.
It's easy to blame the one guy for losing the key, but he could have gotten hit by a bus or lost the hard drive in a house fire and they would have been equally as screwed. This is more of a system design failure than a PEBKAC failure.
I know, after I posted that I was looking at their outages and worrying that my 1/month estimate too much of an exaggeration cause they hadn't had a big one in a bit.
All that flowery bullshit, and I still have no idea if the game is any good or not. Sure, it didn't sound fun, but lots of good games sound really boring if you describe them the wrong way.
I've started noticing websites just to refuse to work on Linux:
Xfinity
Microsoft
United Airlines
American Airlines
It's not like some weird script error either. It's straight up a 403 Forbidden on certain routes. Works perfectly fine if I switch to my Windows laptop. It's like it took one look at my user agent string and decided I was a bot.
It was probably planned as the Defiant class but the Dorito Dictator isn't going to be happy until he's named every single thing after himself.