Not a Putin fan, but that speech is taken out of context. He was making the point their history is very interlinked, and that it is hard to argue (Northern Ireland is indeniable Ireland, but its history is very related to UK so a compromise was made to maintain peace, can you imagine if Catholics forbid Protestants to vote there?) . Funny enough, most of Ukraine land was acquired/given to Ukraine while it was under some sort of Moscow’s dominance. The original Ukraine was just a territorial fraction of what it is today. Ukraine should

Again, in the ideal world, Ukraine should have full autonomy to decide its future, but the Washington and Moscow alike did not like that. I am Ukrainian, would work for a neutrality formula. US does the same with Cuba and Venezuela and US has 0% chances of being invaded by Chine through any of those 2 countries.

What I do notice is the irrational hatred of thinking the other as sub-human… I saw that behavior far, far more in Ukrainians than I did with Russians (at least till 2024).

Why too simplistic:

Palestine got invaded, ethnically cleaned and massively murdered for decades.

Ukraine was cultural a divided country where West and Russia alike used one band or the other to rein power on the entire country. However in 2014 the West overstep the pro-West, pro-Russia alternation with a Coup. Immediately 1/3 of the country got itself completely disfranchised (no vote, no representation, no even could speak its language) and a civil war ensured and then even that 1/3 got without no pensions or services. The sad thing is that the coup was not even needed since Viktor Yanukovych was going to be voted out in just 11 months, but Washington was not having it and needed its coup to put the alternation to an end and be able to make its long-wished constitutional changes to Ukraine . The rest is history.

Russia is not saint here, not at all, but Russia did get invaded and massacred multiple times by the West and every single time through Ukraine… I think if Moscow have a bit if concern it is perfectly warranted. Ukraine should have done what Finland did in 1940s-2010s, side with the West but full warranties to Russia of being fully Neutral and away from NATO.

This is actually critically! I love little distros, but it does break my heart that they cannot give the same reassurance on potential malware as Mint would. Many here we are anti-AI but FOSS could benefit a lot from it… it can automatized checking for malware on peanuts. DistroWatch, Flatpak store, Debian backports, etc should be using AI already across the board to check for malware and that would level dramatically the plain field for all.

After the first year fully immersed in Linux, I would say most would agree with that statement “One can turn any distro into another”, at least in what matters to them.

To any newcomer I recommend to choose the environment (The tendency is for the tech-minded that come from Windows is to choose KDE, less tech-minded or straightforward thinking choose Cinnamon and exclusive Mac and Android users tend to choose Gnome).
The second thing to select is your stand on Stability vs Cutting edge. The rest of features are far, far less relevant and you can easily fine tune to your like and these is what people mean with that above statement (even the environment and stability could be customized too but most would not be able to do it).

At the end, the distro is a choice where you pick the first two parameters and the exact distro you pick is more based in convenience and/or philosophical criteria.

My case: I played with 5 environments and KDE is my cup of tea. Then, I choose a distro in the middle of the road with updates (OpenSuse Tumbleweed) and while extremely happy two updates within 8 months gave me two hiccups (nothing mayor) but I decided I needed more Stability. While I consider Fedora to be the “best” distro by just a hairline, since it has the most resources, but philosophically I am against due to IBM being its main backer, not to mention, US may cause problems “exporting” in a near future… yes you can fork, but you still being dependent in the main source for a while, not to mention supporting IBMś aims. So I am Debian (MX Linux actually) all the way now. However, I recommend to most Mint (for the most conservative) and TuxedoOS (for those looking for a more contemporary look) to most people I encounter.

The rest of distros, or are just niche (for instance Deepin and Kylin cater for Chinese language, Cachy for gamers, etc) or are distros with far less resources to do it properly, but I passionately applaud their existence since they all are contributing with the good cause.

Day after day, the evidence is there more and more. Now, there is far more nuance that characterizations like this, but the essence it is there.

I thought it is highly possible they may had gamed the system at some point, but doubting it less and less by the day… they would have been very consistent for hundreds and hundreds of days! Once you actually installed it, you will realize it is among the most polished yet stable Linux distros there is and has had a very consistent competent team.

Now, I don’ think it has a high popularity at all among newcomers, let alone people on forums (look at the popular KDE variant download per week… 112 vs the ‘rare’ Xfce with 3444). Their base are people that probably are more avid visitors to the legendary Distrowatch than active to these forums, therefore the low visibility to us.

By the way, tried MX KDE and it is really good, I recommend its team stop selling it just as ideal for “old machines”, it is perfect for any one that does not want a rolling release. It is for people that would like Debian but want it more polish without getting into Ubuntu or Cinnamon territory. I would go even further… they should even offer a KDE-advanced version with updated Kernel and KDE (like TUXEDO OS does) and i think they will become a hit! But I understand they may lacking resources for that… offering SystemD and SysVinit must be highly intensive on itself already. I have grown to trust them.

“Debian - older stuff for stability. Arch - bleeding edge rolling release. Fedora somewhere in the middle.” Very true. I would add that then there are a bunch of others that fill the gaps in between. For instance, Ubuntu makes Debian easier and Mint makes Ubuntu more open and TuxedoOS makes Debian/Ubuntu far more up-to-date. Then, CachyOS makes Arch more easy and gamable while Manjaro tries to make Arch more stable. Fedora is a perfect blend but those those that have a beef against Redhat/IBM (USA), OpenSUSE is a perfect blend too of the philosophies of Debian and Arch.

I was aware of the atrocities and agreement violations, but not that perspective that colonials wanted to get free from any agreements the British did with the natives… Is that a common knowledge in the academia, disputed or a minority one? It is not to discredit it at all the idea, just to genuinely know its status at university level?