Not sure I understand how you are reading the article. That’s like saying having a steak knife in your home is a factor in proving elements of a crime. Tools are completely neutral parties that are unrelated to prosecution, and encryption should be no different.

Doing crime in the privacy of my own home allows me to get away with it and commit more crime, doesn’t mean we should have transparent walls that everyone can watch what you do through.

You made me chuckle! I was raised on open source by a software engineer. I was using gimp on Ubuntu when I was 7 or 8 years old. I understand your sentiment completely, but you need to understand that time is money, and if something like layer blending takes even a few more clicks in gimp than photoshop, it is not ready to compete. Of course, you can think whatever you want about software you don’t rely on for a living. The rest of the world will smile and move on with reality.

This is definitely the take of someone who doesn’t need the full capabilities of such tools to make a living.

Is this true? Buying second hand doesn’t add to gross economic output, and doesn’t add anymore jobs. I only buy smartphones second hand because the market for them is so evil, with all these throwaway landfill devices. Its one of the only boycotts I can do in this smartphone dependent world.

Ok dude, you should have looked at the minimum requirements for a linux install before buying that thin client. I checked debian and fedora and both had minimun requirements exceeding 8gb for graphical environments. Read the manual, stop bashing a tool you arent using right. Flatpak works great for almost every use case, especially if you learn how to tweak the sandbox.

Early 2000s jap cars are unkillable, surplus of parts, and are not tracker spyware nests. Great little things for sure. My 90s turboed volvo is a far more temperamental beast, but I cherish her quirks :)

I ended up figuring out how to do mine myself with a Mr Cool kit when the furnace died due to the fact that every hvac guy believed a 4th gen heat pump would be useless in the northeast us. It gets down to about 0F here once or twice a winter and the heat pump starts struggling to keep up around those temps but it still does its job.