My distro’s package manager will quite happily install all of those. From the main distro repo, even. I don’t see any reason why I would mess around with flatpaks or other distribution methods.

I can literally count on one hand the pieces of non-game software I use that are installed from outside my distro’s package manager (there’s three if you include the inkscape plugin to drive my vinyl cutter).

So I repeat, this is either a distro issue or related to how you, personally, prefer to manage your system. It is not a general Linux issue.

True, Linux did solve this decades ago. And then made it significantly worse in the last decade with multiple package managers (apt-get, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, brew, random .sh install scripts etc.). Remembering how a Linux application was installed and calling its update command is a chore, and updating will probably pull in some other 500MB+ dependency that’s not shared with other apps because of a minor version change.

If your distro is forcing you to use more than one package manager on a regular basis, you need to switch distros.

If you’re choosing to use 3-4 package managers simultaneously, even though you don’t really need to, that’s on you.

Either way, it isn’t Linux’s fault.

systemd is a monolith in practice, despite what its advocates like to claim. You can’t run just a part of it under another init without doing extra patch-up work (see elogind). Whereas you can run just one GNU utility on top of, or even alongside, someone else’s implementation of that or other utilities (for instance, in parallel with a rust implementation that isn’t quite ready for the big time yet).

systemd also won’t work on anything except Linux. Older solutions also worked on BSD. That matters to some people.

And the issue was never just Poettering’s employers. He had a bad reputation in parts of the Linux community long before systemd—he was also the main force behind pulseaudio, which was shipped long before it was ready for actual use in the real world and remained in a semi-broken state for quite a long time afterwards. And he often comes across as personally obnoxious. Nothing like telling someone “I’m not interested in fixing your issues with my project” (except less politely) to get them to adopt your code.

Per the “ancient” “Chinese” curse, “May you live in interesting times,” I suspect.

(The phrase is actually the brainchild of a British diplomat who was posted to China for a while sometime around 1900, if I recall correctly.)

Japan often continues to use tech beyond the point other developed countries consider it obsolete (their government only recently transitioned away from floppy discs). It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was manufacturing the Mini- formats in small quantities for the Japanese market only.

There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.

Missing from the article: actual amounts of PFAS found in the bands, what percentage of it can be absorbed through skin contact, how that compares to other sources the average person might run into, and how much you have to absorb before biological damage emerges out of the statistical noise. The information may be in the original paper, but I’m disinclined to search for it there. Without those numbers, this is meaningless.