No one does, but people like it when you install an application and it just works. It makes it easier to install applications regardless of which distro you’re on as well.

I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.

mythical “average casual user”

Mythical? You realize people like this exist, right? This is why programs like this exist. Take Audacity for example, it was made with non-professional audio people in mind. Just people who have odds and ends to do with audio. It’s simple enough that someone with no prior knowledge can start poking around and figuring things out, and it’s advanced enough that it can get the job done for most people who need to work with audio files.

I’m not saying that GIMP needs to prioritize the first time user experience. If making the UI/UX more approachable for new users would necessarily make it worse for established users, then it may be a decent tradeoff. Denying the existence of people who just need to edit an image here and there is absurd though.

Hopefully someone more technical can pitch it, but it did feel very easy to set up and use. The utilities that it comes with just feel very well designed and thought out. If Debian was gone tomorrow, I’d probably try openSUSE again.

That’s a good point. I think Canonical offers some services where they will actively support your system, so it makes economic sense for them to make choices that limit transparency a bit for stability and predictability.

I think the dislike comes from the fact that Ubuntu was and still is many people’s intro to Debian based OSes, and it’s just not as user-centric as it used to be. Thankfully alternatives like Mint exist to bring it back a little bit for people who care.

I don’t doubt Signal per se, but I am surprised that government officials would use it to discuss military plans. I would have thought the government would use something developed by the military just to be sure that it’s safe.

Sure, they can vet the source code, but it seems more straightforward for the government to develop their own solution than create a team to vet the security of something that they didn’t write. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’d almost think they should be doing this on vetted hardware as well. Signal is also relatively new, and they had to have a way to discuss these things beforehand.

I remember in college we had access to a Unix box via these computers that remoted into it. I don’t know the technical details, but I was able to log in with my account and it was presented as a GUI on my end. We used No Machine as the client if that’s relevant. I wonder how something like that can be set up.