Brief items

On the other hand, increasingly difficult CAPTCHA practices can drive humans crazy. "Which pictures do NOT contain traffic signs?" "Confirm this statement, 'there are no images or partial images of automobiles in this set of pictures.'"

Humans may justifiably want to throw their computers through the nearest window when poorly executed CAPTCHAs prevent them from legitimately accessing online services.

With a $300 Proxmark RFID card reading and writing tool, any expired keycard pulled from the trash of a target hotel, and a set of cryptographic tricks developed over close to 15 years of on-and-off analysis of the codes Vingcard electronically writes to its keycards, they found a method to vastly narrow down a hotel's possible master key code. They can use that handheld Proxmark device to cycle through all the remaining possible codes on any lock at the hotel, identify the correct one in about 20 tries, and then write that master code to a card that gives the hacker free reign to roam any room in the building. The whole process takes about a minute.

Samsung Smart TV. During the first minute after power-on, the TV talks to Google Play, Double Click, Netflix, FandangoNOW, Spotify, CBS, MSNBC, NFL, Deezer, and Facebook—even though we did not sign in or create accounts with any of them.

-rc releases suck. seriously suck. The quality of commits that went in -rc cycles was much worse than merge window commits:

• All commits had the same chance of introducing a bug whether they came in a merge window or an -rc cycle. This means that -rc commits mostly end up replacing obvious bugs with less obvious ones.
• While the average merge window commit changes, on average, 3x more lines than an -rc commit, the chances of a bug introduced per patch is the same, which means that bugs-per-line metric of code is much higher with -rc patches.
• A merge window commit spent 50% more days, on average, in -next than a -rc commit.
• The number of -rc commits that never saw any mailing list or has never been replied to on a mailing list was **way** higher than merge window commits.
• For some reason, the odds of a -rc commit to be targeted for -stable is over 20%, while for merge window commits it's about 3%. I can't quite explain why that happens, but this would suggest that -rc commits end up hurting -stable pretty badly.

Please don't edit patches by hand. It's a skill nobody should have.

Charles Babbage wasn’t lying when he said “The only thing that would make my Difference Engine any better would be a modern customisable desktop environment that didn’t deviate from traditional desktop paradigms (unless I wanted it to.)” In a long lost diary entry Ada Lovelace scribbled “If only my code could be matched to an OS that had a perfect blend of usability and style accompanied by a handpicked selection of quality software packages.” ENIAC, moments before being unplugged in 1956, spat out a final message: “Give us a reboot when Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS is out will ya?”

An advantage of code that is dead upstream is that everyone ships the same sources.

This makes porting fixes from one distribution to another trivial.

It's important that the openSUSE Project is a free and open Project for anyone to contribute to.
...

I greatly appreciate the fact that we have contributors who feel able to be part of this project entirely under an identity of their choosing, perhaps one which is significantly different from the identity they hold when interacting with other communities or legal entities.

I strongly feel that such an approach is the true way to fostering diversity within openSUSE, which is a worthwhile goal, long held as part of our projects Guiding Principles.

Not speaking to this case specifically, but in general I would try to convince maintainers with some combination of irrefutable argument and well-tested patches (combined with a friendly demeanour and a rhethorical flourish) rather than try and summon the "mob" from debian-devel if I didn't immediately get my way. ;)

Here are some examples of long-running bug reports where you can see this dynamic in action. It’s quite sad to observe, because everybody involved is doing what makes perfect sense from their perspective (except for a few people behaving badly), yet the result is a mess.

I hope this illustrates why it’s important to assume that people are acting in good faith.

fwiw, libinput has a setting where it can automatically disable the touchpad for external mice but it's not integrated into GNOME (afaik). It's a bit problematic in that it provides little feedback once set. Ideally you want a OSD to signal your touchpad's disabled now. Otherwise it's hard to guess why nothing works after the bluetooth mouse in the sock drawer randomly decided to connect to your host.

So while the libinput feature is there, I'm not sure I can fully recommend it as a user-friendly solution for GNOME.

PS: do not keep mice in a sock drawer. That's not their natural habitat.