Well, the kernel is not “just a program” in that it is not like the other programs on your system. If it was, you would “just” run it in your shell. The kernel cannot run this way of course because it is not a user mode program.

That said, if course the kernel is a program in the sense that it is a set of machine instructions that make the hardware do what you want.

And the kernel is designed to talk to hardware and other programs—to be the bridge between the two. It is not something an end-user interacts with directly.

I think it is a smart play.

They are getting lots of press in the places where the people that care go.

On their website, they focus on the benefits of their platform for customers. From that perspective, the new COSMIC is just a refinement on what they were shipping before.

And this is just the beginning. COSMIC itself is still fairly basic. And the “new” Pop!OS is based on an LTS base that is already 2 years old. None of that is a problem but it is not a hand they want to overplay.

They may actually make a bigger deal about the benefits when 26.04 ships. Things will be a bit more “industry leading” by then.

Individual business owners are free to pursue their own interests.

But so are consumers.

If a Canadian brand sells itself to the US, Canadians should abandon it. If that keeps happening, US companies will stop poaching Canadian companies.

If we had started this process sooner, HBC would still be in business.

If just saying Linux confuses you, just say Linux distro and / or Linux kernel explicitly.

To me, Linux means Linux distro unless further clarification or comedy is given. If you mean the kernel, you should always say so—the Linux kernel.

Non-technical users have no idea what the kernel is and you are not going to talk to them about it. So, when you say Linux they think Linux distro. It is not confusing unless we make it that way.

Just moved my mother from Windows 10 to LMDE.

I think you can still buy new 486 compatible chips today.

https://www.vortex86.com/

I call him Mayor Trump

In the short term perhaps. Longer term, our problem is the lack of continued innovation by American drug companies. As the article states, we need to drive investment ourselves. We cannot do that through forced generics though.

We do not need US style price gauging but drug companies need to make money in Canada if we want them to solve future health problems.

Nobody is proposing rewriting the whole kernel in Rust.

In US politics today, the main strike against Hitler would be that he was not a naturally born a US citizen.

Had he been born in Kentucky, he may have been able to unseat Trump. He would almost certainly be the front-runner vs Biden or Harris.

On a machine with 2 GB of RAM, what is going to make the biggest difference is using a 32 bit distro. Everything, not just the desktop environment but also all the apps, is going to take about half as much RAM. At 2 GB, that takes your system from functionally useless to quite useful ( especially if you plan to open a web browser ).

There is an option you did not list that impressed me recently. Trinity is a desktop environment that is essentially modern KDE 3.

The 32!bit edition of Q4OS makes it easy to install Trinity. It is basically Debian under the hood so you get access to all those packages ( at least the ones available on 32 but ).

Windows and Linux have opposite problems for starters with newer hardware better supported on Windows and old hardware supported on Linux. As Linux gets more popular, it will start to shine because if newer hardware becomes better supported, the experience will truly be that Linux just works and Windows needs drivers for done stuff.

The other big factor is that Windows is already installed. So, you don’t have to do anything or, at most, one or two things. Even if that one thing is hard, you are more likely to blame that one thing than Windows.

Finally, we have to acknowledge that your experience sounds atypical for Windows installs. Most of my hardware is easier to put Linux on than Windows but I doubt any of them would be that hard.

We also have to admit that Linux does not have drivers for everything while Windows basically does ( somewhere ). So, Linux can be the bigger bummer overall. Of course, this is in the x86-64 universe only. Linux has vastly better hardware support when you consider other platforms.