Proxy wars are in fact good. Please allow me to explain what I mean.

Of course, the ideal state is full peace, no wars be they proxy or otherwise. For various reasons, that seems to be impossible for the super powers to achieve. Be it greed or the (perceived or real) need to shape the strategical interests of said super powers, it appears sometime wars are the only solution leaders have at their disposal (again, there is an argument against this, but leaders often seem to choose war).

Why are proxy wars “better”, then? Because they allow the pretending of not being involved. Because they allow the defeated super power to lose without actually losing a war. Proxy wars allow an easy out. It is far easier to explain to proud super power’s citizens that some nation somewhere lost the war, but not us.

Also full war, engages all of said countries assets, including the nuclear weapons. One of the very real issues with the war in Ukraine is that Russia very often threatens with nuclear strikes and, even if they aren’t serious about it this still leads to escalation and for the other countries to consider the real possibility of nuclear war. If the war in Ukraine would be waged by a proxy of Russia, let’s say Belarus, it would be much more difficult to even have those nuclear threats. Russia would not be able to keep saying they are not involved while threatening with nukes.

In conclusion, proxy wars are the ‘sane’ (if you can call it that) solution to wars between super powers.

The question has been eating at you for some time, not since some time.

Thank you, fixed!

Haha, had no idea, I don’t watch the stock market

Unfortunately a lot of people do. So many people care they made him the richest person in the world. I always hated obscenely rich people, but there’s something special with Musk, he manages to add insult to injury.

Be that as it may, it’s still an incredibly short sighted decision to use a centralized service that is under 3rd party control for real security sensitive applications.

It’s people who know they will be irrelevant because they spent decades producing shit software

So the Linux kernel is shit software now? Just because it’s not written in the newest programming language? Kind of a hot take.

This article reads like a press release from SUSE.

Russia Today comes to mind

Sure, but for Russia it’s the actual doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception

you’re a rock star

If you do a rollback, I assume your data remains? I assume you might need to reinstall apps which were not in the original? Or does it keep apps, data and settings across a restore?

In CoreOS (Silverblue), /etc, /var and /home (which is in fact a symlink towards /var/home) are regular writable partitions, so your data, configs and personal files are not touched by the upgrade/rollback procedure.

All the packages (and their dependencies) you’ve installed extra are also upgraded/rolledback when you do a system upgrade.

The immutable part (again, only speaking about Silverblue, I don’t know about others) refers to the inability to make changes online (i.e. without rebooting), but you can eventually change whatever file you want. The way it works is you would make your changes in a copy of the current filesystem and at boot simply mount and use the copy. If something goes wrong, you just mount the original at next boot and you have rolled back.

You make a lot of good points, but I have to disagree on the “don’t let the user see or touch anything”. That’s very much not the way immutable distros behave (and I speak mostly about Fedora Silverblue here, I don’t have experience with other immutable systems): you can touch and change anything and often times you have mechanisms put in place by the distro developers to do exactly that. It’s just that the way you make changes is very different from classical distros, that’s all, but you can definitely customize and change whatever you want. I feel the comparison between immutable distros and Apple is really far off: Apple actively prevents users from making changes, while immutable Linux is the opposite – while there may be some technical limitations, the devs try to empower the user as much as possible.

Maybe I don’t understand the question, but what prevents you from adapting your Ansible playbooks to Fedora Silverblue? I assume for Debian at some point you have a “install packages” section which you should rewrite to use rpm-ostree or flatpak instead of apt-get; your dotfiles section should remain the same etc etc.