The world’s most successfuly motorbike vlogger, Itchy boots, is currently finishing a tour through China. It’s been enlightening to watch - but do accept that I’m parrotting what I’ve seen there (and she makes a point of focusing on positive things) and some other vloggers on other platforms, I have no direct experience, so apologise for the lengthy reply.

IB has to travel with a guide, and can only stay in cities because hotels need a licence to take foreigners, but even in Western China and the Urghur areas, which I understand are the most restrictive, I’ve been hugely impressed by the quality of life there. It’s certainly not what I expected.

Some intesting things:

Bikes are not that common - everyone in cities uses public transport or private cars. No bikes allowed more than 12 years old, and entering a petrol station requires being stopped by a police checkpoint and the rules are different for each one. Sometimes she has to fuel to one side, filling a can from the pump and carrying it to the bike, others she has to push the bike onto the forecourt, and others she can ride right up. But maybe that’s a fuel thing generally - petrol stations are not busy places there, and most cars on the roads seem to be brand new and electric.

A stronger police presence than I’m used to in the UK, but less than many African and other Asian countries she’s ridden through (including Afghanistan - yeah, solo female riding a bike through active taliban was an eye raiser!)

Zero rubbish. I mean, NOTHING. I spotted only one piece of graffiti. (Hugely common in Europe, USA, Middle East, other Asian countries). Very high state of cleanliness. Huge road building and other infrastructure programs of truly incredibly scale. Crime rates are extremely low. (Probably at the cost of personal freedoms and restrictions we don’t consider here) Cities are often beautiful, with wide streets, separation for motorbikes, loads of parking, lots of trees, open spaces and planting.

The people she meets are much like people anywhere - friendly when approached well, inviting, helpful. The food is superb and offered to guests.

So yeah, what I’ve seen it not third world by any scale. It’s a higher standard of living in the cities than we have here in the UK by some margin for many metrics. Much of this change has been very recent and has come at many huge costs. (I’ve read a lot about Mao’s time and that sounds awful at many levels, including the actions of many of the Chinese people themselves)

Workers rights: They do work longer hours, typically, than we do in the west. 12 hour days, six days a week are common, especially in the megacities. Cost of living there is also very high, and many younger employees send money home to families in rural areas. This is not seen as unusual as the Chinese have a very strong culture of working hard and working together for the common good, not that dissimilar to Japanese working culture. I would not like these hours myself, but my own culture is very different.

I’ll look into OpenSUSE as a potential alternative

You could do worse!

I’ve worked with OpenSuse for a few years and I really like the people involved. They’re stand-out in that they’re European based (no bad thing in today’s uncertain world if you’re not American yourself.) They’re a german organisation but the employees are spread through Europe and further afield and they’re a really, really small concern, but IME, they genuinely care about doing the right thing, even if that comes before financial growth. One example of that is their tutoring programs and, unlike many organisations even in the FOSS world, I get the feeling they genuinely uphold their guiding principles

I use Debian myself at home and at work and it’s my go-to for everything, but if it didn’t exist, OpenSuse would probably be the next on my list and although I’m not working with them at present, I would happily do so again.

BTW: are you aware the Linux Foundation is an US entity and funded by (among others) most US IT megacorps?

The Linux Foundation is not Linux. It is a nonprofit organisation that supports linux and encourages open standards.

It does not own nor control Linux; no single entity does.

Fedora is a community project but ultimately owned by Redhat. They own the trademarks and the domain. They could stop support for it at any time they, or their owners, IBM, decide it’s not in their interests to continue supporting, or even allowing, it. People will say “Sure, but you could fork it” and I don’t doubt that it would be forked, and there’s enough userbase to make that fork successful and arguably better, but then it wouldn’t be Fedora.

That does seem unlikely since Fedora is a fundamental part of Redhat’s upstream for their main Linux project, RHEL and would require a bit shift in their model, but they have made some odd decisions over the past few years that have upset the community. (Ending Centos Linux 8 with very little warning, and then trying to block source distribution for the rebuilders that stepped in to replace Centos Linux. Centos was a community owned project back along, by the way, founded by Greg Kertzer who was forced to give it up, which indirectly led to Redhat taking control over it and ultimately ending Centos linux entirely. This was its own huge controversy and did not paint Redhat in any kind of warm and fuzzy light)

So I don’t trust Redhat as much as I did half a decade ago because of these reasons, and more generally because of their corporate sellout. No matter what their supporters and community say, Redhat are a for-profit company that made decisions which upset the community even before it was bought out by a huge multinational with a long history of choosing profit over ethics.

So stick with Debian if you want to stay clear of corporate linux ownership. I’m afraid that does include the entire EL group - Fedora, RHEL, Centos Stream and even the rebuilders, Alma and Rocky. (Two projects that I really love but are vulnerable to further changes by Redhat)

Not morons, just lying to achieve a different agenda.

It’s not that good news goes unreported

Well, it literally is exactly that - not one mention of this in the mainstream media.

“not a single major news organisation reported anything about trachoma in 2025.”

It’s not the case that it was drowned out, it was never said at all.

I used wview for years, and published a couple of weather stations publically. Sadly that looks to be abandoned now.

Nowadays I just run Home Assistant and combine an anenometer, a rain tip gauge and about a million different temperature sensors into that, mostly with 8266’s running Esphome to collect and forward that data. It’s a fun and cheap little hobby if you like collecting data. The gauge and anenometer were off aliexpress for about £5 each, the esps about the same, and temp sensors less than a quid each. All software foss of course, and uses almost no resources so can run on any linux server.

Heretic! MS-DOS 6.22 is where it’s really at!

Hero of War also a strong fave of mine. Bleak as fuck. No Bravery by James Blunt is on similar lines.

“Boys will be boys” by Stella Donnelly. Best listened to blind, imo, so won’t give context.

Hero of War by Rise Against. An American soldier’s view of war.

Raoui by Souad Moussi (I can’t understand arabic so she might be singing a shopping list, but the pain in her voice gives me shivers every time)

No Bravery by James Blunt. A British soldier’s view of war.

I have a long playlist of stuff like this called “Managed Melancholy” - it’s part of my mental health self care to immerse myself in sad sometimes and really feel. (I’m fine btw, and this is part of giving me an outlet)

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Any chance there’s an ip conflict?

Some of us gamers have been training for that our whole lives.

Please, don’t expose VNC to the internet, ever. It’s a horrendously insecure protocol that uses plaintext passwords of no more than 8 characters and everything that passes over the connection is unencrypted and visible to anyone sniffing the traffic.

Once it was the only option, but there are dozens of better things out there now which should be used, even on a lan or vpn.

Why add age checks?

I’ve read this from several sources now and not found anywhere that explains why they’re doing this. Are they being threatened with legal action?

They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.

Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.

I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.

IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.

Agree. Although Mariadb has drifted significantly (and with very good reason) in terms code, features and SQL - I still mentally parse “Mysql” as “MariaDb”. It’s one of the best forks I’ve ever encountered in all my time using foss. I currently maintain around 80 MariaDb servers and have remarkably few problems.

Much as I like to see variety in software, I do kind of wish more recognition of MariaDb was given, and more support.

Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.