The attraction of Linux is precisely that it isn’t one of the two ‘standards’. Your working environment doesn’t get determined by some product manager in a far-away office, who has a set of target users in mind, which he’s given fictional names, biographies and mugshots.

Runs debian unstable. Shuts down his machine every year or so.

The author mentions that some of the changes broke things, but it’s a long way into the article before the word “test” appears. It’s only point 6/7 of his recommendations.

Making changes with no test coverage is not refactoring. It’s just rewriting. Start there.

I don’t think the billionaires’ investments are going to be worth billions if the global economy collapses.

I don’t think China wants that.

None of what you said makes me think the situation would be worse than having Putin in charge. It’s a stretch to say Putin came from the civil sphere, and he assassinates his enemies in foreign countries using nerve agents and throws people out of windows at home.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the leaking process will be the next process to try to allocate memory after you run out. It might actually be your window manager, for example.

The OOM killer is a last-ditch attempt by the OS to keep running, but it is very likely to leave your system in an unstable state.

I think the convenience very much depends on the journey you want to make. To travel from London to Edinburgh by car means several hours where you can do nothing but hold the steering wheel. If you go by train, you can spend the time usefully … or sleep. If you’re talking about commuting, well, driving into most cities during rush hour means sitting in traffic jams every day, not just occasionally.