Wow, a completely sensible and rational take on the issue.

As someone who lives in a country that formerly had a nationalized phone company in the internet age, and currently has a nationalized power company and airline. Dear God fuck no!

I don’t use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don’t need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don’t use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don’t need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.

I was actually a Xubuntu user for a long time, but tried Mint with Cinnamon, and found lots of things much easier and more polished, while maintaining the lightweight feel that XFCE provided.

I find that installing things from repos you typically get something far more up to date with Ubuntu than Debian.

I’ve been a Linux user since installing Slackware from floppy discs. These days I run Mint on my desktop/laptop and Ubuntu on servers. Does this make me weak?

Hikvision also has some serious baggage from the Chinese govt. Hanwha is really good stuff, South Korean, a spin off from Samsung.