There is a lot of hype in this article and precious little in the way of verifiable facts.

Does anyone have any links to something more credible?

Is it for Clickbait purposes?

There’s a reason why there’s only privileged write access to /dev/sda.

If you run unknown software as root on any computer you get to experience first hand the impact of: “fuck around and find out”.

All fine and dandy … got any realistic alternatives?

From the article:

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the company has been aware of the issue since at least August 2023, but maintains that changing the behavior could break compatibility with existing applications.

• Changing your Microsoft or Azure password does not immediately revoke RDP access for old credentials.
• There are no clear alerts or warnings when old passwords are used for RDP logins.
• Microsoft’s security tools, including Defender and Azure, do not flag this behavior.

So … this article published today, 5 May 2025, says that the Microsoft policy will start on 5 May 2025.

Some questions:

1. When did Microsoft announce this and where?
2. Is this a reasonable rollout timeline that affects pretty much anyone on the planet who does email?
3. As a society we run most of our activities through Google and Microsoft. At what point does this get classified as a utility and get regulated.

Education.

Pretty sure that they already shared it with copilot, so I’m guessing that it’s only a matter of time until everyone has a copy…

I’m assuming you’re familiar with Asahi Linux?

It’s still very much a work in progress.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overview/

At the moment I’m bridging the gap by using homebrew, UTM, ssh into local hardware and shortly remote desktop on EC2.

It’s far from ideal, but that’s where I found myself after my x86 iMac died last year, so I feel your pain.

The news reports I’ve read suggest that it started at 6:33 am, hours before the actual outage.

Edit: I must be remembering this wrong, I can only find references to 9:30 am, not 6:33.

See: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250430-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-massive-blackout-that-hit-spain-and-portugal

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, observant, or something else. There have been many a meal where I was asked what I wanted to eat and it’s rare that I go beyond the words “surprise me”, knowing full well that the person asking would eat the same as I was offered, making the “surprise”, less of a risk and more of an adventure.

In this case, OP asked a completely unanswerable question to which there was absolutely no reasonable answer, since we know nothing about the person, their interests, their experience, the hardware they have access to, or anything remotely resembling a needs analysis.

So, even my answer, generic and random as it might appear, was based on how I use a computer, namely, to be productive. I’ve been using them for over 40 years, mostly like that, with some sojourns into art and personal expression, not nearly worthy of public scrutiny, but not specifically “productive” as such.

So … what were you attempting to say?

Whatever you need to be productive.

Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.

My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.

Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.

I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.

The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.

At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.

Much obliged for sharing your experience!

Unfortunately I can’t run Debian on my M3 MacBook Air :-(

Wow, that brings back memories. Forgot about the whole Palm thing. That was a wild ride at the time.

Thank you!

I got a T-shirt from Mozilla in the early 1990’s and foolishly wore it to death. My Linux tie pin is somewhere, but I’m sure that my penguin tie has died, as have the Debian Potato CDs with boot disks for x86, PowerPC and SPARC.

Forgot about BeOS (and NetBSD for that matter), and wonder what came of BeOS.

Why NixOS? I’ve been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?

Debian Slink

Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

Thank you.