It can be considered slightly inferior depending on your viewpoint. Debian tends to have older versions of software components than Ubuntu, and there’s some Ubuntu tools that are quite handy (the graphics driver management tool is one I believe).

So, in my understanding there are good reasons they don’t just pivot to Debian. I am not on the Mint team so you’d have to talk to them, but my recollection of a press realease or interview from a few years ago was that bringing all the ubuntu stuff into LMDE and maintaining it would be a massive effort

LMDE exists as the DR plan for if Ubuntu loses the plot again and Mint can no longer rely on Ubuntu as the upstream. Yes it does create extra work, which is one of the reasons why LMDE releases tend to lag behind the primary Mint Cinnamon, but it’s worth it from the Mint perspective to have an alternative route immediately to hand.

You do realise that the Linux Kernel has Rust in it, right ?

You’ll need to go to BSD if you want to be Rust-less

https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-7-features-changes

" Linux 7.0 also declares the Rust for Linux effort as “here to stay”"

Errm read the article and don’t see any mention of Bambu - what did they do ?

Seems a fair conclusion, certainly it is warmer in London UK than London Ontario !

London (UK) has been successfully running BYD EV buses for years with no major issues. They’re cheaper than the diesels to run and quieter. Not sure why Canada had so much trouble.

I suspect that will depend on how brown the driver is…

Given the enshittification of the BBC I’d say journalist wangled a free ticket to the car show, was desperately trying to find the hook to write the story on, and asked the BYD rep something nigh on insulting like

“How can BYD be profitable when they are locked out of the world’s biggest car market ?”

And given they’re not allowed to say “We’re already doing just fine bitch, we don’t need to kiss the orange fascists taint” then you get that carefully diplomatic quote

BYD doesnt sell cars in the US according to the article so no, I don’t think BYD is spying on you.

However that other post you’re thinking of was possibly the one about the US manufacturers being forced to build in the spyware by the US govt…

Kinda the opposite to your direction of travel in tge post it seems to me ?

Well deserved

Nah we don’t know that either way on the available facts.

I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn’t the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.

The “outage” ended and hasn’t happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don’t know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn’t think to test it.

Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)

Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it

Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.

Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.

Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they’re an MS house, I’ve not checked), which they don’t block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn’t think to test the work laptop given I’d tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I’ll try next time

Ahh. That’s bad. What exactly did they do that made it feel like a data collection scheme ?

Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?

Great questions.

I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.

The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.

There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like

“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”

Continue loop until you hang up.

Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.

Thank you

Thank you

Thanks very much

Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.