Mine is East Germany. I think the German culture and heritage fits socialism really well. They always had a militaristic and hard working culture so that Soviet militarism would fit them pretty well (militarism does not mean attacking other countries or having a strong military but more like a dicipline structure overall). They would not mind having a police state where the military and the state controls everything. They were also the most loyal communist state to the Soviets.

Hi, years ago if someone had asked, "Which Linux Distribution has the best Community Support?" I would have answered "Ubuntu", but mainly because my journey took me from openSuse to Ubuntu, with some detours around DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux, with Ubuntu being the clear winner in terms of having a friendly, welcoming, and active community.

The main avenues of finding support were #ubuntu on freenode (now https://libera.chat/) and https://ubuntuforums.org/ (now retired). Back then both of these were humming with activity. Today, the activity has severely decreased; people don't seem to be hanging out in these spaces helping each other, with the occasional expert popping in and steering the conversation. They're mostly quiet. There's also discourse.ubuntu.com, which I don't know well, and the Ubuntu Matrix space, which is just an awful buggy experience. Even today, Element took 5 minutes to load, and then hit me with the "this channel is closed, the conversation continues elsewhere" which didn't work when I clicked it. Not like IRC at all.

All this to say, I don't think I can recommend the Ubuntu Community any more, unless it truly is the best option and I'm doing it wrong somehow. I am open to that possibility!

The others I've heard of, and the preconceived notions I've heard are:

1. Debian - community geared towards more advanced / knowledgeable users
2. Arch - community geared towards more advanced / knowledgeable users
3. Linux Mint - less active than Ubuntu
4. Fedora - corporate Red Hat?

Could anybody help me out here to find a Linux Distribution where you can talk to actual helpful humans and solve a problem together if you get stuck?

Spain is sending its most advanced frigate to help provide air defense for Cyprus, an EU member state that has come under drone attack as tensions rise across the Middle East, the Spanish Defence Ministry said Thursday.

The Cristóbal Colón (F105 frigate) will deploy to the eastern Mediterranean to help shield the island from aerial threats and assist with potential evacuations of civilians from the region.

The Spanish warship will join a multinational European naval force led by the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle (R91), alongside vessels from the Netherlands, Greece and Italy, tasked with strengthening air defense around Cyprus, located roughly 150 miles (240 km) from Israel’s coast.

The deployment follows a drone strike early Monday on the British RAF Akrotiri base on the island. British officials said the attack caused minimal damage and no casualties, adding on Thursday that the drone was not launched from Iran.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Thursday that he could not rule out his country taking part militarily in the ongoing Middle East conflict.

Speaking alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra, he said: “One can never categorically rule out participation.”

Carney, who previously described US-Israeli strikes on Iran as “inconsistent with international law,” added: “We will stand by our allies.”

Meanwhile, Albanese announced the deployment of “military assets” to the Middle East as a contingency planning to assist Australians stranded in the Middle East.

Embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in

Paywall? https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-iran-war-middle-east-europe-eu-support-military-bases-rift/

I am interested in self hosting a Personal Health Record (PHR) system. I don't need my own EMR/EHR, I just want to be able to pull down my own data, host it, and navigate it.

For example, I'd like to be able to pull down my vitals/labs from my provider and look at trends over time. I'd like to be able to pull down my prescriptions to see when I went on/off different medications. I'd like to pull down doctor's notes, so I can see when I first started complaining about poor sleep, to see if it correlates to any of my medications or some other health change.

I have tried Mere Medical, and it was able to pull down my information from my provider (who uses Cerner), but the functionality is quite lacking. You basically get a timeline view, but nothing to really organize or search through notes (they are mostly just linked documents), or anyway to pull down lab results and see trends.

FastenHealth has also come up in my search, but it seems the onprem is a very stripped down, limited version of their paid product.

Is anyone familiar with anything like this? Ideally, it's be combined with a fitness tracker to pull my health data from my phone/wearables too.

This document will set the pace for Beijing's tech policies in the next five years.

OS scrapes through the test, scoring deceptively respectable five out of nine.

Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers.

Some Democrats aren’t ruling out voting for a multibillion-dollar military infusion, setting up a potential internal clash in the weeks ahead for a party whose political base is aghast at President Donald Trump’s aggression against Iran.

The Trump administration’s top defense and intelligence officials told lawmakers this week that the Pentagon could soon send an emergency supplemental funding request to Capitol Hill. They didn’t offer a timeline or dollar value, but the White House is reportedly mulling a $50 billion ask.

That’s a massive sum on top of the more than $990 billion Congress has shelled out for defense capabilities in recent months between the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” and the latest government funding package.

To pass any new military funding measure through the Senate, the support of at least seven Democrats will be needed to overcome the filibuster. It’s far from certain the votes are there.

Emphasis on “optional.”

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260305141729/https://www.theverge.com/tech/889836/apple-music-ai-transparency-tags-launch

Two US Defense Department employees were wounded when an Iranian drone hit a hotel in Bahrain’s capital Manama, The Washington Post reported Monday.

“Two U.S. DOW personnel were injured,” said a State Department cable reviewed by the newspaper, using an acronym for last year’s Defense Department unofficial rebrand as the Department of War.

I'm still in the research phase of switching to Linux and don't know if this concern is reasonable. I'm not tech savvy. I'm comfortable in the windows ecosystem and could use the dos prompt fine when they used it. I played with QBasic and C++ when I was younger and have built a few computers but that was a couple decades+ ago.

My concern is dealing with malware. I know that Linux has less issues with malware than Windows but, as I understand it, that's primarily because it has a comparatively small market share. I feel like I'm getting into Linux just as it's getting more popular and that it will get worse if the EU moves away from Microsoft because they will most likely adopt some form of Linux as their new standard. More less tech savvy people like me moving to Linux makes it a juicier target for people who create and use malicious software. It's not a reason to stay with Windows but is it a reasonable concern? Are there sufficient tools for people who don't really know what they're doing to be reasonably secure on Linux and will they keep up if the threat profile expands as Linux picks up more users?

An Iranian warship destroyed in a US torpedo strike on Wednesday was "defenceless" and participating in an international naval exercise as a guest of the Indian navy, according to reports.

Former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said “the Iranian ship will not be where it was if we had not invited it to talk [sic] part in our Milan exercise”. Sibal added that because it was taking part in an exercise “it was defenceless”.

Indian politician Supriya Shrinate said on social media: "These Iranian navy men parading at an event in India, were our guests. Invited by us.

"US submarine targeted their ship and killed them while they were returning home." Shrinate also criticised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his failure to make a statement on the attack.

Pseudonymity has never been perfect for preserving privacy. Soon it may be pointless.