And they are, in fact, planning to continue to use RHEL and/or AlmaLinux on their desktop and datacenter machines, even going so far as to adapt Fedora's build system to support building Debian packages[1] to leverage their existing RPM infrastructure.
As I understand it (from reading another article[2] posted on HN a few days ago), this change applies purely to the layer of machines that more or less directly interface with their experimental hardware, which has requirements more akin to industrial controllers than workstations or servers when it comes to the expectation of long service life with limited windows for scheduled maintenance.
Regarding internet infrastructure, the fiber optic network seems to be quite robust these days. There are still places where it isn't available, but compared to e.g. the US it's another world entirely. Even small cities typically offer 1 or sometimes 10 Gbps hookups in many areas.
Regarding bureaucracy I'm afraid that there has been no such progress. Extremely frustrating that even when I do everything right, I get told to come back another day for my trámite because they just...haven't done it! Sorry!
Also American, and I'm interested why you praise the education system. I have a child who will be entering the Andalusian system at some point and although it seems better than my Oklahoman system, that is, uh...damning with faint praise.
Some of my non-Spanish European colleagues also have commented that the education system is kind of "good not great" especially compared with other Western/Central European countries. However, I understand the Spanish system to be somewhat federated; perhaps the difference between Extremadura and Andalusia would explain the difference in opinion.
Wait, really? I'm a native Midwestern/Great Plains American English speaker (I remember reading the Harry Potter books as a kid and wondering why all the -er words were spelled wrong) and I say "PRY-mer." I have never heard anyone say "PRIM-mer" in my life.
I too have never once heard primmer. Not that all words follow the rules, but it doesn't make sense (vowel-consonant-vowel has long sounding vowel. That page also has the audio file links backwards (regular vs irregular). The file labeled irregular pronunciation sounds like primmer.
I am too. I've heard of the supposedly correct pronunciation, but I can't bring myself to use it. The "PRY-mer" pronunciation is more common in practice.
I mean, if you have zero experience with systemd, then yes. By contrast, if you've ever worked with any systemd unit files at all, then all the "systemd stuff" will be very familiar.
Which, if you're doing sysadmin type things on almost (e.g. not Alpine) any mainstream Linux distro in 2026, you should expect to encounter systemd unit files in your day-to-day.
I'm not qualified to comment too heavily on Netflix's infra, but I'm fairly sure that they don't _exclusively_ use AWS. There are things they run there, sure, but I understand that their actual content distribution is run on their own metal, and on FreeBSD. AWS hosts other stuff (auth, recommendation algos, etc).
But the text says "or," not "and." So by my interpretation if you process user data but are available via "free, public" repo, you're not covered. I presume "free" is defined elsewhere in the text, and that it approximates "open-source."
(e) AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER THAT DISTRIBUTES AN OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION UNDER LICENSE TERMS THAT PERMIT A RECIPIENT TO COPY, REDISTRIBUTE, AND MODIFY THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY PLATFORM-IMPOSED TECHNICAL OR CONTRACTUAL RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER ON INSTALLING ALL MODIFIED VERSIONS.
Aha, thanks! So I think that raises the question of whether e.g. RHEL is affected. Technically it could be argued that they don't add any additional restrictions, but I wonder if Colorado will see it that way.
I mean, where I work we offer machines to external users where they have shell access to be able to do their science, but I don't want them to have root access. Other institutes we work with (like supercomputer networks, etc) give us/users non-root access.
When things like CVE-2026-31431 or the bug that this thread is about affect our systems it causes a big headache. Yeah, we firewall off what we _can_ by having different machines doing critical things versus the ones where science users have code execution, but we don't have the resources to give every user their own machine.
I work in IT and have found that the issue impacts my work but not my ability to stream sports from sites of questionable legality. Of course, I don't pirate La Liga matches but that's primarily because I don't give a shit about soccer.
But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful.
Buuuut here is the fix: http://mirror.grid.uchicago.edu/pub/linux/alma/10.2/isos/x86... There's you Alma installer with support for the processors they use, and you can even install EPEL packages built for x86-64-v2 on Alma as well!
So...I agree with the user above, what stops what I must imagine would be a simpler switch from RHEL to Alma instead of Debian?
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