My assumption would be that it’s because we don’t really look at mirrors per se but rather the reflection in them, so the definite article is indicating the fungibility of the mirror itself. This total speculation on my part though and I might be totally wrong.

To answer some of your questions:

1. Fedora has two major releases per year. I’ve only been using it long enough to do one upgrade, but it was basically seamless and the same as any normal incremental update, except it took longer to apply.
2. I can’t speak for other DEs, but the Plasma spin provides a system setting to apply updates automatically. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s literally just a radio button so I imagine it’s pretty easy to get working.
3. SELinux for the most part is unobtrusive, but it can definitely be a pain when trying to do more advanced things on the system. For instance, it needs to be specially configured to allow systemd-hibernate to work, and I still haven’t gotten hibernate-after-sleep to work at all (though that might not be SELinux’s fault, I haven’t found time to follow up on it. You can also disable it, though, if it gets too much in the way.

I can’t speak to Arc support or RAID specifically, although if the data on the RAID array is vital then you NEED to have at least one backup before you even think about installing a new OS.

The question hits on some of the most fundamental aspects of our current understanding of reality and theoretical physics. As another commenter pointed out, one potential answer delves into QFT. Just because OP used a metaphor doesn’t warrant you saying they had “too many pot brownies” and there’s absolutely no need to be a condescending jerk here.

“Old man yells at cloud”

Doesn’t trixie still support like a dozen arches? I think one of the more recent deprecations was MIPS BE which is functionally obsolete in 2024, at least insofar as practically no one is using it to run a modern distribution.

Nope, doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of an LLM and LLMs aren’t yet clever enough to produce original humor like that.

Sure, but that only applies when referring to indices or to the zeroth element specifically.

Even in the CS world, ordinal phrases are still 1-indexed (e.g. the first element of an array vs element 0).

Heartbleed was the result of an accidental buffer overread bug, not a backdoor.

Fair warning, you do lose access to some offline AI features like improved voice dictation and song recognition as well as Google Pay. I’m okay with the tradeoff personally but it is still a downside.

SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 my brother.

continue is useful as a loop analog to early return in a function context, which helps keep indentation/nested conditionals under control and in turn improves code readability.

Just as a note, I believe you still need to tick the “Enable Steam Play for all titles” in Steam settings to allow it to be used with non-verified games.

It’s not meant to be empty. You could fix it by mounting your root partition in a live environment and copying over the sudo binary from the live disk, but without knowing why this happened I’d personally be a bit nervous that other binaries are corrupted as well, so I’d maybe consider reinstalling the OS (preserving the home partition/folder ofc). You could also probably get away with just reinstalling coreutils and fixing any other issues as they crop up if and when they do.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the urge to apply an alignment chart to monospace fonts of all things, but Xenon and Radon are basically lawful and chaotic evil respectively.

Public companies are by definition amoral. They’re beholden to their shareholders and virtually every decision they make is informed by this obligation. Morality generally only factors into their decision-making insofar as it affects PR and thus the bottom line.

I don’t mean to say that Google or any other company is immoral. I use amoral to simply mean that they operate independent of morality. No public company, no matter how much you may like them, is your friend at the end of the day.

Chromium is open-source. Chrome is not and also happens to constitute a majority of the browser market, and Google has tried multiple times to cash in on this market share to benefit their primary business of advertising to the detriment of users (FLoC, Manifest v3, Web Environment Integrity).

Likewise, AOSP is open-source, but Google has been progressively dismantling it and making various components closed-source (most recently the dialer app).

All this to say, Google is absolutely not friendly to FOSS. As a corporation, they’re beholden to their shareholders above all else and they should be treated as an amoral entity, the same as every other publicly-traded company.

Nope, different product with almost the exact same name lol.