The right answer is “yes”. Some cash in the moment is a nice thing to do, and will alleviate an immediate want or need potentially.

Donation to an organisation that will help the problem long term is a worthwhile thing to fund.

Why not give a man a fish to eat while you’re teaching them to fish for themselves, if you’re in a position to do so?

You could have asked him what he wanted first, if anything at all?

It smacks of elitism, that’s all.

The OS is simply a means to an end. If Linux offers a way to do what they want in a way that is less hassle, and it meets their needs, then that’s a good thing.

customizable and configurable

Whatever you think of OPs proposed use case is definitely falls under the above.

It’s this kind of 1337 h@xor approach to the OS that makes people feel like it’s unapproachable when that’s so far from the reality these days.

My great uncle left a load of masonic stuff but my dad returned it to his lodge before I could have a rummage through it.

My parents are religious and took a dim view of it.

Some of that stuff was pretty cool - it was a part of my great uncles life I would have loved to asked him about and I didn’t find out about it until he passed. Sad stuff.

young women are taking up sex work for financial stability when they shouldn’t have to.

This is true, and depressing.

But I think Kate Nash and Lilley Allen pros have other options to raise cash here - I doubt OF is a last resort for them. It is, however, a headline grabber for the British gutter press and will generate a lot of cover for two artists who really don’t have a huge amount of space in the public consciousness these days.

For what it’s worth, there are also some sex workers who do it because a)they enjoy it and b)it’s a faster way to make money than other avenues available to them. Nash and Allen both seem to fallm under this bracket.

Not really - there’s plenty of use cases where running memory intensive stuff like that isn’t an issue and running a small footprint distro makes more sense than, say, a maximalist, fully featured desktop distro.

I’m not trying to run a media centre or play games on my 11 year old MacBook!

Point taken!

I don’t think the lite distros are to blame for performance drops in that case, are they? Unless it’s down to a lack of system optimisation.

Fair enough!

I’ve done some blindingly stupid things with my installs in the past, and I’m not angling to try any in the near future - I guess I’ll just embrace the reinstallation game!

That’s a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701…

So if there’s additional repositories does that mean that there is likely to be core functionality which would be broken if it stops being maintained?