Is this really true though? Don't they have ways of tracking the returns on advertising investment? I would have thought that after a certain amount of time these ad buys would show themselves as worthless if they actually were.

No, it's not really true. Media companies have a whole host of KPI's and tracking methods to evaluate the success/failure of their campaigns/single ads: here's a small summary of some of the KPI's and methods https://www.themediaant.com/blog/methods-of-measuring-advert...

I had the same experience, but the difference these days seems to be that so many people can't NOT talk about politics. There are certain folk who just find a way to shoehorn it into any conversation. It is really draining.

This is anecdotal, of course.

Yea, it's possible to be very politically enthusiastic and active, but also NOT bring up your favorite (or hated) politician in every damn discussion. We all have that uncle that can't let everyone else enjoy Thanksgiving dinner anymore because he has to make it about Trump or something.

I sincerely hope this type of comment isn't going to become commonplace in the future. Especially when it's someone's hobby project or labour of love.

No-one is stopping you from using netstat.

Yeah, I'd absolutely agree here. The article didn't "miss" this option. It just isn't relevant here.

Same feeling here. Realistically, what is this distro doing that couldn't just be done with a quick bash script on whatever the current 'new user distro' is?

The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?

None of this makes any sense to me.

This is true of any electrical system, no?

Also the variations are often not just cosmetic things like colour. Sometimes they are entirely different products.

I echo this sentiment. Whilst I completely understand that developers are doing this in their own time and largely for no other reason than it being a labour of love, it would really help lower the barrier to entry.

Oftentimes when the tool is typically used as part of a useful stack, the other components have documentation that can also be difficult to decode. So it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.

Same here. Tends to be pretty inconsistent. DNS-over-HTTP(s) definitely disabled. 30s is a lot more than I've experienced, but there are times where it clearly struggles to look things up.