You’re right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.

Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you’re there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I’m sure they would scare some people off.

Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.

And that’s just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.

It seems unlikely to me that their public statements about their situation are a full and accurate reflection of their feelings. I mean, what else are they going to say? “Fuck Boeing, fuck this failed mission, we’re pilots with families and it’s less than ideal that we’ll be stranded up here for 8 months doing busywork while our bone density gets nuked”?

If my employer sent me to a remote island without any of my personal effects, on a vehicle that couldn’t safely return me home, I’d look at any list of tasks they sent me with some measure of bitterness. Even if it was my favourite remote island. Being trapped there would change the colour of things. Working is probably the only thing they can do to keep from going insane.

From a policy standpoint, disengagement is the worst possible strategy. Worse than engagement, and far worse than developing proactive foreign policy in the face of constant foreign interference.

Canada needs to create a foreign agent registry, and establish more sophisticated systems to combat and sanction foreign interference in our political and cultural spaces. For fuck sake, we know for a fact that right now, we have a sitting Member of Parliament (Han Dong) who has their seat as a result of Chinese state influence into their candidacy. The fact that we lack the mechanisms, or the political will, or both, to do something about this, is insanity.

Current composition of the House of Commons

• Liberal (156 seats)
• NDP (24)
• Conservative (118)
• Bloc Québécois (32)
• Green (2)
• Independent (3)
• Vacant (3)

Only 4 of those parties have official party status, and the structure of the NDP/Liberal supply and confidence agreement arguably makes them the same party.

So, boiled down, there are 3 parties that are relevant, and only 2 that are relevant to the nation as a whole.