I just came back home from a business trip to Lithuania - this was before Vance's speech. MAGA people have no idea how determined people are up there to never give in a inch to Putin, and how deep and irreversible their hatred for Russia is. They're more than ready and willing to get into a hot war against Putin, and know that the rest of the Baltics, including Finland, as well as Poland, feel the same. I have always defended MAGA's position that the US should stop paying for NATO and that Europe must get its shit together and protect its own borders. This is also the sort of jolt that we need to rebuild our industrial capabilities. I doubt very much Trump is willing to go as far as totally getting out of Europe, but if he did it would be a blessing in disguise. The unfortunate consequence is that as we are already seeing, Trump causes a deep rejection among the European populace. So, far from causing a generalized change in leadership in Europe, he will contribute to consolidate the current one. The Eurocrats and their media cronies are gloating like ever with their phony condemnation of Vance's speech, which is a true oxygen balloon for them. Ditto for Musk. If they wanted to give the AfD in Germany "one last little boost" to win, to give an example, they've achieved the exact oppoaite. Same in France if they hoped to get rid of Macron any time soon.

So a few months ago I extensively documented here my days-long struggle to get my bitcoin node up and running on an old laptop with Ubuntu 22.04 -- mainly due to a mix of Bitcore's incomprehensible retardness in making one's life difficult if you want to use an external drive to store the blocks, and Ubuntu's retardness in forcing Snaps down users' throats. Then there's the usual problems with Linux, like not having Logitech drivers for my mouse and keyboard, and being force to find a way around it (Solaar). Having to edit multiple config files to get simple stuff working, like my VPN, and so on and so forth. Incidentally, I also completely switched to linux on my "main use" box, in this case Mint, because I got PTSD with Snaps and Ubuntu, and it's a lot worse in this sense. I had to roll back the kernel a couple of weeks ago because HDMI support is completely broken. I haven't been able to fix a weird issue with bluetooth headphones that causes my audio to play **faster** (not slower) than video (probably also an HDMI/graphics card support problem). My wired connection randomly drops and I have to restart to get back online. Voodoo black magic to make mouse and keyboard buttons partially work. Four times I have had to deal with boot problems. The first time, the computer would just be caught in a loop unable to boot AT ALL, just straight from BIOS to black screen, so I had to make a live USB on the other computer, and go from there. The other times, the kernel just broke on me but I was able to just go initframs manually from Grub and let it fix itself. Not that I would go back to Windows ever again. Not happening, ever. But as much as I have been able to deal with all this stuff, I can see how none of my friends and family would be able to, even if they wanted. Anyhow, it's been a while since my bitcore machine on Ubuntu has started to complain that I should update to 24.04... and I'm scared shitless by the thought.