Hacker News Reader

I suppose the moment when there are only two questions to be answered before a non-developer's device is selected has arrived.

Q1: Does it run a mainstream, grade A browser? Q2: Is there an adequate way of generating documents I can share with users of other devices?

Answer yes to both and it is down to price, convenience and aesthetics - with (for some) the added advantage of a selection making life tougher for inter- (and infra-) national spies.

View on HN

As mentioned by many people, open source gives you peer review as an advantages, and bugs (both in-good-faith and intentional) get more easily spotted.

This however doesn't prevents bug from be there, and the question is: will those guys be keeping their custom systems up to date?

Also, as you point out, a lot of the work is now moved on this [gorram] cloud, and unfortunately the simple fact you're running GNU/Linux hardly prevents information from leaking. I wonder if they will also be using strong cryptography or custom online services!

EDIT: the distro is likely being a spin-off of something existing -- indeed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu as somebody linked -- so yes, that will be up to date.

At least they get to solve the problems. You can't do that with closed OSs. Same goes for the cloud vs. your own server.

Q3: Is it supported by a company I can trust?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com