Of course you can fake a small/large crowd in a protest.
From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.
Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".
Counting large crowds is hard, but the tools continue to improve: we have increasingly advanced drone photography and access to better AI tools to generate more reliable estimates.
If crowd sizes become a significant point of contention it'll become increasingly commonplace for multiple parties to take lots of aerial video and photos that serve as independent verification. You could probably get a pretty accurate estimate of how many people show up to an event by sending drones to take photos every 15 minutes.
In any case, I think the problem you highlight is more focused towards the upper-end, while I was thinking about the lower end of the spectrum. Where some people might be very vocal online, but they're unable to gather more than a dozen or two people for any given protest. If a protest is gathering an unknown number of people that ranges between 100k and 1 million that sounds like a really good problem to have.
Your criticism of inconsistent people estimates are valid, I'm not sure if newspapers have published the set of tools and criteria that they use when generating these estimates, so that's an area where it would be great to see increased transparency.
While 100K itself is indeed impressive - the order of magnitude difference between 100K and 1M makes a lot of room for interpretations, rationalizations, spins ...etc.
The "publishing the set of tools and criteria used to generate estimates" is happening, and so far it seems that usually doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because of course those sources/news that report wildly wrong (be it larger or smaller numbers) are usually (not always, but very commonly) controlled by the governments.
So despite students that organized the biggest protests in Belgrade giving their estimates (based on combo of RSVP and how many people accommodated people from other cities). And those being close to independant research (using drone footage, VR/AR crowd simulations, AI) with loads of posts/videos providing detailed explanations ...
Most "ordinary people" saw (and keep seeing) just the "official version".
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels ...
Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".
Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".
And it's more of the same online.
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This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.
TL;DR: you can pre-configure and keep updating/building new versions of your own live-boot image of Gentoo/Calculate. Which kind of get's you "previous known-good builds" just the other way around.
Oh and the other thing I also never needed to use is update/rescue of Gentoo/Calculate installation through it's flip-flopping between two root partitions.
Calculate installer by default creates two root partitions, but I've only ever used one. And so far `cl-update` never broke the system - even when I was so far behind that my version of python and glibc got masked (or maybe even removed).
Back on vanilla Gentoo - being that far behind usually meant it was easier to reinstall Gentoo from stage3 :D
When you say "There are precompiled versions of big popular binaries" - were you thinking of "firefox-bin" and such?
I think that for some years already - Gentoo has been providing binaries for "normal" packages - as long as your config/use-flags match (and if you turned on the option/flag to use binary packages).
And of course places with more than just a few Gentoo boxes were usually already running their own BINHOST setups long time ago.
And it's literally yes, yes, next, next - the defaults are pretty good.
1) Calculate Linux is 100% Gentoo with more profiles (e.g. server, desktop-kde, desktop-gnome ...etc) and after switching from vanilla Gentoo to Calculate - I didn't need to tweak any use flags of any packages.
Profiles are so good that everything works nicely together
2) There are prebuild binaries for your profile use-flag combo - can't recall last time I had to wait for something to compile
3) Much less likely to happen since you get binaries for everything - but there's additional cl-xxx tooling that makes even that easier
4) I don't think that's a bad thing. Though sure I could agree that having option to automatically restart services would be nice.
5) Yes - and you can also archive and basically have git-log on conf changes.
> Calculate Linux is 100% Gentoo with more profiles (e.g. server, desktop-kde, desktop-gnome ...etc) and after switching from vanilla Gentoo to Calculate - I didn't need to tweak any use flags of any packages.
If that's your thing, sure. I find even Gentoo too automated for my preferences. I'm using the most basic from the available profiles and tweak everything manually in package.use. I stopped using openrc and switched to just sysvinit/inittab.
But then, if you want binary packages and such, why use Gentoo or a fork?
This "I'm using the most basic from the available profiles and tweak everything manually in package.use" sounds like me 10-15 years ago.
Then one day at work I wanted to print something and I think I needed to add LDAP and CUPS use flags ... Rebuilding world with those new flags was not finished by the time I was back from lunch break, or maybe it even failed.
Then I discovered Calculate and it's desktop (e.g. KDE) profile turned out to have all those useful use flags already set in it's profiles.
Anyway ...
IMHO main reason to choose/stay with Gentoo/Calculate is flexibility and choice (like not having to use systemd, but also being able to). Habit is a part too - though due to work I've got familiar with CentOS and Ubuntu.
I don't necessarily want binary packages. Sure they are handy/convenient for speed/ease/etc. And even though I can't recall last time I needed to tweak some package/feature use flag (maybe V4L2 virtual camera in OBS?) - I really don't want to give that flexibility up ... As without it - it would be back to manually figuring out compile/run-time dependencies when all you want is just slightly differently configured/built package.
AFAIK Calculate provides more profiles (predefined set of use flags) - instead of just Gnome or KDE/Plasma - it also has Cinnamon, LXQt, MATE and Xfce, as well as one for server(s).
And Calculate also provides binaries for those profiles.
It's still 100% pure Gentoo (and actually these days even vanilla Gentoo itself offers precompiled binaries) so you still can compile things in rare cases that binary isn't already compiled with use/config that you want.
I've had quite the opposite experience with Microsoft.
One time their support just give me a licence for a newer version of Windows - I've replaced the HDD/SSD, cloned/copied it and it was not activated. I contacted their chat support from that laptop and when they asked me for licence on the sticker I mentioned I'll have to come back in 5 minutes since I'll have to turn off laptop, and take out battery to see the MS sticker/hologram.
Support said "No worries, here's a new activation key".
Can't recall if it was from XP to Win 7, or Win 7 to 10.
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And after buying 2 or 3 licences from another website just like G2A (Win 10 was ~€10 on Instant-Gaming) - a bunch of new computers (even brand new assembled desktops) were automatically activated.
Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients?
When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
Depends on what you mean by this in "been doing this"?
While work now mandates "If you want to use Linux, it has to be Ubuntu" (and I complied). On personal front - about a decade ago I've moved from "vanilla" Gentoo to Calculate Linux - which was and still is 100% Gentoo.
These days difference is even smaller, but already 10+ years ago Calculate had sane profiles as well as all software packages as pre compiled binaries matching those profiles.
And although systemd is one of configurable USE keywords on Calculate/Gentoo - it's still not the default.
So there probably are some folks that haven't been touched by systemd at all... For now.
From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.
Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".