They weren’t just random Russians, they were working for companies under sanctions.

That’s just false. First, nobody in the maillists claimed those specific people were working for sanctioned companies. Second, at least one of the banned maintainers, when advised to contact their company’s lawyers, said he isn’t working for any company at all, just freelancing and doing free work for the community.

What were they supposed to do? Ignore the sanctions?

Yes. It was(and probably still is) literally written on the Linux Foundation website that the US sanctions do not concern open source community. It goes against everything open source ideology is, that is code and contribution is all that matters.

And what’s worse it raises serious concerns what other malicious actions to the Linux kernel and other projects Linus and LF had to take on demands of the government that likes to install backdoors in software.

I don’t see a problem with Flatpak in this. It does what it’s supposed to do. You find not using it better? That’s great, that option is the default in all of the distributives.

Is it even a problem for a desktop in 2024? Never had an issue with RAM or diskspace. And even for those that have, they can just not use flatpak until they upgrade, no reason to kill it.

Your SSD will likely live longer than most of the other hardware. 8gb is surely low but quite enough for running Asahi in daily tasks.

Yeah, it’s literally whether the publisher wants to install malware with their games or not.

They are still in the mindset of “we are the only player in the field and people can’t live without us”.

No, they are in the mindset “we are a company selling cloud Linux, our legacy products are money drain”. They clearly state it in their yearly reports.

My main concern with this happening is how much secret control the US government has over top Linux maintainers. Many commenters say that Linus couldn’t refuse the request from the government because he lives in the US and Linux Foundation is in the US. So what other requests from the government known to put backdoors into software they couldn’t refuse in the past or won’t be able to refuse in the future?

If I recall correctly Russia is not allowed to participate because of their state doping program not because of their politics. So unless there was an Israel state doping program discovered that’s not double standard.

There’s definitely a lot of opposition to Russia’s actions in the world but your comment sounds especially funny today when leaders of most of the world(including the UN Secretary General and even a certain NATO country President) are currently in Kazan, Russia on a global cooperation summit.