People are praising e-book readers as a green alternative to books. I'm not so sure.

E-book readers are full of electronics. These require large expensive factories, which use a lot of resources. Then the devices are shipped, consuming resources - such hi-tech manufacture is expensive, therefore is done somewhere cheap, meaning international shipping. Books are cheap to print.

Then you need a computer with Internet access to get your ebooks - more hi-tech, more distant manufacturing and transport. It downloads books from big websites, meaning big datacentres, meaning lots and lots of manufacturing and power.

Then the devices need regular charging - so more power, more fuels being burned, more power distribution.

Books tend to last. They're cheap, need no power, have no DRM (photocopy 'em or scan 'em if you want - it's laborious but perfectly doable), can be reused many times by many people, can be lent and borrowed (think libraries), etc.

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Distros & their package managers, or a brief Linux family history

Package management systems are one of the deepest divides between Linux distros.

One family uses .DEB - Debian and things made from Debian. What makes .DEB good is not the format itself or the basic tools (`dpkg`, `dselect`) that handle it; it's the meta-package-management tool on top, `apt`. Apt has automatic recursive dependency resolution. This means packages much be fetched from carefully-structured repositories, primarily over the Internet.

RPM is much more basic and for years didn't have a meta-manager on top and had no form of dependency resolution. I started to use Red Hat in 1996 or so and stuck with it for 2-3y. Installing something new usually meant going and finding and installing, in the right order, sometimes hundreds of libraries and dependencies. Certainly typically 4-5-6, maybe dozens.

It was a nightmare.
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