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https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14
Dear Friends and Software Freedom Lovers,
Devuan Developers are pleased to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera
4.0 as the project's newest stable release. This is the result of lots of
painstaking work by the team and extensive testing by the wider Devuan
community.What's new in Chimaera 4.0?
* Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10.
* Your choice of init: sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.
* Improved desktop support - virtually all desktop environments available
in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free.
* New boot, display manager and desktop theming.
* Enhanced accessibility: installation via GUI or console can now be
accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis, or using a
refreshable braille display, and Devuan Chimaera has the ability to
install desktop environments without PulseAudio, allowing speech
synthesis in both console and GUI sessions at the same time.
"without PulseAudio", eh? Speculations on the reason for that are welcome, he asked them knowingly... -- Ed.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:43PM
Your story is another example of why systems need hard limits, shutoffs, kill switches, and the like, that are not subject to software manipulation. You know of the Therac-25? To save money, they removed hardware limiters, relying solely on the software to keep things at sane levels. But the software was seriously flawed. There could have been a final sanity check in the software, but there wasn't even that. A few patients received 1000x the radiation dose they should have been given, and died.
Many headphones do have a volume control, independent of the extremely complicated system that, as you learned the hard way, did have a booby trap. Yes, there's lots of bad work by Poettering, but this could have easily happened with any complicated system and another bad developer. This sort of stuff is why people look side-eyed at IoT.