Direct link to the actual Mint blog-post: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=5050

It looks like you get what you pay for with SearXNG.

While SearXNG claims to aggregate results from "more than 70 search services", the "Engines" tab show that most instances only support a small number of engines, and many of these are degraded. That matches my experience of trying SearXNG, where I entered a few queries on a service that randomly picks an instance: Half of those queries failed due to the instance having been rate-limited by the search providers and the other half gave inconsistent and often poor responses. I'm not sure what engine(s) those instances used.

I guess I could self-host, and configure and maintain just the engines I want access to, but the time required to do so would very quickly exceed the amount of hours I have to work to pay for a Kagi subscription, so it doesn't make much sense economically.

However, one area where I think SearXNG does have a distinct advantage is privacy, provided that you self-host and only use engines that do not require an API key to access. But that's a tall ask for most people

Obviously. It is, however, a good heuristic. The headlines that can be answered in the affirmative are very much in the minority

Betteridge's law of headlines:

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no

Kagi has always been upfront about using other search providers' indexes.

Per Kagi's current documentation (source), their search results

include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide

That particular page dates back to at least Oct. 2022. It was also mentioned in their FAQ back when they were still in closed beta

This is horrible in my view. All types that implement Deref and/or DerefMut can be called smart pointers, and everything is “thread-safe” in safe Rust.

If I had to call something “Rust’s thread-safe smart pointer”, it would be the actual references &T/&mut T where T: Send + Sync.

Not everything is thread-safe in safe rust; while safe rust prevents you from using thread-unsafe constructs in a threaded context, most types are not thread-safe. That's why you have both Rc and Arc, since it is not safe to use non-atomic reference counting in a threaded context, but you don't need the overhead of atomics in a non-threaded context.

Nor are references &T/&mut T where T: Send + Sync considered smart pointers in Rust. Those are just references to something that itself implements the traits required to make that type thread-safe.

See also https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch15-00-smart-pointers.html and https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html#thread-safety

I guess that the purpose of the one-line summary is to communicate the spirit of the policy. The details that you are asking for, is what constitutes the majority of the the policy document itself. While you could probably summarize the body of the policy in more detail, having multiple lists with different levels of details would likely lead to confusion. So I think that the approach they've taken makes sense

You are not going to accomplish that using a random selection of textbooks. It doesn't even look like there are that many textbooks in these piles. Realistically, you'd probably have better luck asking students taking intro-level courses to donate their old text books, or just pirating the textbooks you need

I'm guessing that the big books are old collections of scientific journals. Depending on the journal, you could have multiple of those tomes per year. These days scientists access journals digitally, so there's little benefit to keeping the physical copies around in most cases

But if that is the reason, then they should label most distros the same way. To give one example, Debian has bundled non-free firmware since Bookworm. It feels very odd for them to single out Mint like this, if that is in fact the reason.

Either way, they need to clearly spell out why they accuse Mint of this

It's appears to be from https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Linux Mint does not adhere to the principles of software freedom and it does not publish security advisories.

I am, however, unsure why the author claims that mint does not adhere to the "principles of software freedom". Maybe because,

Mint's reputation for ease of use has been further enhanced by the inclusion of proprietary and patent-encumbered multimedia codecs that are often absent from larger distributions due to potential legal threats.

If it is just for your own (offline) reading pleasure, and it is not a too large a number of pages, then SingleFile is an easy way to archive pages in a semi-automated fashion: You can configure it such that it automatically saves every page you visit based on a pattern or just for a tab, so you'll just have to page through the threads to save them