All of these claims clash with the reality of so many core open source projects, used by private users and massive corporations alike, that rely on single voluntary developers or super small groups which receive no flowers and no donations.

dock

Not a permanent dock. Docks predate Apple any way.

activities (somewhat e mix between Apple’s mission control and launchpad

GNOME 3 was officially launched a few months after OS X Lion, but combined these things into one first.

How it manages to use up more resources than KDE is beyond me.

It can happen when you have to develop all your technology on your own instead of relying on the work of a hundred-million dollar company that does the heavy lifting for you.

What does the founder of GNOME have to do with GNOME in 2022? He worked for Microsoft for 6 years.

Right, Midnight Trains was a French company trying to create a European night train network that centred on France, specifically on Paris. I think they found out the hard way that for various reasons, as they detailed in their blog, France might not be the best country in which to organise such a company; it also might have been simply too ambitious of a project for the current market.

Survivor bias, we don’t know about all the towers that did in fact lean to far and fell over the centuries.

Yes, bank accounts are still (only) bank accounts, which they have been for centuries with only cash (coins or banknotes) and paper-based accounting. Isn’t this the point? If the digital euro is to be a digital analogue for cash, surely one would expect it to play the same role as cash, which isn’t the form to store your entire wealth and belonging, but to serve as an easily tradeable and transportable form of money. The ECB doesn’t want to provide and manage bank accounts, or rather no central bank does as it’s simply not what banking has always been, it’s always been a private endeavour.

I think the digital convenience of “anonymous” payments is real, and also that the ECB wanting to implement the digital euro as an online e-commerce compatible system from the beginning, directly challenging various different payment circuits with a single universal one, is also a significant development.

At the moment the idea that I have understood reading the various documents and interviews is that the digital euro wallets will not be a sort of bank account managed by the ECB, but they will be managed by the private banks (with similar guarantees for banking inclusion as existing bank accounts) and will be interoperable in order to use the common ECB-backed digital euro.

Therefore you still have the banks managing the infrastructure; also to convince the banks to adhere and not to completely destroy the existing electronic payment circuits there is a proposal to have a limit on the maximum transaction amount.