Between 2024 and 2026, nearly every open-source Nintendo emulator was erased — not by any court, but by settlements, phone calls, and takedown forms. No one was ever found liable of anything. This is the story of that erasure and the people who refused to let it be quiet, told entirely through the commit history of a Linux package manager, where every dead package is still required to say what happened to it.

The most-quoted line in software was said out loud by a man who never wrote it down, popularised by someone who half-remembered hearing it, and given its third item by a stranger on Twitter. Also: it is not in Civilization, and if it were, it would not have been Sean Bean reading it.

Three reboots in two weeks, a 21.5 GB idle JavaScript heap, and the declarative cgroup cage that finally stopped my workstation from OOM-killing itself.

You upgraded 22.04 → 24.04, restored an old Timeshift snapshot to roll back a problem, and now Pop!_OS drops to an emergency shell every boot — modprobe says 'Function not implemented' and /boot/efi won't mount. Here's why BTRFS booted the wrong subvolume, and a fish-shell, step-by-step recovery from the emergency shell back to a clean 24.04 boot.

Targets and slices sit side by side in systemctl, and both 'group' units — so it's easy to assume they're variations on one idea. They're not. They descend from two completely different corners of Unix history: one is the heir of init runlevels, the other is the heir of the kernel's cgroups. Here's the narrative history of both, and how to tell which one you actually want.