There’s a thing called leasehold whereby you own the building and lease the land usually for 99 years after which it returns to the freeholder. It’s one of the reasons that the US embassy in London moved from Mayfair to Nine Elms. It was the only US embassy in the world that the US government didn’t own, the freehold belongs to the Grosvenor family (i.e. Lord Grosvenor). When the US tried to buy the freehold the Grosvenor family refused but agreed to a 999 year lease in exchange for the return of 12000 acres of Florida that was confiscated from them after the Revolutionary War - yes, they’ve been landowners for a very long time! I think the US made sure to buy the freehold of the new site at Nine Elms (they sold the remainder of the 999 year lease in Mayfair for an undisclosed sum) 😀

Excuse me but the correct SI units for length and area are double-decker buses and Waleses respectively ☺️

Tech journo and one-time Cixen*

https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven/ Liam is an EMEA-based Register journalist covering free-and-open-source software (FOSS), operating systems, and cloud developments. Prior to joining our publisher, he has had decades of experience in the worlds of IT and publishing, with roles ranging from tech support and IT manager to teacher, technical writer, and software director.

(*Cix, probably the original UK based social media platform :-) https://forums.cixonline.com/ )

For no better reason than that Liam Proven mentioned it on Mastodon recently and I had an old laptop lying about that met the fairly lowly spec (4gb RAM, 15GB free space, 64 bit processor) and I was bored ☺️ It easily installed on a Packard Bell eadynote TJ65, team smoothly, and send to be a nice useable basic system. For which I’ve no real use already having a Xubuntu desktop & laptop, and a MacBook Pro😀

Welcome to the top of the slippery slope. Won’t be long before you’re digging out an old laptop to install Ghost BSD 😀