It is a bit of a utopia for a privacy minded Linux fan. Most social media I’ve had to find my community. Here it is THE community. It would take an effort to avoid it.

And you have a nice day too.

Context matters quite a bit here. Not all boycots are created equal.

I used to be the guy who wandered into Target every other week to get one thing and left with an $150 cart full of junk I didn’t plan on buying. I joined the boycotting over their DEI policy shift. I wouldn’t judge someone for continuing to shop there. Though I would encourage them to spend less. I view that boycott as an important lesson in respecting all stakeholders and not bending the knee to authoritarianism, but hardly an existential crisis for anyone or anything but Target.

I’m not sure if I’m technically boycotting Tesla because I’ve never done any business with them. However, it’s my firm conviction that someone who buys a Tesla today, is a piece of shit. Someone who knowingly invests in Tesla is a piece of shit. If they’re someone I continue to interact with after that they’re very likely to hear about it.

Tesla, in my opinion, is complicit in everything Elon does. It has proactively financed, and propagandized oppression and undermined democracy and the functioning of a government that is supposed to serve and represent me. Anyone who buys a Tesla today is also complicit.

She’s not an idiot. She represents idiots. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Her and Susan Collins with their “oopsie… I fell for it again” routine. I don’t know who it’s for at this point, but they’re both still in office so I guess it’s working.

There is so much of that kind of marketing at this point, that it had not occurred to me until reading this discussion that “Liquid Death” was intended to ironically over the top.

Even if there isn’t a document with a big header that says “Client List” and firm documentation of what crimes were committed, we know there are flight logs, there are victim statements, and there are records of financial transactions.

That is absolutely enough to bring charges against at least some of these people. We are accepting a false narrative that there has to be some chiseled in stone singular document listing bad actors.

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds. We have greater life expectancy and mostly a better quality of health along the way. Child mortality is down globally.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=1996..latest

Improvements in our understanding of neurodivergent students has resulted in better educational and quality of life outcomes for millions who in past decades would have fallen through the cracks.

The proliferation of environmental lead from paint and gasoline are WAY down, and the hole in the Ozone was just about peak in 1995.

Open source, public domain, and freely available knowledge have democratized education, technology, research, and product development in ways that would have almost been inconcievable in 1995.

We are able to communicate more globally, even with total strangers, often across language barriers, and for free.

Video games, films, and television are able to create visions that would have been technically impossible 30 years ago. And technology has reduced the barriers for people to gain entry into those industries.

I carry around a tiny super computer with instant access to all the world’s knowledge. That would have been a dream in 1995.

There are of course many things that are worse. It’s a harder time to be starting out in life. “Luxuries” are dirt cheap and necesities are unaffordable. We’ve traded our sense of community for a paranioa of “others” even as the world has gotten safer. Globally the world has been swinging toward extremism and it constantly feels like capitalism may collapse and we don’t know what comes next if that happens. But failure to see how much is better and for how many seems like too much doom scrolling and too narrow and outlook.

It’s just consumption in general. It predates capitalism (as we know it). For thousands of years humanity has been using beer and wine to cut the fat, sugar, and salt on our palate so we don’t feel too full or sate and can eat more.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can tell you what I personally love about Gnome.

I like that it’s Spartan. I like that it looks good without me having to customize a thousand different settings.

I like that It has client side decorations, so every window doesn’t have to have an obscene, chunky, mostly useless title bar.

I don’t miss every single application having 100 different options packed into a menu bar. Once you get used to it, you realize that it was mostly getting in the way the whole time.

It’s just a really streamlined workflow for 98% of what you do. The problem is that 2% where it’s too spartan and God do you wish you had some options.

But I also think KDE is a great desktop environment. If I were more of a gamer I’d be using KDE. I think XFCE is an excellent desktop environment for aging hardware and Windows converts. It is very much a matter of taste, Use cases, and your preferred workflow.

There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.

Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.

In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.

Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.

There’s also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.

And the Amazon “scandal”.

And then there’s the telemetry stuff.

Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him… unapproachable and edgy.

Out of curiosity, I just checked my pantry. I have two 30 ounce jars (1400+ grams), sitting in reserve.

This genuinely represents a failure to comprehend the scale of American food products.

I was just thinking, I wish a trillion dollar company would figure out a way to turn a few billion dollars worth of usable hardware into e-waste today.

Hopefully people dumping these cards drives down the used prices.

“This PC is basically my life” screams leave well enough alone. I wouldn’t even set up a dual boot on a machine I depended on to make my living. If you do, make sure you’ve got everything backed up before you start. Nothing should go wrong, but that’s a very different statement than nothing will go wrong.

If you want to start using linux I’d recommend you buy a cheap second computer and start there. You can safely experiment as much as you like without risking your professional set up.

I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.

But in terms of “best at what they do” I’m blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use “just works” OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It’s remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.

I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the “this will run on your toaster” type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.

You don’t need a high level of technical skill. You can learn everything you need to get started in a few minutes of tutorials or walk throughs. The rest you learn as you go.

Bear in mind no every linux user has memorized every terminal command and the whole file structure. Lots of people are just casual users who learn what they need.

One of the things I wish someone had told me at the start of using linux is that initially your desktop environment will effect how you feel about linux more than the distribution or specific architecture of the OS.

The good news is they’re all free. Try a few things and see what you like. IMO Fedora is a great, beginner friendly Gnome or KDE experience. Mint has an excellent Cinnamon and XFCE desktop either of which will feel somewhat familiar to a windows user. Mint will also run on just about anything.

Also, it’s not binary. You can dual boot. If there’s something you need windows for you can use it. Over time you’ll eventually find that you don’t really need windows anymore.

I didn’t make it through that movie, though it’s very well done.

It wasn’t so much a tear jerker for me. It just left me feeling sick to my stomach.

What linux does and does not protect the user from is endlessly hilarious to me.

Hey linux, I want to install a file you downloaded.

Linux: Sounds risky man

I’d like my file explorer to have super user privleges.

Linux: Are you out of your god damned mind?

Hey linux, I want to delete the kernel that I’m actively using right now.

Linux: Hell yeah. I’ll go to the looney bin with you.