JaggedRobotPubes

Hell yeah. This is the good shit.

What brand? I can see all the letters but none of them mean anything to me.

Regardless, congrats! Good call.

This is what forced me onto Linux for the first time, and permanently.

It’s partly great, mostly fine, and 10% of the time god damn fucking annoying. Mostly having to learn the fucking game of thrones factions of installing things.

But I don’t feel like there’s a piece of shit company in my computer trying to completely ruin it, so it’s a win. The positives outweigh the negatives, even as someone who wasn’t really into the idea of switching.

But even if it was half as good, it would still be an improvement, given Microsoft destroying itself.

The basic problem is thinking that conquering somebody is natural, inevitable, or good.

1. It isn’t misinformation.

2. Someone like this board member being a traitor to his species isn’t covered by “opinion”. No normalizing nazis. It’s such a low bar. He couldn’t clear it.

3. He blasted his treachery over the public airwaves. His privacy isn’t being violated.

This whole comment feels like an exercise in using all the best words to miss the point. We know, as does this probably-lying board member, that Republicans are only going to go more authoritarian, and the only reason they would pretend to care about big tech abuses is to grab the steering wheel from them to commit far worse abuses. No company that gets into bed with traitors is going to become the new center of my digital life.

Tuta for email, syncthing for photos bc I’m not self-hosting, mullvad for VPN.

As someone who is way into the idea of Linux, wants to switch, and is very gun-shy about the million little programs and extensions I might not be able to replace, let me tell you what is required of anybody who is actually genuine in their desire to see Linux gain the traction it deserves:

Don’t ever tell anybody to read the manual again. Just answer the god damn question. It’s good when answers to basic, common problems are peppered around the internet like that; it’s dumb and wrong and weird to think of it as a thing to be avoided. If you’d like to put a link to the part of the manual where the questioner could have looked to find it, that’s cool, too. Don’t just leave the link–there’s a good chance they didn’t understand it and that’s why they’re asking. Maybe they just want a person-answer instead of a reference-manual-answer, and it’s good when the answer exists in both forms. Every answered question is a contribution.

I would go even further: the version of reality where Linux beats Windows and ushers in an era of community-centric open source dominance is populated by a Linux community that considers “rtfm”, “pebcac”, etc to be borderline bannable offenses. If you are a small, weak person, and want Linux to be your way of thinking you’re better than other people, you’ll drive question-askers away, back to Inferiority Land, using your knowledge to dunk on them instead of help them, and call it a win. These are the ugly bridge trolls, who may as well be paid Microsoft employees, keeping people away from your community, and a serious change of pace might yield much smoother adoption. At the very least, the community owes it to their own work to see how much smoother.

As someone considering the switch seriously, the knowledge that I may have to deal with people like that is absolutely, 100% a factor, and I am someone who has no qualms about telling someone on the internet to fuck off, so it’s gonna be more of an issue for many others who are more conflict-averse.

The Linux community needs to take very seriously whether it actually wants increased open source adoption, or if it wants to remain a tiny minority so that it has a nice, large majority to feel better than.