PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

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  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah my position is really to recommend any FOSS OS in the large over proprietary ones. However, since my experience is primarily with Linux distributions, and I do think that Linux makes sense for a lot of use cases, I usually start by talking about “Linux” first.

    But, from my experience, if a “solution” to a problem “forces” the user to make a choice, then they’ll stick with what “currently works” over having to make a choice. So when I talk to people about Linux IRL, I typically direct them to Linux Mint directly, even though other distros exist and it actually doesn’t fit my use cases. Once they’re comfortable in the Linux ecosystem, they can switch to a different distro or OS family if they feel the need to do so.







  • I’ve never met a person in my life that was convinced by an ad to buy something.

    I believe that you’re being truthful, but I respectfully challenge the idea that you don’t know some person who was convinced by an ad to buy something. Even if all your friends truthfully insist that their decisions are not swayed by ads, there is probably some product they chose at least partially because an advertisement reached them and left a positive impression about the product.

    Ads do clearly work on people who are suggestible enough to be susceptible to them. Some of your contacts are probably these people whether they admit to it or not. If ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t be made. Ads aren’t made inherently to be annoying or make our lives worse; they’re driven by profit. Kill the profit and the motive dies. IMO that’s all the more reason to get rid of them.

    Anecdotally, my parents and grandmother watch TV with commercials, and they give me a bug-eyed look when I explain to them that I don’t get advertisements and that I don’t want to see them. Most people I know just want to get content crammed down their content-holes and will deal with ads to avoid the momentary inconvenience of change. So I feel like we’re fighting an uphill battle.




  • I’m on Debian because the software in the Debian repos is stable. So for mission-critical software, at least for my purposes, I’ll pick the version in the Debian repo, especially if it requires detailed integration with the operating system such as real-time audio. If the software does get updated, it is probably important and nearly guaranteed not to break. A great example has been KDE Plasma: I don’t get the bleeding-edge features, but it’s been a rock-solid, fast, still modern desktop environment on every computer I installed it on, including an old laptop that is so underpowered that Windows 10 is a Power-Point presentation upon a fresh restart. If Debian takes several months or longer to update it’s Plasma packages to Plasma 6 when it comes out next year, that would be fine for me because I don’t desperately need any new features from Plasma.

    However, for software that really benefits from being up-to-date and isn’t a showstopper if it breaks, for example FreeTube, I prefer the Flatpak. I primarily use Discover for simple package management and upgrades, and it was trivial to install the Flatpak backend, so now my Flatpaks get updated like anything else. However, Librewolf (a browser, which I prefer to keep up-to-date) is installed from a non-Flatpak external repo because I had problems giving its Flatpak version webcam permissions (even if I enabled them in Flatseal).

    AppImages have been great for working on new computers because I can (usually) just download them and go. Except for programs that I expect to be portable, I don’t typically use them in the long haul. Still, they’re super convenient to have around.

    I don’t touch Snaps because of the closed-source backend and their role in Canonical’s transparent attempt to lock down Ubuntu, but if they open-source the backend I might consider trying them.

    IMO part of why I’ve stuck with Linux is because there is (usually) a choice of how to compute. I.e., there are several ways to solve a problem where Windows or Mac would pigeonhole you into their workflow. Having multiple options is inherently a good thing as far as I’m concerned, even if I don’t use all of them.