Yes and no to all of those reasons, and many others.

There isn’t a right or wrong way to install/use Linux. As the saying goes “you do you”. If going through the Arch learning curve doesn’t appeal to you, don’t do it. If you’re the sort of person whose curiosity sometimes leads them to do silly things that aren’t necessarily logical but that you find enormously fun and satisfying, then maybe go for it.

Alternative way of writing the headline: “OAP intentionally walks up to police with a sign saying I AM A TERRORIST and is then surprised when she gets treated as a terrorist”.

You can argue whether or not Palestine Action should have been proscribed or not, but it did happen and the government made it abundantly clear what that proscription means for anyone continuing to show support for them.

Maybe she wanted to make the point that the group shouldn’t have been banned (in fact I’m sure that’s the point she wanted to make) but surely she didn’t think Keir Starmer was going to go “oh my god you know what, you’re right, I’ll do yet another U-turn because of this old lady”.

Despite the K in its name, KiCad is nothing to do with the KDE project. It’s an independent program started (iirc) at a French university. I agree it’s awesome, though.

That “assuming nothing else changes” is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people’s rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.

Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.

Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That’s the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you’d gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they’d have laughed in your face. But it happened.

Looking at that screenshot, even though I’ve been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

We’ve seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.

The one example I can think of that’s survived for many years is Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.

The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?