Of course it did.

If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.

People had kids during the black plague.

While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.

I wouldn’t tell anyone to have kids if they don’t want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don’t fully understand.

I think I’m 6/10. I’d consider myself an advanced user. I’m capable enough to avoid casual problems, and instead create real serious problems.

I am skilled enough to understand that I don’t know shit.

We don’t need Russian disinformation or funding. The Secretary of Health and the worlds biggest podcaster will happily disinform the public on spotify’s dime and entirely of their own accord.

There is no such thing as a qualified US presidential candidate. There’s no job, or training, or comparable experience that can ready a person for that role. Anyone who honestly thinks they are the most capable person in the world to assume control of the largest military and the largest economy that has ever existed should immediately be disqualified from the role. You’d have to be a madman to think that. But that’s all we ever get.

There’s no indication that a senator, governor, or vice president makes a better president than someone with no political experience (of which there have been 6). In fact, coming through that system seems to teach people to make peace with corruption, bribery, complacence, and protecting the status quo at it’s worst.

As much as I hate Donald Trump’s policy, and flagrant disregard for the law, it would be hard to argue that his experience as a narcissistic game show host hasn’t proven more effective at the day to day politics of implementing his policy than almost any other president of the last 40 years. It’s hard to keep up with how fast he’s getting disastrous shit (that we voted for) done.

And he’s only in office today because 50 years of “qualified” stuffed shirts have wrung all the money, opportunity, and hope out of the middle class. Then the “qualified” people told America to vote for a clearly senile “qualified” candidate.

Which is all well and good except for now it’s just a baseless paranoid fantasy. And if that was laid out up front I would have no notes.

Over here in reality, if Canonical deployed a closed source, paid, spyware laden version of it’s OS it might take a little while for some of the server business to disappear, but they’d loose almost all their market share overnight. They’d be a cautionary tale in the FOSS community and the software industry.

I’m struggling to connect the dots between “X person used to work in electronic surveillance” and an immediate risk to the open source software being developed by a different employer. Is there some reason to think this person is still working for their old employer? Or is the speculation that they are a idologue out to destroy Linux from the inside?

If there’s something unsafe in the code, especially a rust rewrite of the coreutils I’d expect it’s going to be found immediately. People are going to go over that code with a fine toothed comb.

If the central idea of the article is “I don’t think there’s a place in the FOSS community for people with different ideas/beliefs/history than me” then the author should come out and say that (many have in the past). Claiming we’re at risk because of some wild speculation about a nefarious plot between the military and Microsoft to attack Linux and privacy… it really does require something more firm than this.

I think the hardware compatibility issues may be overstated. It seems (to me) that besides apple silicon, the support for most consumer hardware is pretty robust. this seems especially true of the kinds of hardware casuals use. Im not a tester, but havent seen a dell, hp, or Lenovo with a hardware issue in ages.

While I think that could be really helpful it is worth pointing out that schools in the US have been shoving Chromebooks into the hands of kids for over a decade and the market share sits at about 4%. Now Google’s planning to merge Chrome OS into Android.

I think the gap between what the average Linux user thinks is ease of use and what the average non Linux user thinks is ease of use is probably much larger and many devs seem to understand.

I think it would be beneficial to have a completely idiot proof installer that doesn’t ask you about partitions or formatting or basically anything just point it towards a drive and it will set up a default installation.

More GUI based means of doing basic stuff. A casual who wants to access some photos from his laptop does not want to figure out how to manually configure samba shares by editing config files in their terminal based text editor.

I think codecs are a much bigger pain in the ass than is ideal. As I understand that there are legal reasons for this but the first time some casual goes to play a video and gets an error message their first thought may not be “let me search Google and figure out what this error message means” their first thought maybe “Linux sucks and can’t play videos”.

The permission structure that makes Linux so secure makes it a little annoying for casuals. For example, you actively and intentionally go to the default software store, navigate to the updates tab, update a package you’ve already installed and clearly want, and do so from the official OS repository… This requires that you enter your password to protect you from what exactly? It’s not a big deal it takes one second to type my password, but how would you explain this to a casual in a way that makes sense? Your OS is protecting you from potentially rogue acts of official patches to your default text editor.

I think the folder structures are pretty big challenge for converts. On Windows you can find most of the files associated with any given program in your program files folder. On Mac there’s an applications folder. On Linux… it’s somewhere, don’t worry about it. That’s not really a fixable one it just is what it is.

Due to the inherently competitive nature of living in a society that competes for resources, many people assume that a kind, upbeat person will be easy prey for someone tough and pushy. They lack the emotional intelligence to understand that you can be both kind and assertive.

In reality, you catch more flies with honey. Pretty much every study of game theory concludes that nice but assertive is the optimal strategy in any ongoing interaction. A nice person with a backbone is likely to have healthier boundaries, lower stress, and better relationships with people.

Kinda. It’s not hard, but it’s also not idiot proof.

On Fedora for example you just need to use RPM Fusion instead of the standard Fedora repos. The problem is that you need to know that you need to use RPM Fusion.

Fedora is a pretty common recommendation to new users (with good reason it’s excellent) but plenty of casual users will run into that problem and decide that videos don’t work right on Linux.

I feel like there really are just 2 or 3 main distros for Linux adoption. Every article, forum, discussion, etc… it’s always Mint, followed by either Fedora or Ubuntu. IMO distro is less important for converts than desktop environment.

I think the most important thing for adoption is actually little quality of life stuff.

• The first question during installation should be “are you new to Linux” and if you select yes it doesn’t ask you about file systems or partitions it just installs the goddamn operating system with a default configuration, and casual friendly software.
• Photo and video thumbnails that just work.
• An idiot proof way to get a video player with support for every video codec.
• More GUI based “intermediate” applications. If Grandpa has to figure out samba config files just so he can open up his photos on his laptop he’s going to second guess his decision.

Parents… No.

Communities (which are more than just parents). It’s a little more complicated. It’s really common to see communities celebrate a home town boy who made good.

But are they happy that in a broader sense they aren’t good enough? Do they like being someplace you leave behind? This whole discussion stemmed from a place that had great education and is now circling the drain. I don’t think communities enjoy that kind of thing.

A boomer who provided a great education for their kids in 90s probably wasn’t expecting to grow old in a community with 3rd world healthcare and lunch ladies teaching their grandkids classes because the school won’t hire woke teachers.

It’s fair to say it’s not helping the communities that provided those schools and raised those kids to be successful adults. I think it would be nice if more people were able to use their success to give back to the communities that gave them so much.

Society as a whole doesn’t really benefit much from concentrating wealth, education, and marketable skill into a few places. But if I were graduating Harvard Law I wouldn’t be looking to move back to some rural community where the best steakhouse in town is a Chili’s.

They get into a good college in a blue state and never come back. Academically successful people tend to move towards bigger markets for bigger salaries.

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.

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.