“I’m not mad, I’m just … disappointed.”

• arguing for internet censorship
• a non-profit that has increased the salary of their CEO 400% while their market share drops 85% and they lay off 250 workers
• CPO is suing them for potential discrimination
• just bought Anonym, a full on advertising company
• blocking anti-censorship addons at Russia’s request
• buying into the AI hype

(sad part is even if they sold out, they’d still be leagues ahead of the compromises Firefox and Chrome have made)

from the FAQ

• How can you be “independent” if you have sponsors?
• All sponsorships are in the form of unrestricted donations. Board seats and other forms of influence are not for sale.

• LibreWolf ← Firefox
• Mullvad ← Tor ← Firefox

no love for RISC-V?

hobnibble ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

it was clearly a feature

“If I had to suffer, then so should you.”

• repeat the “Don’t sweat it.”
• Ubuntu is a perfectly fine starting point (the other “beginner distro” that’s commonly recommended is LinuxMint)
• »AFTER« you become comfortable with what you have:
  • try familiarizing yourself with the command line
    • far more competent than Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell
    • !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev
  • get overwhelmed with all the distro choices available
    • get bitten by the distro-hopping bug (“Gotta try them all!”)
      • and then try Distrobox (“ALL the distros at once!”)
• »THEN« take a look at immutable distros
  • “immutable distro” is a catch-all term that embraces several concepts
    • immutable – the root filesystem is set to read-only – makes it harder to mess up your system
    • declarative – your hardware and packages and configs are declared in a master configuration file
    • atomic / transactional – updates are checked as they’re applied, if it fails, it gets rolled back to a previous “safe state”
    • container / sandbox – ex. Flatpak or Docker or OCI – apps are isolated in their own sandbox and not allowed to mess up anything else

Eliza Effect

when workers go on strike, they call in the police, strikebreakers, National Guard, even bomb whole neighborhoods – but when a CEO takes a week off, no one even notices …

Hacker Purity Test from 1989

yep, plain old boring Debian Stable with Xfce

unless you made a lace card

don’t worry, when you get tired of distro-hopping, Debian will still be there for you

if you don’t like Lisp, you can use Forth

this explains caution, wariness, concern, unfamiliarity with the terminal – it doesn’t explain the revulsion people show to even the thought of the terminal as a partner to a GUI

• you have to figure out what the icons are and which menu holds which command
• in a GUI, only the basic options are laid out for you – newcomers regularly assume something can’t be done because the option isn’t there rather trying to find out if the option has just been moved to a completely different area of the UI
• GUIs regularly freeze up with even less indication of what’s going on (do you wait a few seconds or half an hour when the beach ball isn’t spinning)
• (on a side note, GUIs are generally a nightmare for accessibility options)