Thats pretty reasonable. I’m sure there are a ton of orphan accounts just lingering out there. Including accounts that other people may like to have.

All of these companies are tightening their belts. Those interest rates going up are sure making companies reassess their business models.

Pop!_OS for life!

Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?

To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)

There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.

if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.

Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?

I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?

Now this is a hot take!

I dont know if I agree with you, but its making me think.

I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

 -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

 -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.

So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

It gives a good short history of how we got here.

He’s the embodiment of “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”*

Ubuntu is the typical go-to.

Id recommend pop!_os personally.

Fedora is another great option.

The reality is, as a new Linux user, you’ll probably hop around quite a bit. I say go for it! Try out everything you want.

The “right to be forgotten” rules are, with all due respect to the EU regulators, pretty shortsighted.

I think the initial “right to be forgotten” lawsuit that Google faced from that Spanish guy-- where he claimed bankruptcy years prior. People( potential lenders?) kept finding that information online through google searches. He sued to have Google remove those sites from the index. He won and the Spanish Judge told Google they had to remove those results from searches.

But it didn’t change that the information was still on each site. Those sites, the ones that actually held the information didn’t get sued, just Google.

It also opened the door for oppressive governments covering up human rights abuses or hide other information they dont want widely available.

Google appealed and won: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

I also want to point out that this Spanish guy’s situation is very different from “posting publicly on social media”. He was getting written about by others and the courts eventually said “no, this can stand. This information should remain available”. So I imagine, public statements made by an individual certainly wouldn’t qualify to be forgotten.

At the end of the day, to me, this is a technical decision not a privacy one.

The only drama I’ve seen on it is a few idealists on other instances complaining about it and these posts.

I actually like beehaw more as an instance because of what they’ve done.

Nilay Patel had a great article when Elon bought Twitter. One of the key take aways I tend to agree with is:“The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.”

I love being part of a community and being able to discuss and debate. But ultimately I want to do it in a place where I don’t feel creeped out, skeevy, or where I am getting harassed or threatened.

I value the moderation. I value the curation. I want the mods to defederate if they see an influx of trolls, shit posts, or sketchy content from a particular instance.

And you know what, I’ll be annoyed when they block something or someone I don’t think they should have.

The reality is: the fediverse is designed for this sort of thing. Theyve been very transparent and they will re federate when the tooling is better. I have no reason to doubt that.

I see this as growing pains and nothing more.

I dont know that its how they brand themselves, but Pop!_OS is a fantastic linux gaming distro.

Its based on Ubuntu, but they do several very important things: they update/patch the kernel with the latest drivers and goodness and provide the latest nvidia proprietary drivers. So you get the stability and durability of ubuntu + newer kernel support which means things like much more current mesa drivers (for radeon cards).

I’ve been using it full-time for 3 (or 4?) years now. I technically have my PC dual booting with Windows for gaming reasons, but since the steamdeck took off all of the big games I want to play are available on linux. I’ve logged into windows exactly 2 times and that was to run updates.

Pop has been rock solid and turned out to be a great gaming OS.