This. Once you know how to use it it’s way, way more preferable than dealing with all the problems that come from how scattered the Linux ecosystem is and how little control you as a dev had about app distribution. Development and debugging gets more predictable, people can get (app-related) fixes faster, it’s hypothetically more secure (if Flatpak gets their shit together) and with the payment backend for Flatpak repos they (Gnome Foundation & KDE e.V.) work on it finally becomes properly viable to distribute paid apps. All the different hacky ways that are currently circulating (which are often outdated, only work on certain distros etc.) to offer paid applications are honestly obnoxious and expensive to maintain. Not to mention Flatpaks work great on immutable distros.

Just hope they gonna moderate things properly. Flathub & perhaps a few others have to place themselves as the de-facto standard marketplace to define and uphold all the important values the Linux community is organized around once it gets commercial. Not to do so would be a phenomenal mistake and end up in enshittification once the tech bros start targeting Linux.

So yeah, Flatpaks, Snaps and (maybe) AppImages are probably the future for most common end-user distros. Sorry for the small tangent.

I rather hope for a PS Vita moment.

Wouldn’t have made much sense since it doesn’t use GNU utils by default. Also Hinduism lacks a sufficient amount of elephants to put all big source distros there anyway.

It would make sense in a meme about docker though, Alpine is really popular for containers.

If the extension API would be changed so they couldn’t crash our shell session, extensions would become way less powerful and be mostly useless.

That’s not true, a proper API would enable probably 90% of existing extensions to be portable since they more often than not “just” add stuff into different places without really modifying anything. And if they really are worried so much about developer freedom they could still allow for the current monkey-patching approach to exist for those extensions that would otherwise not work, so the user ends up with more options than just “no extension at all” or “from now on shit may crash”. To allow random code to run right in the shell (which is one of the most important pieces of software in an end-user facing system) and/or actively manipulate its code without sufficient measures to ensure stability or at least recoverability is just not an acceptable status Quo in my opinion.

I’m sad and annoyed about this whole situation (therefore memes) ever since a Gnome dev confirmed to me they (meaning some board; their orga structure is rather stiff) actively decided against doing anything about this problem. I love Gnome, but I had to move to KDE simply to have a modern, stable desktop that I could trust in a production environment without feeling so barebone.

Nothing, unless you really want to use a DE that’s still lacking behind in its adoption. There are a few tools that still only offer early support for it (like RustDesk), but otherwise Wayland is a way better choice these days. However if you got an Nvidia GPU and need to use the proprietary driver you might be forced to still use X11. Their pile of garbage still routinely bugs on Wayland, and given their work on NVK I doubt that thing will ever get fully fixed.

Especially since the manpages are not written to always be comprehensible for end-users, but for developers and professionals. Some tools like tldr can help, however they rarely come preinstalled and aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Afaik KDE and Gnome do use SIGKILL at some point except for certain processes like running package managers. At least they are able to forcibly close almost anything if you really insist on shutting down now, depending on your (distro) configuration. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from my experience in Gnome you have to click on shutdown twice for it to happen, while KDE gives applications a 60 sec grace period unless you click a button in a notification pop-up.

Edit: Not sure how it is in the terminal aside from those 1:30min grace periods during shutdown.

Whatever you need to tell yourself about people voicing criticism the community culture to shut it down. I’m already contributing to the best of my abilities, so please stop with the “just fix it yourself” nonsense. Not even professionals like Torvalds would have the ability to to all that. Hell, not even companies can; System76 ends up creating a whole new DE because the cultural and structural issues with Gnome were so severe, and they’re working on it for years now (arguably they could’ve moved to KDE, a new DE without old baggage might be a good idea though). Some parts of the Linux community even are so toxic they’re famous for ripping each other apart regularly, like the Kernel devs.

It’s this whole culture and the bad decisions it causes I’m criticizing. And the only way to change anything about such a thing literally is to loudly criticize it, and to introduce new people with new perspectives. Who unfortunately more often than not get alienated by all the toxicity.

You are contradicting yourself.

I already admitted my previous statement being bad.

You are looking for a walled garden that protects its users.

No, I don’t. There’s a difference between a walled garden and a safe environment, the word itself even says it. Windows, iOS etc. outright build closed boxes you can’t escape. The Linux community rightfully doesn’t like that, but to a degree where we hardly even have proper safety rails next to cliffs and either no or insufficient warning labels next to exposed 11kV powerlines. Yet we expect people who don’t know what they see to not hurt themselves and instead stand still and study books for a few weeks. Even worse, in an attempt to keep answers as universal as possible the correct answers often are that “it’s easy, just hook up X to the 11kV powerline” (equal to editing grub.conf, xorg.conf, or anything else that could literally kill your system or user-essential parts like the graphical interface).

I’m so fed up with the notion that any change that adds safety rails is seen as building walls. Just because you have to add “–no-preserve-root” to delete your root folder you’re not prevented from destroying your OS if you want to (people seriously argued against this change). Improving the apt warning so humans pick it up is not a wall either.

Just criticizing a toxic culture that causes systemic problems. It’s both sad and funny you still think I’m the one with the problem though.

Should’ve been more verbose with that argument.

Yes, there was that single safety measure. Will this single thing with the white text next to hundreds of other rows of white text create sufficient awareness to discourage someone who was 1. told by the internet that “this is the solution!” and 2. has no notion about the severity of this action given they’ve nothing to compare it to except systems (and the web) that constantly cry for attention? Lol no, absolutely not.

There’s a good reason fatal warnings are almost always red or yellow and there are literally pictograms of human skulls in warning signs. People will not understand some white text next to a ton of other white text (that’s utterly incomprehensible to most of them, raising the tendency of people to disregard all of it) paired with something akin to a captcha as the fatal warning it was meant to be. That is not how (a majority of) humans work. The warning as it was back then provided no sufficient safeguards for newcomers, yet gave people sufficient reason to blame them. Although, and that’s the worst part, they have to be applauded for even featuring a warning at all.

The argument that came up afterwards was about exactly this, making the warning adequate and sufficient so even if the information on the internet said they should execute this, people are still being made sufficiently aware so they’re more likely to stop despite feeling that whatever they want might be just around the corner. But of course there’ll always be some people who prefer to call others stupid for their lack of experience or mistakes, especially if they want to protect something from criticism they identify with.

My previous statement was bad, but I stand with the opinion about the whole debate from back then being a good example.

No, I am the fire department for my family who’re currently moving over to Linux and are already fed up with the communities’ toxicity and unhelpful nature in most corners of the internet. And I can’t blame them, it’s an awful experience. The self-righteousness you’re putting on display with your comment is part of the problem.

are you trying to say that there are Linux enthusiasts that protest GUIs being made simple and intuitive, and that if they succeed, would-be Linux users will go back to Windows, which is more intuitive?

Not just GUI, but that’s a prime example. A good one would also be the whole debate about warning measures in apt so it doesn’t just happily remove essential system components like xorg. That debate came up after LinusTechTips’ video where Pop!_OS became unusable as he tried to install Steam. Good example as countless people blamed him for “executing commands he didn’t understand”, he as well as System76 were flooded with hate for “making Linux look bad”. Which, well, in that case it absolutely was as there were no safeguards or structures preventing either a wrongly configured package to be published in the repo, nor for the user to not remove essential parts of your system with a command that isn’t specifically about them (sudo apt install steam). Anyone who’s arguing that more of the Linux software stack should aim to be more stable and accessible usually gets hated on, and people who’re new to Linux but also say they don’t want to get into PCs but just use it and for it to work are getting alienated and in some cases outright attacked.

Windows obviously isn’t really more intuitive compared to a fully working Gnome or KDE environment except for people who already know it for decades. That’s not what it’s about in this case though, but people who expect literally everyone to spend weeks and months learning about concepts, commands and structures in their computer that by now is second nature to them but not interesting to many others. It’s xkcd 2501 in a nutshell, but with toxicity sprinkled on top. Common users mostly have to stay in certain corners like the Linux Mint forums to consistently have a good time, and it really sucks.

She’s talking about him in that sentence and is referencing something owned by only him and not the whole group, so “his” is correct.

Unless you think testicles are family property, of course. Then grammar would somewhat become a free-for-all here which only teachers would survive.

Pretty sure it’s originally meant to be a joke about all their pets.

Plot twist, she is trans and this is actually an inside joke causing him to smirk back so hard.

Need to check it immediately, it looks on point. Every other theme I saw over the years was always somewhat off. I love this aesthetic from Vista / 7 so much.

What the absolute fuck

I think the general idea of her was that, if society was perfectly accepting, there wouldn’t be any real reason for bigger medical intervention; specifically that there’s no gender dysphoria coming from within / being there by default, but all of it existing because of transphobia. With a perfect society there would be no suffering - still expression, but that’s it. And there should be no science on this whole topic because that’s apparently… well, see the pic. It’s one of the really weird takes from back then I could find.

Like, I understand the fear of this knowledge being used against us and the criticism of our current, overly strict diagnostic system this comic contains (which already gets discussed controversially within the academic community and is partially tied to economic necessities)… but that knowledge could likewise be used for so, so much good. To completely ignore the suffering this condition can cause on its own and putting all of the blame on a society that’s indeed not perfect yet, and even worse, question Enlightenment itself (as in the move towards an educated society and knowledge over religion, that kind)… in my opinion this is, or was, just fear-driven ignorance and not helpful at all.

But I’d like to say it again: If she happened to change her opinions in this regard I’m more than happy to hear about it. The comic OP posted looks more like her opinions are still very extreme though…

Not sure how her being trans is related to criticism (well, except right-wingers throwing a temper tantrum. But that isn’t criticism). I heavily dislike her due to her - perhaps former(?) - anti-medical viewpoints she also perpetuated in comics. To break it down what her position a few years ago was:

• Science about gender and the cause of dysphoria / being trans is bad and must be stopped
• Everyone would be happy if society was better (Gender dysphoria = all societies’ fault)
• Everyone who argues otherwise was either a TERF, Nazi or bot in her books‏‏‎

Perhaps her extreme viewpoints changed over the years, and I’m sure not to have all the infos available given I haven’t heard about her in a while. But what I saw coming from her a few years ago was just so much crap (Pretty sure I also criticized her for it once, for which she blocked me immediately to then go on a rant). It really pissed me off since it completely undermined efforts to give trans kids (and adults!) the professional help they might need to become both happy and successful (and most importantly themselves).

And in case anyone who reads this thinks this is important for my criticism to be valid or sth: Yes, I am trans myself.