Steam is not the only means of distribution anywhere, and you can often buy the same game both from Steam and directly.

It’s too early to hate it.

(Well, I mean, I want a FreeBSD native Steam client with native Proton and all infrastructure, but I can understand that it’s a small percentage, even if not that different from Linux support.)

Chrome shouldn’t be worth more than an IMAP client. If it is, then the web should be torn down and built anew.

as long as its secure and 100% recoverable by the user

These two are fundamentally incompatible.

And having a central authority obviously compromises security.

I dislike this idea that government run is bad.

Nothing is inherently bad, but putting yourself into a hierarchy (at the bottom of it too) that you don’t need seems a dubious decision.

Having postal service support e-mail services is fine, maybe.

People have invented cryptographic identities. Maybe unbinding email identity from service is long overdue.

I’m biased, but seems much better than what you are suggesting.

Typical.

Especially when that ad was released, nobody considered piracy a crime seriously then.

Those making the ad could probably be thinking like: something business-made, with workhours put into it, shouldn’t be pirated, that’s theft, but something made by enthusiasts can, it’s taking what doesn’t have an owner, just toys in the Internet, and also GPL is dishonest for having rules, it’s cheating and poison, it’s ownerless too, only companies doing business should be able to sue for IP violations.

The governments need encryption less than regular citizens. Wolves and sheep are not equal, one wolf among hundreds of sheep is still safe. It’s the sheep who need protection against that wolf. They’ll still have their hard power in any case.

You can, you also can have very seamless and unnoticeable surveillance over those few who would put effort into protecting their privacy.

There’s a rule of the thumb here: if someone with power doesn’t yet do what’s clearly unacceptable and outrageous, but does painful things which are not but on the fringe, this means you just don’t know what they are really doing. It’s the same with Russia, its state security services were never hindered by any laws, but less visibility of that helps reduce public pressure.

When someone even approaches backdoors, surveillance, nothing to hide nothing to fear, we know better, we can’t have direct democracy here, we have institutions and rules, all that, - even in words, - then you should start killing them. Immediately.

It only seems to have many years to have totalitarianism and mafia rule all together. In reality this happens in a few weeks. You had transparency and rules and responsible citizens and democracy, a week passes, and you have undocumented prisons where people die without being convicted, surveillance of anyone even to walk near something of interest, “politicians” all knowing each other for decades, no real grassroot movements at all, even fake grassroot movements’ leaders being murdered in plain sight and never properly investigated. All this happens momentarily. The slow transition is only in appearance and only to reduce effort spent on damage control.

No way, how can that be if they have so many laws protecting children, must make more, surely voting for something and putting it on paper always solves problems.

What it really does, though, is to give people authorization to use force with a stated goal of fulfilling them.

That’s the intended effect. People with real power think this way: “where it does work, it’ll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn’t work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered”. Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.

Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.

An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies

Just … accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it’ll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.

The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with P*tin as president and other such types, but it’s just an imperfect democracy don’t you worry), SG-1 series.

Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn’t.

Why is ease of hosting a mail server rated so well ? How is “leveraging email hosting services” decentralized in any way ?

Because somebody there doesn’t even understand you’re supposed to host an email server as easily as hosting a web server with a website. While in reality you’ll learn all the Satanish obscene lexicon before making big email providers accept your mail.

I’m exaggerating probably, but ahem.

That said, in my humble careless incompetent “let’s-go-back-to-year-2005” opinion we need a new email standard, spiritually same, but qualitatively different, like the upgrade from prehistoric email with UUCP paths to something more modern, only this time cutting down all the DMARC and DKIM bullshit and simply using pubkeys in To: and From: headers, with the email itself signed by the author, by mail server and maybe by something else. One can make encryption of email content the baseline norm while we’re at it. One can even get rid of the attachment of identities to mail servers and use servers similar to how NOSTR has relays. I mean, what I described already is just NOSTR with nostalgic aesthetics. Maybe also similar to some kind of Fidonet reimagined.

Do they host login servers and supernodes for the actual real Skype? Asking for a friend.

Than today’s Mac and Windows - sure. But take w2k or macos 9 - and hell no. Those are much cleaner and more consistent.

Evil or not, w2k is something everyone should thank MS for, it’s really how it should be.

probably would not want to rebuild to configure something.

It builds in a second. About DWM. It’s 2k lines of C code, all they do is basic functionality. It’s not some cumbersome process of setting up an environment, and then looking at running lines of compiler output as if you were some fscking Neo installing Gentoo.

To remain polite, I’ll note that this subject has nothing to do with “your average user” or anything else connected to selling something useless to somebody who doesn’t care. All this grandma and average user and other talk is absolutely out of place about tools never intended to be sold on a market or be used by everyone. You are not required to use suckless tools in the first place.

Something having an X-Wing pic keeps out a lot of people too, cause not everyone likes Star Wars. What’s your point?

If you’ve seen suckless tools, the whole point is that they are rudimentary. DWM is one header file and one source code file of ~2k lines.

It’s not lazy because having a config file wouldn’t add anything to using those things, and it’s not elitism or gross because it’s not hard for those who understand why’d they use suckless tools at all. It also contributes to atmosphere.

FFS, please stop trying to press other people to do things your way, that’s what’s gross.

Linux is built on the foundation of cooperation and mutual aid

It’s very dangerous to make casual users and activists and someone like me equal to people doing actual work.

As demonstrated by RedHat-fed activists abusing that equality again and again, making “the community” appear what RedHat wants it to be.

Besides, if we ever hope for “the year of Linux desktop” to be a real thing, we have to be inviting.

You know who’s not being inviting? Microsoft and Apple. The former just informs you that the PCs you can buy come with Windows that version, the latter just shows how damn fscking important and rich you’ll look if you buy their stuff.

The problems are all technical (with “user-friendliness” and “just works” movement as it exists contributing to them and not solving them), if they didn’t exist, nobody would care that the community is grumpy.

Yes, they will have dumb and silly questions. Yes, many of such quesrions have already been answered before, and yes, they could have searched better.

It’s fine to be dumb and ask questions, but with Unix-likes it’s somehow common that newbies first ask for advice, then get it, then react with “that’s dumb, should have been done like in Windows” and that tends to irritate people. And sometimes they want to do things the hard way, but blame the system for them lacking knowledge to do that.

If we want for all our favorite programs and games to finally become Linux native, if we want to ensure Linux experience becomes smooth, if we don’t want to be seen as a community of red-eyed nerds, we need all those people in.

Something is wrong. Amateur radio and in general knowing stuff about radio being associated with a “community of red-eyed nerds” was a fact, but never prevented people from using radio in the 90s and 80s. Most people can’t do electric design for their apartment, yet they use electricity.

And there’s no detriment to this greater than constant infighting and elitism, than forcing people to bury down the wikis instead of providing useful support, and so on.

So why don’t BSDs have that problem?

That’s a rhetorical question, because in BSDs they don’t slap layers of layers of tools intended to make things “easier” and parallel ways to do the same. Linux user-friendliness movement is doomed in the way that it’s not aimed at making kernel interfaces and basic tooling simpler, it aims at making graphical and scripted slap-ons that make things kinda work. All with different logic, taking the nerves out of newbies, and at the same time those newbies can’t exactly tell what’s wrong.

And infighting and elitism are because it’s hard for everyone to admit they are all wrong, all sides. The “elitist” side, because yep, newbies shouldn’t struggle with setting up sound where in BSDs that’s kinda easy, for example. The “newbie-friendly” side, because they are focusing on the wrong thing.

The development process is the problem. Both with the kernel and the userland and with major DEs.

Do you follow the same principle when seeing anti-vaxxer posts en masse? Or any other fillers?

I usually answer a few questions with advice and then leave, when the op genuinely just uses other people as ChatGPT. But I understand those who start making jokes.