I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

Pop verification neck to continue.

Janeway would straight up murder them. She’s done worse for less reason.

PHP: You’re not a nerd. But you are at least trying.

It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

Install uBlock.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Disable “sponsored” stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

Disable telemetry.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

Remove “suggested” and “sponsored” autocomplete.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.

Oh! So I can’t go into a post-op ward in a white lab coat and tell the recovering patients that the power of prayer is better than surgery?!

What’s next?! Taking away my Professional Engineer certification just because I’m not an engineer?

Or maybe you want to bankrupt my architecture firm simply because my certifications double as my Colgate Cavity Patrol diploma!

Never forget: If you can’t commit outright fraud with your free speech, is it really free?

/s

I stopped caring several years ago.

It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.

It’s more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.

I genuinely want Gopher back.

I want to share information and to communicate. I don’t want every bowel movement tracked and monetizes. I don’t want 30 cross site requests when going to a news site. A single story should not require 10MB of JavaScript libraries.

I have no doubt that most of the authors of the original internet are aghast at what their high-minded creation has itself created.

Same here. I’ve been trying to immerse myself in Spanish. My grandparents were from there and they were always disappointed that none of their grandchildren became fluent.

Now I go back once per year as a sort of pilgrimage. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold conversations soon.

It’s difficult, but I never want to be that American who refuses to make even a token effort to learn the basics of the language when they’re travelling abroad.

Spectat sicut Anglis. Possum legere sine ullo negotio.

My NeoVim (which can leverage VSCodes plugins) uses about 60MB for an entire project.

And doesn’t have the stink of Microsoft and its associated user tracking.

I’ll talk nothing over a terribly implemented Electron app that devours system resources and brings every other Electron app down when it inevitably OOMs.

The “easier to keep an eye on them” mentality only works if we do something once we observe shenanigans.

Otherwise it’s just a mealy-mouthed punt in the same category as “both sides”.

I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I’m trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

Hail, SATAN!

I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don’t know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.

Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can’t maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.

They’ve spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can’t even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it’s a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.

And let’s not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it’s consistently returning better results than big G.

If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.

Can I expect similar protections for The Satanic Verses, or is this another instance of religion being afforded a special status with the power to control non-adherents lives?

I always get the two mixed up.