Broken things can be fixed. You don’t always have to give up and throw it away.

You’re the one advocating for doing nothing.

Please don’t put words in my mouth. I don’t believe the US is invincible or will beat the whole rest of the world or anything like that. In the end fascists always fail, because they’re not actually good at running countries.

Be real though. Just because the US isn’t invincible doesn’t mean the US military can’t choose to eradicate any one location on Earth and no one can stop them. All that air and naval power means nowhere is safe from a strike. And that’s before we start talking about giving a fully fascist government access to a cartoonishly oversized nuclear arsenal. When things go badly enough for them, there is a very real chance they hit the F you button and take everyone else down with them.

Also, let’s be real again, not everyone is going to be on the other side. The US has a lot of allies, and it’s not the only place where fascism is on the rise. The capacity for destruction is like nothing the world has ever seen, and I especially wouldn’t want to be in a place like Mexico, given the proximity and all the fascist propaganda about Mexicans.

Either we’re doomed and voting for the Democrats does no harm, or it’s possible to pull ourselves out of this spiral and voting for the Democrats could buy us the time we need to do it. I can’t see the future, I don’t truly know which of us is right, and even if I’m right and it is possible that doesn’t necessarily mean we will succeed, but as long as there is even the tiniest shred of uncertainty then it is worth giving ourselves every possible chance. The most powerful military in the world falling fully to fascism will go global, and it will end with a death toll unlike anything the world has ever seen. I’d rather not let that happen, if I have a choice. I may not. It may be too late, but even if I wanted to run, where would I be safe from the US? There is no such place.

You realize this is an argument in favor of voting for Democrats, right? Real progress doesn’t happen in a single day in November, but that day in November can stop things from getting worse while real progress happens elsewhere.

Just because it’s bullshit doesn’t mean it’s wrong. If you actually care maybe share memes about taking action instead of doomerism.

Hey, if you don’t think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don’t notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do myself.

The big five is pretty much the only version of this that’s actually sort of kind of almost a real thing. Nobody likes being told they have high neuroticism though, so it’s not ever a fun fad meme thing.

It would be nice, but they gotta eat.

Well, most dentists would recommend most toothpaste. They’re a lot more concerned with making sure people are brushing regularly than they are with worrying about the brand of toothpaste they use.

That kinda means the exceptions are weird and highly dependent on the dentist and toothpaste brand involved. Maybe they think it’s overpriced, maybe they think it’s less effective, maybe they have ethical concerns about the parent corporation (looking at you, Crest), maybe they’re super picky about what they recommend, maybe they’ve never heard of the brand before, maybe they just got lousy swag from the company rep and they’re being petty. It could be all kinds of things, and the ads certainly won’t tell you what they are.

Amazon is super evil, but it mostly comes from the way they treat their employees and sellers. The customer service is… okayish, mostly. They certainly have problems there as well, but it’s not the real issue.

Why? Now the Democrats are going to start tearing each other apart and in the end they’ll pick someone even worse and now we’re even more likely to end up with Trump winning. The only people who ever had a problem with Biden being old were the people who had already made up their minds.

Sure, yeah, but there are two major problems I see with that. It is a plan that even if it worked correctly would result in the most deadly war in human history if it happened in the US today, and also it wouldn’t work. They’d loose.

I mean, stopping fascists from gaining power is a pretty good way of stopping fascists from gaining power. If the government is to incompetent and/or uninterested in running the country to actually fix the issues people are pissed off about it’s only a stopgap solution, but a stopgap is better than nothing. If you have an actual plan for how to go about the process of creating an actual better system in the real world starting from where we are then by all means feel free to share, but until then voting will save lives.

Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

Not counting the time a lady popped her clutch pulling out of her driveway and hit me, since I guess that’s not “almost” an accident, probably the time I got caught out by a snowstorm, and on the way home I did a 360 on the freeway before regaining control. Thankfully there was no one else around, so it didn’t hurt anything other than my pride.

If you think China is any better than the US, then you’ve just switched flavors.

Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.

One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.

There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.

I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.

This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?