Always eat your greens!
I mean, it’s intended to be an insult because the implication is that Reddit sucks.
I personally never understood the “Redditor” insults.
Reddit is just a forum directory with an infinite feed. You can find cringey weirdos but there’s also subreddits for potted plants, chess, home improvement, etc. which are pretty mundane and low drama.
I left Reddit for similar reasons, but I still use it sometimes for troubleshooting and advice in the IT/Programming space.
Haven’t had a Motorola in many years. Hopefully this works out well and we get a really nice piece of hardware that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.
It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
One of the reasons Linux Mint is so great, all the awesome things about Ubuntu under the hood without any of the trash 😊
Netbird and Pangolin too.
Breaking News! Multiple forks discovered in kitchen, exclusive coverage tonight at 11:00!
Don’t feel bad about the distro you land on, especially not Linux Mint. It’s the #1 distro I recommend to completely new Linux users.
I use it myself for any computer that I want a #JustWorks experience on. The Cinnamon desktop environment is super stable and easy to use. And so far, Linux Mint is the only distro I know of where you truly don’t have to use the terminal for anything even kernel updates/rollbacks, alternative driver installations, and major version upgrades.
The Mint team is wonderful and they’ve created a fantastic product.
I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.
Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.
It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It’s designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.
FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.
If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn’t have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.
As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it’s just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don’t really think about it much anymore.
Free Options:
Cheap Options:
I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.
Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.
And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.
All we want is a really good FOSS browser and email client…
“A great commander secures his victory before entering into battle. A poor commander first rushes into battle, then searches for victory.”
~Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If I want simple and super stable, Cinnamon. If I want sexy, custom, and slightly less stable, Plasma.
Ooh yeah, that is better 🤌
Slopilot
“Old men keep dreaming up battles for young men to fight.”
Daggers - The Chariot
President of peace, eh MAGAts?
Waterfox might have just got a new convert here.
I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.
My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.
Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.
My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.
Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.
Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.