The importance of open & interchangeable hardware and software goes way beyond the upgrades you may or may not make, or even saving money & reducing e-waste.

You get better products that way. Having complete control over your system benefits you even if you never exercise that control. It is literally a constraint on enshittification.

I open nano more often than any other editor, and by a lot. I spend more TIME in vscode and maybe Kate, but lately I’ve been tweaking setups on a couple of machines.

sudo nano /that/cfg/file/u/thinking/.about

It sounds like they’ve gotten fat, rich, and complacent. Just like some societies I know!

Well hey, at least our rights-obliterating global surveillance apparatus is already named like the bad guys in a stupid action movie!

People are saying the facility is by the river. You know the one.

I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.

But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.

Gross.

I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:

The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.

Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.

Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.

The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.

It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!

Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”

The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.

I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.

This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.

Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.

Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!

Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.

I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

Cool story, goog.

I’m just going to keep waiting for a linux/foss phone so that its features and capabilities are actually predictable year to year.

But maybe I’m just too picky about what features and capabilities I want. I admit I’ve gotten used to some pretty outlandish stuff like… lemme check my notes here… “the device does the things I tell it to do.” Real galaxy-brain shit!

Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.

LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!

I can only hope that THIS time, with the sheer amount of information available, that future historians will convince society that it’s better to run society based on evidence and progress and humanity.

We have the old boys club running our companies, grifting and building a giant economic bubble to make a quick buck they have no use for, and casually destroying some of the most valuable brands out there.

They are running many of our governments too, and that’s not working great.

I liked it back in the day, but I don’t mess with that stuff no more. That’s how you get another GlaDOS.

Why do you prefer them to flatpaks? Genuinely curious. I’ve only used appimages once or twice.

Yeah we should just choose a winner and go with their system.

This should be easy!

The head-to-head comparison between the update user experience is so incredibly lopsided against Windows, that it kind of seems silly.

I bet if both have a big yearly update, I could format and install an entire fresh copy of the linux distro before the windows machine would be usable.

I didn’t say there were no issues.

My 4-monitor setup at work functions considerably better in both ubuntu and debian based Linux Mints than it does in Windows. Just your standard corporate Dell laptop & docking station.

No computers have zero weird stuff wrong with them. But over time the design intent has mattered more and more versus just the bugginess of the execution.

In my experience though, Linux has pulled ahead in both. And by a lot.

Yeah, my old machines (and work laptop!) are all nvidia, and it’s nice how seamlessly it works.

With the main version of mint that’s based on ubuntu, you get a driver manager so that you can choose between driver versions if needed.

With Linux Mint Debian Edition, it worked fine for general use out of the box with the open source driver. I went looking for info about the nvidia driver out of curiosity, and after stumbling upon some forum discussion I went ahead and tried “sudo apt install nvidia-driver” and it freaking worked!

• note I might be slightly off on that command, this is just from memory. And I probably enabled non-free software previously, because I know nvidia’s reputation with linux enthusiasts.

edit to add: it did a LONG setup process to enable the nvidia driver too. I think it compiled some kernel modules and stuff too. But I like reading all that lovely monospaced terminal text scroll by with those details most users can ignore.

Go install Linux Mint and you might just realize that line is already way behind microsoft.