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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

    Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it’s hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

    Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won’t tell people they’ll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won’t understand.

    The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren’t up to date yet, and won’t be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I’m not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

    As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren’t FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let’s backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we’ll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we’ll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn’t vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

    Simply put, if you want to install Linux you’re gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

    Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn’t paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).



  • Some people recommend dual booting. I recommend having at least one cheap SBC in your home that’s dedicated to running Linux, and eventually to keep Windows on big enough machines for professional work, video games, and so on.

    But the kids? Sure, they should run Linux, unless specified otherwise by their schools, until they’re old enough to decide by themselves.

    I’d encourage you to push for free software if you’re stuck on Windows, but that’s another issue, I just think you might keep this machine on Windows and install Linux on a lowtech computer. It depends on what you need Linux for but with my eeePC the only bottleneck is the web.



  • Hi, this is an excellent answer.

    I didn’t mean to dismiss online resources, but to highlight the continuous entrepreneurship in dismissing foundational knowledge. My post was honestly, rather bad for the reasons mentioned a few minutes ago, but the sentence “Linux is only free if your time has no value” erases the pleasure of reading books and getting new skills. It literally means that free and open source software can’t be more useful than whatever Google and Microsoft are developing, which doesn’t even include passwords managers.

    Secondly, the difference you make between free and open source software are very interesting but to my understanding, it may boil down to the freedom 0 : free software is made for everyone, whereas open source software is made for specialized communities. Because most people don’t even write simple software, and I’m not talking about enterprise-level complexity here, most open source software is written for other developers. I’ve observed thousands of anonymous messages which coincidentally blurred the difference between free software and open source software by e.g. promoting the sway window manager that we know and love. On 4chan at least, calling people to hurt themselves has become an acronym (to whomever reads this, please don’t hurt yourself).

    I’m not sure my own definition of free vs. open source software is the right one, but I know the actual difference is leveraged to kill people – comrades even.

    And finally, I agree about everything else. I didn’t properly develop about GNU software because I was trying to leave my screen.


  • Hi, it may depend on the background, but personally I’ve been stuck on problems for months, only to solve them by spending 2 hours reading a book. I’m talking about basic self-taught tools like Git, your first programming language, and so on – Microsoft and Google build and leverage platforms to keep specific demographics stuck for years, and to some extent, to kill them.

    I’m not talking about solving problems on a complex stack with tools that you already know, but rather about learning to program the output of a Skribe document as a social media-addict 4chan user. We’re not even talking about Makefiles here, but about hundreds of thousands of people actually giving a hand to free software development, instead of trying to change the world in free form fields.


  • Alright, that’s pretty cool, sorry – I thought it was a list of links automatically inserted in lieu of comments.

    I’ve been trying to get into the IndieWeb for years, but I’ve been struggling to implement it. Doesn’t it rely on a central server too? Can we use it in a fully e.g. decentralized or federated way – would it even make sense, or could we easily switch to another flagship server, as we did with the Freenode takeover?

    Please feel no pressure to reply, I can do my own research ^_^



  • Océane@jlai.luOPtoLinux@lemmy.mlGoogle is only free if your time has no value
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    1 month ago

    Hi, because there are messages on 4chan claiming that “Linux is only free if your time has no value.”

    Thank you for the nice message, but to be honest, I regret posting it. I should’ve put more care into the style – anyway, there have been daily persistent anti-free software messages on 4chan for more than a decade, leading me to think about Olgina-style contractual workers. Some patterns seem to (1) defend Google, (2) put users back into depression, (3) promote the confusion between libre software and open source software, (4) shatter the EU and US IT work forces over demographic traits, through anti-LGBTQIA+, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic messages.

    Some of these pattern seem to match known Kremlin strategies, others defend the interests of Microsoft and Google so well, matching other patterns I’ve observed with Android, YouTube, and Windows/Office 365 development, that I’m starting to collect evidence in Denote. I need to sort out coincidences, to account for the fact that many orgs may actually post anonymously on 4chan (including Nazis and orgs false-flagging as Nazis) but that’s one hell of a lot of coincidences.








  • Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.

    Whereas Twitter isn’t meant for most people’s use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what’s happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.