To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

ENDELAYIFICATION IS STILL BAD!!!

Yeah, massive amounts of completely preventable suffering and death due to people no longer using vaccines thanks to the spreading of these conspiracy theories is totally not a big deal compared to someone having a bad attitude.

This could mean that it’s the year of thy Linux desktop 🤔

And thine as well!

The lowest end hardware you ever ran Linux on, so far!

Confusingly, no, they are completely unrelated things, despite how similar the names look. (This confused me as well until somewhat recently.)

Agreed; I was only arguing against the proposition that increased market share would not eventually make a difference.

I think that if Linux had a 50% market share then it would be considered a very valid alternative, even though that is obviously not very realistic (at this point, at least). My comment was more about why a high market share would be desirable than about how realistic it would be to get there.

Having said that: I think that if Linux were to get to a 10% or 15% valid market share, it would be a sign that a lot of things had changed that would have made it a more valid alternative in the process.

That’s completely fair!

Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.

Incorrect. You did not just say that some things were “suboptimal” about Linux; your thrust was that Linux offers a “frustrating experience” overall compared to Windows as a result of all of these supposed “paper cuts”:

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

No, bad for you for asserting that your experience was universal, and then getting grumpy when someone disagreed and cited their own experience as being different.

You may be lucky enough to use Linux for your fault work, but some of are forced to use Windows because it is the industry standard. If Linux were widely enough used that I could use it at work then that would be a huge benefit to me.

I don’t think that editing fstab is a necessary step in this process, going by the first set of instructions here.

Could you be more specific about exactly what about Linux makes it so difficult to use that a typical person would not be able to use their computer at all if it were installed on it?

I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a “paper cuts”, I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

I won’t say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

I really do not think that these “paper cuts” are representative of peoples’ general experiences with Linux.

It’s not clear that it would, because the root problem is locking a package to a particular version of the nvidia drivers, which nix would not solve. Unless I am missing something?

The problem of there being a separate runtime for each video driver version was explicitly discussed in the article:

If you are part of the huge part of the population who happens to own a Nvidia GPU, it’s a whole other can of worms. There are Flatpak runtimes that target specific Nvidia driver versions, but they must be matched with a compatible version installed on the host system, and it is not always a process as smooth and painless as one would hope.

An improvement idea that is floating around is to, basically, just take a step back and load the host drivers directly into the runtime, rather than shipping a specific version of the userspace drivers along with the application. Technically, it is possible: Valve’s Linux runtime is pretty similar to Flatpak architecturally, and they solved this problem from its inception by using a library called libcapsule to load the natively installed host drivers into the Steam Runtime. This is the reason why it’s significantly rarer that an old Steam game fails to launch on a new GPU, compared to the same scenario on Flatpak!

Just for fun, you might consider seeing how well NetBSD.

We did it Redis!!!

Yeah, I tried disabling my ad blocker to support them, but the page does not show ads even then and complains as if it were still active, and I think it is because I left Privacy Badger on. There is no way I am turning that off, so too bad for them!

Heck, I would even consider subscribing, but it looks like one first needs to create a forum account before one can even see the subscription price‽ What a very weird site…