Oh shit. Nobody tell congress or else they’re gonna ban linux

On the hardware level, it will take a while. In the software level, I don’t think it will ever happen.

I’m no computer engineer, but this seems like a silly take. Hardware requires supply chains and some of the most closely guarded technology in the world. Software requires programmers and time.

the Linux Kernel, the GNU stuff, the systemd stuff, the Freedesktop specifications, Xorg if they still use it, wayland protocols and wlroots, are all developed by people from The West,

Literally anyone can download those things and fork them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already chinese contributors. And if China really wanted, they could even ignore the GPL and not publish their changes to the source code 😲

Not everyone can download extreme UV lithography.

This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn’t get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.

What’s nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn’t constantly changing a million packages a week that you don’t even know the function of.

Gotta wonder how many state actors have been using it for years.

Oh right, sometimes I forget people have computers other than old thinkpads

IDK if thats true in 2024. Debian 12 isn’t much harder to setup than mint or Ubuntu, and the version of gnome it ships with is perfectly fine. I’m not a beginner anymore, so maybe there’s something I glossed over.

Oh wait, I just remembered the thing I glossed over. Needing to install sudo would definitely throw a beginner for a loop. (Iirc, you only need to do that if you give a root password during install). And that’s the problem with trying to learn Linux. Someone will tell you the thing is easy, but they forgot about some arcane step

Open camera is the best

Idk if it can be called a smartwatch, but I just found out about the sensor watch, and now I really want one. Basically a hackable Casio f-91w

Pretty much. I used mint for a while, then Ubuntu, upgrading every October and April. Then I tried Debian on a laptop I didn’t want to update often, and realized it’s not really missing anything that Ubuntu has.

Although I think the main thing that lead me to Debian was some issue with snap that I was having

Conda makes python soooo much easier. I never use apt for python things. If you use it a lot, you’ll eventually have to learn how to work with different environments. But I promise it’s easier than trying to solve dependency hell with some combination of apt and pip.

Debian stable on Thinkpad 1 and Debian testing on Thinkpad 2. Testing is nice because Gnome is a slightly better version. Stable is nice because it doesn’t bother me about updates.

What don’t you like about gnome?

Thanks for setting me straight! I kinda assumed it was some green washing bs, but the details in the interview are very interesting

Carbon-free steel is just iron

[Edit] nevermind I forgot that that I don’t know metallurgy lol

no.

The problem with the cli is you need to memorize a whole bunch of new words and syntax in order to do anything. You also need to memorize what not to do so you don’t accidentally erase your system while using rm or cp or whatever.

Even something as simple as copying and pasting, which works the same in every single other program has new rules in the terminal. I mean, think about that. If you’re just learning bash, then the first thing you’ll be doing is copy pasting commands. But even that has the hurdle of 'oh, I guess this is the one program where ctrl-c means something else

Like, how do you look at sudo, cat, man, and apt, and think ‘yeah that’s intuitive’. And forget about multitasking, new users won’t even know how to quit most programs (is it ctrl-q? Just q? Esc? Ctrl-c? Ctrl-d? Wait how do I undo that, is it ctrl-z? Wait where did the thing go

I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.

The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.

My Thinkpad touchscreens were useless until I switched to wayland.

The only drawback is I have to manually edit the qgis desktop file to start qgis with x11 instead of Wayland. I had to do the same to a couple other random experimental apps, too.