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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Everyone has different preferences, so it can be difficult to judge what you may like or dislike. Even in gaming, there are such disparate subcommunities that one subcommunity may not even know of the existence of another. I personally prefer slow paced, artistic, single player games and I can’t stand multi-player games, much less competitive ones.

    So my answer is there’s likely something for you somewhere, but without more information, I wouldn’t know how you would begin finding that something


  • Democrats in the past 10 ish years have been absolutely horrendous at marketing, allowing Republicans to take up all of the media talking space, traditional or otherwise. TV, news, podcasts, social media influencers, YouTube, etc. are all generally Republican leaning.

    Republicans control the talking points and co-opt anything that the Democrats say. Meanwhile, Democrats are either unable or unwilling to do the same.

    Republicans’ control of the media allows them to get away with way more things than the Democrats. It allows them to essentially claim that they’re for the working class while simultaneously working against working class interests, especially when heard by people who don’t generally follow political news. Meanwhile, Democrats get called out for relatively smaller issues, and that makes them seem elitist and uncaring of working class issues.

    One major facet of the Democrats being unable to control their marketing is their unwillingness to use populist rhetoric, even though by policy stances they should be (comparatively) more closely associated with populism than the Republicans. I’ve heard several takes on why Harris lost the election and the one that I most agree with is that she failed to use populist rhetoric and was unable to differentiate herself from Biden. People wanted change, and Harris offered the status quo.

    Remember that the vast majority of Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and so voter impressions are decided by tone and messaging rather than specific policies






  • Would definitely not recommend KDE Neon. It’s more of a showcase of new KDE features than an actual usable OS. I currently use Kubuntu and it’s fine. I wish it updated more frequently but the update frequency isn’t slow enough to really be a deal breaker.

    I disabled snap Firefox, not really because I’m ideologically against snap, but because snap Firefox is annoying to use. Other than that, the OS generally just works out of the box.

    I’ve heard good things about OpenSUSE, but I’ve never tried it. My personal opinion is that I want to stick to the most common distros so that it’s easier to find troubleshooting advice



  • It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.

    Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.

    It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.

    Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.

    But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.

    As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.

    My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.

    Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.

    If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first


  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoFacepalm@lemmy.worldThe future is now
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    1 month ago

    “couple of big arguments and some smaller ones.”

    Let’s do a count:

    • big arguments: 2
    • smaller arguments: at least 3, let’s say 5
    • months: 8
    • Number of total arguments per month: (2+5) /8 = 0.875 arguments per month = less than 1 argument per month

    Tell me, what is an acceptable frequency of arguments for you?




  • For me, everything is a belief unless it satisfies the following criteria:

    1. It is generally accepted as true among experts
    2. There is ample evidence that is both personally convincing and leaves no room for alternate interpretations (not the same as #1, since many fields have “commonly accepted knowledge” that is generally acknowledged as most likely true but has no evidence to back it up)
    3. It is specific enough that it cannot be interpreted in a way that is misleading

    I find that the one that trips up most people is #3, since some people speak in technically true but overly broad statements and the listener ends up filling in the gaps with their own biases. The listener leaves feeling like their biases have been confirmed by data, not realizing that they have been misled.

    In the end, according to my criteria, very little can be categorized as true knowledge. But that’s fine. You can still make judgements from partial or biased data or personal beliefs. You just can’t be resolute about it and say that it’s true.



  • I think doing nothing is an overlooked business strategy. Companies always expect change and improvement. There must be a new version, a new redesign, a new functionality, a new hype. It looks good on paper and signals leadership to the investors, even when what the customer really wants is just stability and consistency. We saw it with Windows, where Microsoft’s endless hype-chasing led us to Windows 11. If stagnation is one extreme of business strategies, then whatever these tech companies are doing is the opposite extreme.

    Valve knows what to change and, more importantly, what not to change.