This doesn’t really compute. Society would collapse if nobody trusted “third parties”, and your second phrase is just hyperbole.

It’s more complex than that. The issue is money, and incentives, and how power is structured. A third party that you are paying or whose income is uncoupled to the profit motive, and preferably one that has both private and institutional stakeholders - well, if we choose not to trust them, then basically we can’t trust anyone for anyone. That would be a dark place to be.

Yes and for an interesting reason. I am a member of a minority group. Doesn’t matter which, and I have never seen it as a defining part of my identity, but it has one obvious advantage: my friends have come from a wider variety of class backgrounds than they otherwise might have.

Personally I’m skeptical about multiculturalism, I think it can be dangerous in democracy if taken too far. But the fact that humans inevitably sort themselves into groups does have some upsides. De Tocqueville mentioned the political one: groups are a bulwark to protect the individual from the state. But there’s another: a group which is based on ethnicity, or sexuality, or some other immutable personal condition, or religion, or a political ideology, or even a hobby, is at least not one which is based on money and social class.

always find myself needing to fire up a window manager just to get a browser eventually

A chromeless tiling WM is basically invisible and AFAIK has almost zero performance impact. That’s roughly what I do.

Launching it using the raw framebuffer means it blocks the screen until you close it, and there’s no means to do anything else except switching to another TTY, is that it?

Fair point about raw speed. I never found the keyboard-vs-mouse speed debate very interesting either.

But cognitive load is a double-edged sword. Sure, the first time you attempt a task, the abstraction of a GUI is really helpful. There’s nothing to remember, you just point and click around and eventually the task is done. But when you have a task with 7 steps which you have to do every 2 weeks, then the GUI becomes a PITA in my experience. GUIs are all but impossible to script, and so you’re gonna need a good memory if you want to get it done quickly and accurately. This is where CLI scripting becomes genuinely useful. Personally I have quite a few such tasks.

Great! I guessed that going full framebuffer would be trickier than that. You’ve laid me down a new challenge.

How much can you actually do without a windowing environment? […] Opening images in fbi, PDFs in fbpdf, listening to music in cmus, watching movies in mplayer

Maybe not an “environment” but it sounds like you’re at least using a window manager. The PDFs and videos, not to mention web browser, are gonna be hard to pull off from a raw shell. [Hard but not that hard, apparently!]

But that’s a detail. Otherwise I share your enthusiasm, I’ve been doing things this way for a while. Basically: tiling window manager + TUI file manager + scripts which do precisely what I want, if possible in the terminal, if necessary by launching a GUI app. In practice the GUI apps are Firefox, mapping app, and messaging apps.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

For example: I have a button which runs a script with getmail that pulls in my email and then deploys ripmime and weasyprint to convert it to datestamped PDF files, which it dumps with any attachments directly into an inbox folder. In other words, I have made ranger into my email client and I never need to “download” anything, it’s already there.

And those PDFs I can then manipulate with a bunch of shell scripts that use standard utilities, i.e. to split them, merge them, shrink them, clean them of metadata, even make them look like they come from photocopied paper (dumb bank!). All the stupid shit I once did with 10 manipulations hunting thru menus with a pointer in a fiddly app and always forgetting how it was done. Now I just select the file in the terminal, hit a button and it’s done, I don’t even see the PDF.

Of course, it’s not for everyone, but this is the promise of free computing.

Earning more than I spent. It’s really not a complex science. In fact this whole question reminds me of the weight-loss debate.

For context, I’ve been working for a couple of decades, never been highly paid, rarely even worked full time, and it’s been at least 15 years since I had the slightest money issue.

The critical variable is self-discipline. I know this is not a popular opinion. I also understand that there are societal factors that feed into all this, and that questions of virtue and vice are basically irrelevant. But it’s true nonetheless. We do not live in a society of material scarcity. If you have an income, basically any income, and you can find a way to control your needs, then you will quickly escape survival mode.

Just don’t be that American who says “Gee everything’s so cheap!” and pays over the odds and causes inflation for the rest of us. Thanks.

While I appreciate the amount of development those companies bring to the table, the moment they’re in control of the project they’ll try to find ways to profit from it at the expense of the community, and it almost always results in a poorer product.

Yes, hard to argue with this. Or indeed anything else you just said. I agree that for any project it’s crucial that there be a wide variety of stakeholders.

Believe it or not, I’m being gradually won over by the arguments deployed in this discussion! Incredible but true.

Admittedly the definition is hard to pin down but clearly the thing exists or the word wouldn’t have taken off so quickly.

Roughly, it refers to the worldview in which group power dynamics are all-determining, where race is destiny, where the individual takes a back seat, and where the only possibly solution is some form of reverse discrimination - but even that will never work, really, because injustice is destiny.

It exists, quite few people believe these things, far far more of them hate it, and that’s why the peak woke moment seems to have passed. Mercifully.

Yes yes, these are good points. To be clear, IMO Debian is the ideal Ubuntu replacement. They have the pedigree, the credible claim to be the Universal OS. But have you seen Debian’s website? No way. Hopefully that will change one day.

Fair enough, and perhaps you’re right. Personally I’m reassured when a for-profit company backstops an open-source project. So many amateur projects turn into abandonware, an OS has to do better than that. But yes, Canonical could get into trouble too.

Personally I see not Mint but Debian as the best claimant to Ubuntu’s mantle. I just wish they would become a bit less amateurish. Maybe move towards the Wikimedia foundation model, get some serious resources, a better website and onboarding funnel, etc. Their ideological position is great, but if you want to change the world then at some point you need to behave at least somewhat like a private business.

Fair points. Admittedly I use a tiling window manager so I never see most of these problems.

My basic concern is with fragmentation. IMO many techies just don’t grasp how forbidding Linux is to normal people. Or the importance of reputation in people’s choice to take the leap. It’s all but priceless. Ubuntu-bashing has always struck me as a case of an elite group that prefers to split hairs rather than to take the win of getting extra users of FOSS. Idealism vs pragmatism, basically.

Anyway, I’m repeating myself. If you think that normies have heard of Mint already and that it won’t go away next year, then fine. The important thing is to get them to take the leap. They can always change distro later, the second time is much less forbidding.

In my opinion Ubuntu-bashing is unjustified and counterproductive.

Unjustified because Ubuntu is great! I say that having used it exclusively for years without a problem. That has to be worth something. Yes, there’s the Snap issue, and occasional shenanigans from Canonical, but so far these problems are not existential. For context I’ve been on Linux for 2 decades (also Debian) but I am not a typical techie (history major). Ubuntu just works.

Counterproductive because Linux needs a flagship distro for beginners. Just the word Linux is daunting to most normies! We absolutely need a beginner distro with name recognition. Well, this may hurt to hear but Ubuntu is basically the only candidate. Name recognition does not come cheap. At this point it is decades of work and we should not be squandering it.

Terrible, no-good, cynical, nihilist take. If everybody took your advice, the world would be a worse place in short order. Sorry to be so blunt.

This should really be more widely known. It’s a case study of mission creep and bureaucratization. The cost of keeping the servers running, and even dev work, is at this point a smallish fraction of what they’re pulling in. The is rest going to various forms of outreach and activism. That’s fine, and the money is probably well spent. But they really should be more honest about why they’re asking for it.

A token amount, a few euro a month.

BUT. One day it will all be donated. Every last cent of it.

Money is security. It’s peace of mind. So I will keep hold of mine for now, thank you very much.

That’s why I wrote typical. The question was from a beginner, not a networking expert.