Bringing it back to the whole thing about Linux, can you imagine how frustrating it would be to have to help debug a user’s Linux installation when they already need help with installing a browser add on? I work with tech and Linux on a daily basis and I already find it frustrating doing it for myself (fuck Nvidia drivers). No way am I gonna recommend it to someone else.

Are you honestly going to still claim at this late date of 2024 that a decent popular linux distro is actually going to be MORE of a headache than Windows?

…?

Have you tried Windows recently?

Can y’all IT people please stop with the condescending “you don’t know how stupid people are about computers”, it seems like there is always one of you showing up in a comment thread to tell us that we can’t have the future literally all of us want including you all as well… because WE are too stupid and lazy about computers.

I helped a grown ass human who was my age at 40yo how to install a Firefox extension.

Were you as condescending to them in person as you are being in referencing them right now? Why is not knowing how to install a Firefox extension some indicator of foreclosure on the possibility of that person becoming computer literate along whatever metrics you define? There are plenty of smart people out there who can learn how to use a computer for very complex tasks who have just simply never learned about extensions for Firefox. This is a very feasible and normal reality.

Do you know how to change the oil on your car yourself? Do simple plumbing jobs? Could you run a classroom of middle schoolers and keep them all focused while keeping your eye on the shy sad kid in the back who tends to disappear if you don’t engage them? What about basic healthcare changes or cooking? What about outdoor work or basic small engine maintenance? Do you even know shit about the most basic species of trees in your backyard? Do you know the species of songbirds you often hear outside your window? Do you even pay attention to that? Do you know how to drive a dirt bike extremely fast on a rough dirt road? Do you know how to adjust for the violent explosive power of turbo lag in a car with a turbocharger so that torque oversteer doesn’t launch you off the road? Do you know how to sew and repair basic garments? To weave? Can you even fish? Like could you literally even just catch a fish to save your life right now if I handed you a fishing rod unassembled with no instructions?

My point is, don’t go looking for confirmation of how stupid or lazy people are or how limited their capacity is to evolve and grow by casting the shapes of their ignorance onto the floor and trying to read some magic language from that.

Maybe they don’t know because they are hopelesssly stupid, but maybe not? If they are intelligent and they don’t know computers then those are the perfect people to teach linux. Then it is their first language instead of windows, many linux distro are perfectly fine for this at this point.

See here is the bottom line, legions of IT people show up online always arguing they think they know that the average person is too dumb, lazy and uninterested in computers for Linux adoption to seriously take off in the personal computer market and challenge Microsoft, but y’all don’t know shit about humans. You are experts in computers who think that makes you experts in human potential.

Go take some theater classes (or get an degree in education) and get educated before you start drawing conclusions about people when you really haven’t spent time closely studying how people engage with their potential and what situations facilitate that in basic human interaction and framing of conversations (both literal and abstract).

I’m sorry if I snapped at you but I think it is existentially important to recognize here that we don’t know what people are capable of, you can’t know the essential capacity of people to change, don’t try to predict it. Focus on creating the material opportunity for change and the rest may follow depending on what people desire, no matter to us, we desire to create that positive opportunity for change because it is the right thing to do, not because we like the future growth charts of the things we believe are important and vital.

If you need more focus to the game play Sky Island, also / and ? are your best friends

Windows Phone was never given a chance to pan out. There wasn’t space for Windows Phone to force its way on the scene when it finally began to fire on all cylinders as a smartphone OS but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity to when it came.

It is wild to me that upper management at Microsoft was too dumb to understand that and just killed their perfectly good apparatus for gaining a foothold on the mobile market. Simply put a tech company that large should always be thinking seriously about maintaining a practical entrance to an industry as important to their bottom line as this.

They are fools and they ultimately threw mud in the face of the small amount of windows phone fans (of which there definitely were loyal fans especially for the great Nokia cameras and extremely focused UI) who could have delivered that initial burst of energy and excitement/growth when the opportunity eventually did come. Thus they have actually sealed and barricaded the door to Microsoft ever EVER being in the mobile space since they betrayed ALL of the early adopter nerds who would have stuck around for the rough beginning.

Hell yeah, it is so much easier than it used to be right?

How was your experience?

Any tips for someone who might be about to do the same?

Did you create a ritual pyre of Microsoft jewel cases and old manuals and stuff and burn it while dancing around it chanting burnnn babyyy burnnn?

If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.

They aren’t just overinesting in AI, they are foreclosing the future of programming and software design as a prestigious, respectable and valuable career.

It doesn’t matter if the AI works or not, it just matters that programmers sat there and took it because they thought they were special and the ruling class would never betray their trade.

Well here we are kids if you want a realistic career that will pay the bills dont follow your heart and go into programming and computers, that is a passionate hobby you shouldnt expect to be highly paid for it. Go into the trades, anywhere else, programming as a career is fucked (and again it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not).

Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.

waves from over in the linux corner seize the day, and microsoft’s throat :P

Oops there we go with another pathetic example of a raging fascist literally outflanking a milquetost centrist on the left.

Fuck Trump, the hateful bastard, but this is so pathetic that Biden and centrist democrats utterly refuse to engage in promising genuine reforms and providing a vision to the truly desperate (economically) american public and it is going to end up killing us all.

First problem, that URL link goes to a dead website for me, which is a major issue given the name of Paint.Net is it’s URL…

But yeah I mean sure Paint.Net is good in terms of functionality!

I wouldn’t recommend it over Gimp though, sure Gimp is annoying but Paint.Net is a shovel where as Gimp is a fully featured construction crew with excavators and equipment. Different uses and design goals but the important bit is you can easily ask a construction crew to dig a random hole for you whereas it is much harder to ask a shovel to clear a building site and dig out a pit for a foundation for you… so I tend to recommend familiarizing yourself with Gimp and just skip Paint.Net unless you have a specific need where it fits better.

Learn Gimp once and use it the rest of your life, shrugs it is the nature of successful Open Source projects like this that after they reach a critical mass of functionality from two decades of development or so there just isn’t a great reason to go with anything else in my opinion (unless you want to drop money on a paid image editor from a company less shitty than Adobe).

Gimp will be around, being developed and used all over the world long after you are dead. Paint.Net mightttt be if it continues to grow.

Don’t forget Inkscape!!!

Inkscape is amazing for vector editing

https://inkscape.org/

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

GIMP

https://www.gimp.org/

The discussion you put yourself into was whether Gaza was the FIRST or not. The only person that suggested that genocide wasn’t happening was you when you said only Gaza was genocide.

…what? When did I say that?

I don’t think you understand, this moment, this slaughter of Palestinians, it is the announcement of a new world order for the western world. A new era of western governments turning inwards and enacting massive amounts of violence towards their own people.

There is only one correct response to that, and it is to treat it as a red line. Failing to do so is catastrophic. Letting Biden win without having to deal with this is incredibly dangerous and is a classic liberal/centrist perspective of appeasing the forces of fascism until it is too late.

Tell that to the people of Bucha, of Lyman, of Maruipol.

Ok, not sure what this has to do with them but sure. If they are curious I will point out that this is not in fact a war, not even close.

….and stop trying to sidetrack this conversation, other genocides and atrocities existing has no bearing on my outrage over a genocide the US is directly enabling right now.

How dare you use whataboutism for genocides as if bringing up one makes another less awful, what a repulsive and cynical way to see the world.

Nowhere did I say I like Trump, Trump is a fascist, that isn’t hyperbole or shrill lefty talk,bit is just just brand at this point.

Biden needs to stop the Palestinian genocide so that Trump doesn’t win.

I don’t feel like this makes me a troll, maybe you disagree with me. Fine. My intentions are not disingenuous however, I want the least amount of harm to come to all humans and animals however best that may be. In my opinion, that means putting all our chips on the table now and making it clear that no matter what Trump does, Biden has no path to the presidency if he directly backs an ongoing genocide with US weapons against the majority will of the US public (by a sizable margin).

Ukraine is a war, it is modern imperialism, an army invades a country and an another army fights to repel the invasion.

Gaza is a genocide.

Apples and oranges though both are horrendous.

If you think the Palestinian Genocide in Gaza is a war you need to unplug your brain from cable news because it is decaying your capacity to understand reality, slap yourself in the face, touch some grass, topple your world view to pieces and begin over again from the standpoint that human life, all human life, is precious and that the many are never responsible for the actions of the one.

I am a very vocal critic of Biden for supporting the Palestinian genocide.

I have railed on him in thread after thread for enabling the slaughter of Palestinians.

I am one single person but I want to vote for Biden, this genocide is just a red line for me.

I can really only speak for the left but mark my words if Biden genuinely stops this genocide (or starts taking meaningful action to stop it) the vast majority of those voters will come back because this isn’t about rejecting Biden (have y’all even been paying attention to leftists organizing around voting “uncommitted” in the primaries as a thoughtful way to mitigate splitting the party?), this is about rejecting neoliberalism’s stranglehold over the democratic party and the absolutely horrific consequences that happen when we don’t do the work to reject the intellectually suffocating and ideologically lazy environment created by neoliberalism and centrism (that inevitably plays directly into the hands of fascists as history has shown over and over again).

Barely anybody on the left who has indicated they don’t want to vote for Biden because of his appalling lack of desire to stop the genocide of the Palestinians is going to react to Biden genuinely creating a ceasefire by not changing their position and supporting Biden over Trump. Leftists understand just as well as centrists that Trump will be worse.

What centrists can’t wrap their mind around is that if we don’t fight existentially for Palestinians now than Gaza will be considered a successful prototype by rightwing fascist western parties/governments all over the world and we will see this kind of violence become the new world order. We need to stamp this shit out now, and many of us on the left feel that the only effective leverage point is setting Biden’s ego for desiring to win the presidency as an old piece of shit against his loyalty to Israel (along with most of the Republican and Democratic parties).

Is Biden directly complicit in the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians no matter if he stops the genocide today? Of course, and he will always deserve the jeering insult “Genocide Joe” for it as a tiny penance to pay. However like the rest of y’all I understand that all US presidents are mass murderers. George Bush directly caused 1 million Iraqi citizens to die…. for what? How fucked up is it the way Obama escalated highly illegal unilateral drone strikes completely hidden from the scrutiny of the US public?

I don’t need Biden to be a good person I agree with to vote for him, I need him to come back over what is a very very very reasonable red line.

ACAB

Give people homes, healthcare and education if you are so terrified of crime.

Stop giving babies dressed up as their vision of authoritarian superheroes more guns and power.

Cops don’t need better training, we need better training so we stop thinking about police as fundamentally good or necessary.

Police are violent thugs who made a deal with the current status quo, this is what police have and will always be, especially in countries drowning in rightwing fascism like the U.S.

Recipe For Economics: Strip out all the fun interesting parts of Astrology, add a suffocating amount of clueless bros, and dump a full bottle of “rationalizations for not caring about the consequences of our cruelty” on top.

Valve is a business, they don’t give a shit about vibes, when Valve gets sold off and it will one day (probably sooner than we expect) none of these “vibes” or “culture” are going to matter one single tiny little bit.

That is the point of this whole system, we receive assurances up down left right and in every which direction that entities like Valve won’t be ripped up and destroyed by venture capital, private equity, or whatever the fuck the current grift the 1% has us in… and they are empty promises by design.

A company is not legally defined as the will of its creator/creators, rather the labor and particular genius of a company’s workers is purposefully rationalized into a structure that we are supposed to accept is fundamentally designed to be ripped from our hands brutally because “that is just how the adult world works, shut up and get back to work”.

Justification of unnecessary violence and destruction is one of the primary products of the system.

In a world that isn’t drowning in late stage capitalism what we call that is the overwhelming gift given to us by the generations before us so that we may in turn give it to the next generation. Video games are only a tiny subsection of those gifts compared to everything else we just get handed for free.

Wealthy US boomers brutally executed that way of looking at the world though, so literally any form of passing on gifts to the next generation other than being rich as fuck and directly leaving an unbelievable amount of money to your kids is unfathomable or framed as unfair or absurd in modern day society.