I grew up with Windows and I constantly had to fix shit just for my own casual use, the biggest barrier to moving to Linux is about learning a new OS from scratch, we already go through that learning curve with Windows normally so we forget how much time and effort it took us just to understand the system well.

That aside, I’d argue that for most productive work that doesn’t require proprietary software, you also don’t need to understand Linux that well to be productive. You just need to know how to log in, launch whatever you need, and then turn it off before going home. The biggest reason why we can’t just make people switch overnight is that they’re probably used to proprietary software that just won’t work well on Linux, like Adobe or Microsoft Office. If you train your personal to first switch to FOSS alternative, when you do make the switch to Linux the learning curve for what they need to do is small and they won’t be as intimidated. But now, if you’re talking about how their years of learning Word or Excel or Photoshop doesn’t translate 1:1 because of different UI and behavior, they’ll be very uncomfortable and less productive when they switch.

Things inevitably go wrong no matter what system or software in general you use, we’re just used at tolerating it when it’s something we know and use already, but there’s no reason why we should think Linux or FOSS software has to be strictly much more stable than its counterparts, as long as they’re good enough for the person or the use case, it’s already good enough to switch, with the caveat that you should never switch everything at once, but rather first switch your productive software, retrain to feel confident in it, and then switch to Linux. That way you’ll not even remember you’re running Linux after a few weeks, other than when you see the login screen or something.

That’s amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

Personally I think everyone should be benefitting, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen if the big corpos lobby successfully to ban foss alternatives or if hardware stays perpetually expensive, but for coders as a whole it wouldn’t be the worst if we can simply run a foss model locally for a use case that makes sense, especially stuff like debugging. I do agree with most of your points, for what is worth. I just don’t agree with copyright law or IP law a whole lot even if it sometimes benefits regular workers, these laws were reshaped long ago to protect big owners of capital and we need to move away from them at some point.

Yeah it’s just very poorly written, I was trying to be too charitable in my previous comment but I think the article deserves a lot more criticism, like about the random change of tone (ex: professional to swearing for no reason to professional again), missing explanations, and taking several paragraphs to explain that sometimes people do shit they don’t like for money, like, we’re human, we know that lmao

I also gave up reading it, but from a few paragraphs below, when they said knowledge work they mean stuff like marketing, finances and other relatively high paying jobs that most people aren’t passionate about but choose to do for money. I think it’s a weakness of the article that it isn’t upfront about what it means, so you’re not wrong for looking it up, but yeah, they meant that.

The article itself seems to be on alienation and stress, but as I said I didn’t finish it, as it’s quite long and not engaging enough, at least to me.

Programmers?

Make no mistakes

I had read cats and was expecting some weird shitposting lol

b4 Xi Jiping conquers me.

Because China has been so aggressive? Wtf lol

How do you suggest they get paid? There’s a massive issue with most foss devs and maintainers being unpaid and burnt out while their work is used by corpos and more often than not they don’t receive a dime

than what an AI or cheap programmers from places like India or China could do.

People abroad making less money has more to do with the cost of living, different regulations and so on, not necessarily skill. I’m a mid developer with years of professional experience and my salary is shit for US standards, but it allows me to live okayish here, so that’s why we put up with it. Immigrants also often face a precarious position (such as a visa status being tied to their work, or prosecution by the authorities, or not being part of a union in an otherwise unionized industry, etc), so them getting paid badly is, again, not always related to skill. I’ve met Arab doctors who are cab drivers in Europe.

That doesn’t address the climate or jobs question though, both require organizing

Unfortunately both parties share the same donors who benefit from this, and getting momentum on a third party under a bipartisan system takes a lot of time and effort

I didn’t say it was the sole reason, rather that it is measurable and clear as day (look at the difference in the number of voters between the last two US presidential elections). You don’t need foreign actors to explain why democrat voters didn’t bother to show up.

Trump’s numbers were more or less constant for the last two election cycles, but look at the difference in voters between Biden and Harris in the same two elections.

I’m not a fan of the Russian government, but let’s stick to the facts. The biggest reason why the democrats lost is because they didn’t give most people a reason to care to vote, they didn’t listen to their more popular base on things like healthcare and a certain genocide as that could push away their corporate donors, and they promised continuity with an impopular administration that had the bad luck of governing during most of the economic hardship of the pandemic. Still, they could have done a decent campaign and ran on more popular policy.

Obviously powerful countries do try to influence elections to a degree, but the idea that Trump only won because of Russian interference has been disproven already.

Might be a vibecoded docker container or something, but I agree with your skepticism here

The prosecution of pro Palestine speech in places like Germany isn’t a fiction. The support for neocolonialism in places like France, which to this day benefits from treating former colonies like shit is also not fiction. And most of the EU is conveniently supported US foreign policy until it came to bite them in the ass with Greenland (and still generally support the US everywhere else).

Some European countries are very nice to live in, but internationally they’re not the good guys. They supported bombing Yugoslavia and Libya and now they pretend to hold space for nuance in the illegal invasion of Iran. They also supported kidnapping Maduro in Venezuela and they clearly don’t give a shit about Cuba being subjected to a genocidal blockade.

This isn’t to say Russia is better, Russia is another country with an oligarchy and they tend to be the bad guys all the time as well, the difference is that Russia does good some of the time, even if for the wrong reasons, like recently violating the US blockade of Cuba to bring them oil. I doubt they do it because they care about Cuban people, but the result is still a good one for Cubans, and it’s a whole lot more than what the EU has ever done.

Ps Snowden being alive and well in Russia for this long should tell you something else too.

That Russia understands he’s useful to undermine western soft power?

Thanks!