I used to be a card-carrying, passionate advocate of Free Software. I used to see Stallman lecture. I only installed Free Software on my personal computer to the fullest extent possible. I was considering buying a coreboot-compatible laptop to get rid of the rest.
But then, slowly, I stopped caring. It felt really similar to when I decided to leave Catholicism. I started noticing that these beliefs weren’t really actually helpful, and were frankly, mostly harmful. Now, I’m not saying Free Software is harmful. What I am saying is that refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody, and only harms yourself. Even if you are the kind of person who thinks boycotts work, there just aren’t enough free software diehards to form a large enough boycott. And even then, you’d want to do the boycott together, simultaneously, to send the message.
Boycotts REQUIRE significant-percentage-of-population, to hurt the monopoly/polyopoly they’re trying to dent.
I used to be a believer in the FLOSS that was out there, but … always, it was broken.
Firefox for Android, they broke our ability to backup our bookmarks without giving them to Mozilla…
they broke our ability to save webpages properly…
they won’t permit us to bookmark-all-tabs…
Why TF would anybody be loyal to one’s abusers??
Find me a distro that gets everything right, and is plug-and-play?
None exist.
Ubuntu-family has this fucktarded habit of killing-the-X-server during some updates, AND THERE IS NO DEFAULT WAY TO PROPERLY RECOVER THE GUI OR POWEROFF THE MACHINE??!??!!
Applied clue-by-4’s are needed to communicate with people, about what the FUNDAMENTAL requirements are, of people’s OS’s??
FLOSS, nowadays has finally got good-enough that it is possible to rely on it, for some things, but … for others, it’s actually a case of using RANDOM drugs, from random people, because of ideology, or availability.
Which absolutely sucks.
Replace all Windows XP…etc installs with Puppy Linux, fersure.
Having openSUSE break my wifi-drivers, for no reason, at the beginning of the year, … WHY??
Someday, somebody is going to MAKE a distro that is truly-trustworthy/reliable/won’t-fuck-you-over, AND provides all the required function, AND is sufficiently secure, AND runs well on whatever hardware is available, …
…but in the mean-time, it is an abusive-relationship, for the ones subject-to-it, who can’t produce repplacement/alternatives to what the current projects are doing,
… and if the current projects prefer to butcher everybody’s systems because they don’t value trustWORTHY computing, or reliability-for-users, well, Too Bad™ is the fact.
Sorry to be bitter at the decades-of-needless-brokenness-and-abuse, but Slackware gave a reasonable approximation of function back in 1996, and it’s nearly 2026, so nearly-3-decades, and getting
- works-with-the-users’-actual-hardware, AND
- works reasonably-quickly, AND
- provides required function, AND
- is trustWORTHY computing, NOT abusing the user’s life
isn’t possible???
Nobody considers that to be worth committing??
( I’m a brain-injury survivor, who’s geeked, but failed to learn programming since 1983, so telling me to “either put up or shut up” is exactly the chauvanistic-bullying that non-programmers oft get, and it doesn’t actually make the world work correctly… so I wonder why people are devout to such culture… )
just venting, I guess.
Whisper has made it theoretically possible to do without Dragon Naturally Speaking, so now there simply isn’t any major-functionality that isn’t availble in Linux…
but the endless “let’s break this, let’s break that, they don’t need this, they don’t need to be able to poweroff their system in a way that doesn’t trash its filesystems, they won’t mind if we force them to red-button-poweroff, they don’t need the UI to work, they don’t need their internet-drivers” abuses…
I don’t want to be “belonging” in any “community” that values abuses-on-others for sake of some endless-new-feature-addiction, or churn-addiction, or whatever the current fashionable addiction is, you know?
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen.
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