The left doesn’t really have any political power under capitalist hegemony where there’s economic consensus in the political and ruling class. There are many leftists but essentially no political left, and at the same time politics can no longer impact our economic arrangements, irs basically a spectacle we react to from different angles. What we have are centrist liberals both portrayed as “far left” by the right, some who ignorantly react to that with “yes, I am far left!” And those who actually have a visceral hate for capitalism have almost always been dealt with on common ground between centrist liberals and the right.

Not wholly opposed to that, markets can serve the purpose they’re designed for, and I could see an evolution of cybersyn that helps run the economy using simulated markets.

Code Sherpa

Chances are your pants are not as fancy as the pair

Of very fancy pants that Mr. Fancy Pants will wear

When everybody’s marching in the fancy pants parade

He’s gonna pass the test, he’s gonna be the best

The best in terms of pants

The true test is, would you install it for your mom. Have fun figuring out her public library and ereader shit on Linux.

The average person just has no idea about RCS or protocols in general and are incidental adopters of it just like SMS. Sometimes these nerd debates about platforms and protocols emphasize technology features over actually connecting with people or doing something productive on said technology.

These nerds will debate platforms way more than use them productively.

Used a self hosted matrix with element for years now it’s solid. Have a friend group who uses it for everything with dedicated channels etc.

“I only talk to other nerds” basically

They hated him, for he spoke the truth.

AtlasOS is great wish I discovered it before doing it all manually. All it really does is apply group policy changes and config management, which is what any enterprise workplace will do by default. I have 15 years experience as a sysadmin in a mixed OS environment in the operation of critical infrastructure. We’re bound by intense regulations and audited often, and Windows is the workstation OS that we can easily manage security-wise. This is in contrast to the notion of Windows as a garbage consumer product, which yeah not wrong there, but people might not be aware of it’s compliance with industry standards and security regs. Which is a shame because that’s ultimately what’s evil about the MS approach to business, they create a problem for businesses and offer the solution.

The only thing you can’t disable here are the vulns, technically MS is obligated to patch though so I’d be interested which ones apply, I’m assuming there’s a lot of vulns in certain features. My Windows SSD is 60GB fully loaded with apps and drivers. Search and other stuff are just basic config items and plenty of UI replacements and tweaks to be had.

My Debian servers and laptop run way lighter as expected, unfortunately I need the custom hardware support of Windows for some software critical to my livelihood. All I do is deploy Windows in the same way I’d deploy and manage an enterprise workstation. No store, no live, no “apps,” no overlay bs or news feeds, just pure Windows. Gotta say I prefer 11 so far to 10, the window snapping and some other changes have been good for productivity, which is really the only thing I care about since I’d switch that machine to Debian in a heartbeat if I didn’t have a use case.

Oh yay another Windows 11 being bad meme, and all the same comments about it too. Feel like it’s groundhog day cause this place only has 2 jokes that get recycled on repeat.

“10 degrees to the left in good times, 10 degrees to the right when it affects them personally.”

Would probably change the cabinets to a lighter color but I love it.

It’s a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren’t often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people’s leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.

If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we’d have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.

If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.

Right, you’re establishing a moral superiority by your consumption model. I have the same consumption model but not vain enough to think the way I watch movies has any moral significance.

Nah it depends on physical infrastructure and programs which aren’t capable of having values and principles. You mean people ascribe values and principles as their motivation for working on said programs, which I don’t doubt.

“The movement values and principles” is a fairy tale tech hobbyists tell themselves to feel like their consumer preferences have grandiose importance.

My use case is finding good online communities for my offline interests wherever they exist, and I’ve found some solid ones on Discord. This is why I agree with every point you’ve raised but find them ineffective at making me want to not use it. I value the connections I make with people through the platform more than any of the nerd reasons why I’m supposed to be bad for using it. Ultimately I don’t care about the platforms that much, they’re just transient things which come and go. So I’ll host a Matrix instance until something else is better, I’ll use Discord for running my weekly dnd group because nothing else worked for everyone and it’s been solid for 3 years. “Discord’s product is not usability” …okay I guess I’ll stop using it now. /s That just falls flat. To stop using it the reasons I use it will have to go away.

I’ve faced similar arguments about how I have a Windows machine for media creation, people try to debate me that there’s better alternatives assuming I haven’t tried them or that I don’t prioritize FOSS, but they don’t even have a connection to the scene I use this stuff for and they think some nerd technology argument is a valid reason to stop doing what I love. It’s like yeah every point raised is completely valid, but people will debate the ins and outs of platforms and software before they ever apply them to something beyond themselves.

It’s like okay you don’t like the new Milwaukee battery line of tools, but here’s a kitchen I made with them so just stfu and eat your food.