Too many commenters here do not understand anything about how any of it works, especially how first past the post voting works. Progressives do not seem to understand that the system has not rejected them, but the voters have.

It is mostly relentless propaganda for the oligarchs that has captured the country. That’s the problem, and it is not fixed by any of the suggestions here.

You need to look up Komar & Melamid. They did market research art, and they commissioned “The Least Favorite Song” after a survey that showed the least favorite features of songs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People’s_Choice_Music#The_Most_Unwanted_Song

My mantra: “Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks, and see that it is barren.”

No, he’s accusing them of being what he is, a time-honored tactic that Trump also utilizes.

Everyone needs to read that post. 99% of Lemmy/Mastodon users do not know how incredibly highly self-selected they are for a level of tech engagement that is orders of magnitude beyond what the vast majority of people are willing to engage in.

Email has taken 25 years to get people that comfortable with it, and most folks either go with their ISP email, or one of 3 or 4 providers. Discord, you’re already in the tech savvy population.

You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.

Personal dignity?

My mom died.

My father taught me to hate myself.

You invite my “billionaires shouldn’t exist” TED talk.

Yeah, and folks know “scruples” as a noun which some people have and some don’t, but “scruple” as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don’t encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say “meaningful”. Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn’t giving of himself very much.

“scruple” as a verb, meaning “hesitate due to conscience”.

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Some of us learn better lessons.

I have become aggressively more anti-capitalist as I’ve grown older. At 56, with a nice professional career mostly behind me, I am vigorously ANTIFA EAT THE RICH ACAB.

Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.

Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.

Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.

My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I’m not a programmer, so it’s just, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck on this ever being fixed.”

I’ve done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there’s some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that’s good enough. Read the man page.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they’ll say, “Yes, it’s the best,” but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it’s not a lack in the OS, it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I’ve used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as “sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove”. And there’s a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they’re scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question “Is Linux as good as we think it is?” then you may have your answer.

What happened in Twoteen Twooty Two?