Bazzite’s been working pretty good for me. Was honestly easier to set up too, and fights me less, and runs smoother, and also doesn’t spy on me.

Joke’s clear, it just only makes sense if you’re privileged.

Lovely, romanticizing gendered labour. You guys know poor people have always been around, right?

Crazy that the world isn’t bubblewrapped for you and people do shit anyway. Chud.

Very un-Nazi to try to gaslight people and punish emotions yeah. God you people are so transparent

I can tell you’re new to talking about Nazis. Howbout you stop acting like one?

God, liberals just love to show how fucking eugenicist and ableist they are when they feel like there’s a crisis. I almost never see these Nazis made fun of for being Nazis, almost like it would be too revealing to discuss why fascism is bad.

This isn’t making fun of Nazis, it’s making fun of fat people and rationalising it because of Nazis.

You’ve assumed that I’m in a tech knowledge bubble. I use Linux for work, but I am not in the tech field even remotely. Even though I have some professional training and a hobby interest, which prepared me better, I had to use textbooks and online forums to learn how to use my Linux desktop comfortably. I regularly deal with students and am therefore very familiar with low tech-literacy, let alone others in my own life that I have helped. I know there is a skill barrier for entry into Linux.

What I am much better equipped to handle is broad social and economic developments historically, with a particular concern for capitalist erosion of community wellbeing and mutual aid. As I have said, I do not doubt there is value for consumers in this service and I do not doubt that this service appears to be reasonably priced to those consumers. My concern regards the potential attraction that such profitability could generate and that same tech-illiteracy would make users more easily coerced into capitalization. Those conditions are exactly why there is a social as well as skill barrier of entry into Linux. As you said, many consumers have been primed to accept convenience over skill-building, which in turn makes them less capable of choosing when something is not worth the price and abandoning a convenient user experience.

Again, it is good that more people try to make this switch – Microsoft’s near monopoly is undeniably a social detriment – but we do not benefit from suspending criticism of how this switch happens just because we are happy it is happening.

I think it is very purposeful that Zorin has expansive marketing and frames features in terms of price value.

My concern is more oriented toward how capitalization of consumer-facing Linux will look if it proves to be a profitable site of expansion with Windows’ decline in popularity. I don’t care about licenses or the utility of the feature, though I do question its value when there are free options. The support is the more valuable thing, but again I worry about this success given that other distros have communities that serve the same purpose for free with only a little more labour from the user. It’s a good thing this is happening at all, but we should be critical of how it happens.

This is a good point, particularly in the context of value for new users. My comment is more regarding the precedent of framing desktop environments as some sort of premium feature. I do question how much value users still get out of that though, since so many Linux distros have communities that provide essentially the same service for free with a bit more labour on the user.

I really hope these people don’t accept that it’s normal to charge for different desktop environments.

Yeah exactly. Sucks if you have a job that forces you to use Windows though, which is largely how MS has this stanglehold on PC share. Once this becomes an expensive security risk, maybe more businesses will switch to paid Linux OS’s.

Yes exactly, they’re making it very clear they won’t stop until forced to.

Fuck eh, guess the state has absolute power over everybody within its grasp and all those periods of revolt and revolution were fake news.

Straight up, it would be mortally dangerous for federal US reps to bailout tech. The industry is wildly unpopular, has openly threatened labourers with forced redundancy, polluted and\or poisoned vulnerable communities, and houses some of the most famous billionaires in the country. This is not an industry that thousands of blue-collar workers depend on for wages and produces products that people need to survive. Also, the US state is subject to the most open resistance and condemnation it has had since the Civil Rights Era (even privileged groups find the erasure of wealth disparity appealing now too).

Seriously, I think if this were to happen, it would result in violent retaliation.

Consumers are not the main driver of profit, speculative value is. Microsoft knows that Windows is guaranteed to be on the majority of PC’s, which means they can afford to implement hostile features that increase the speculative value on data collection and AI investment.

Yeah, libs have been very open about homophobia and ableism since Trump was elected and they had a crisis that warranted a suspension of the performance. Statistically, we know most men in the US are complacent with or perpetrators of sexual violence and a significant amount – even the majority in some places – fetishize youth and teen women. For Americans, it really is more reputation destroying to have done queer shit than to be a rapist pedophile (this includes “ephebophiles,” sorry).

They’re not going to get mad about racism and genocide, it isn’t even going to be on their minds because they don’t actually oppose the underlying values that facilitate those policies currently. They will make a show of anti-racism and constitution protection so long as it remains a rhetorical response exclusively.

Lookit that, ephebophile strat went mainstream.