Excessive for my threat model, one more thing which could break something (even if by no fault of its own).

I like it as a concept, but many of my devices don’t use it.

Send an email to their webmaster if you haven’t already. The more of us, the better.

Why not Debian directly instead of MX?

Debian requires more config out-of-the-box to get a nice desktop/laptop experience. This is ready to go.

I’m only used it as installed onto a USB, and in fact I chose it for that reason, so my experience isn’t ideal because of that USB drive speed but it’s a great lightweight OS that looks nice out of the box. Lightweight doesn’t have to look clunky or feel strange or unfeatured. I recommend it if there are reasons that lightweight is important (old hardware, low-end hardware, portable OS, … )

Defenestrit

Hopefully this one directly shoves the electons. I’m scared of society’s DHMO dependency.

It seems to me like many have arrived from huge mainstream sites and don’t realize that the fedi is actually pretty big. There are many thousands of us, just look at this community’s stats alone!

When you’ve explored beyond the core of the internet and found websites where there truly are dozens of you, it’s much more calm and communal (or as screentime enthusiasts would call it, slow and ded). I actually was on Lemmy back when there were mere hundreds of us, when many were yearning for the day when reddit would shoot its own foot and bring people here. So I’m very grateful that there aren’t dozens of us! Welcome!

That’s it, I’m deleting the internet

Oh hey, my anniversary is coming up.

For base daily driver on desk and lap, just a stable standard beginner friendly distro. I’ve customized it a lot, added custom hotkey scripts here and there, but it’s so close to base that a stranger could use it. VMs for anything specialist, a couple of portable USB distros for presentation/demo/one-purpose OS environments, but for the most part I’ve just kept it simple and clean.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

That’s a good point. If we’ve reached a point where the basic experience Just Works while solving real Windows issues (incl updates and performance), then it’s going to get word-of-mouth praise instead of complaints. And if regular people start hearing about Linux stuff improving their computer, it’s going to mean far more than my ideological rants about owning your own tools and community created software.

Thanks. Lots of the documentation was difficult to parse for a beginner so your explanation of those features is very helpful.

Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

If you have a bit of time, please collect evidence of when that targeting and harassment happens. I’ve already seen a few accounts using low-quality /c/MoG posts to try and demonize .ml, lemmygrad and hexbear so it’s useful to have a post or posts to point to showing that it’s a harassment circlejerk, not the credible spectators they pretend to be.

First things first, I do not defend nutomic’s ignorant transphobia. It’s unfortunate to see how legitimate complaints about capitalist exploitation of trans issues (rainbow capitalism) can be wrongfully misdirected into reactionary anti-trans victim-blaming. Their personal writings on trans issues are harmful.

And I don’t think Lemmy really is defined by the politics of those instances anymore. Their politics are largely optional, especially now that many other instances have grown. These days, I see more red-scare posters than tankies, who regularly inflame off-topic instance drama whenever they see a username from one of the instances.

The cm0002 compilation linked is a list of trolling strawman claims, many are either completely made up or shamelessly misframed. I’ll pick a few representative ones to talk about, obviously there’s too many to give proper attention to in one reply:

• The first one: [Dessalines:] “Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan”: Yes, this is a true claim from cm0002 and a fair position from Desallines to hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini#Second_World_War . Openly-fascist groups like Azov Battalion maintain a strong presence in Ukrainian nationalism, so the preservation of this slogan isn’t a historical oddity.

• ^^ We also see cm0002 list another post of a user being banned for saying “Slava Ukraini”, which cm0002 knows is considered by lemmy.ml staff as being a fascist slogan, but instead knowingly misframes the ban as “Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban”, which simply isn’t the case. fwiw, I do believe the two devs, in the busyness, do a terrible job of explaining their perspectives in ban messages, using quick messages like “orientalism” or “Rule 1” which will just puzzle someone who doesn’t understand how what they said was offensive.

• [Dessalines:] “The BBC is not a credible news source”: I don’t unconditionally agree with that as a general statement, but in the context of some political topics, this is a fair position. They’re a state-sponsored channel, and like all countries, the British state has biases too. Here is one case of MI5 state intervention into the BBC ongoing for over 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“Christmas_tree”_files .

• “[Davel:] Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo”: The report is right there to read, it’s not claiming “misinfo”. Spreading political beliefs is not against the rules of that community or the instance, why should it be? The point of thinking about politics is to improve the world. cm0002 just assumes saying some basic positive things about countries they don’t like should be banned. That is a chauvinistic belief, and them posting about it this way is propaganda in itself. Yet we can assume someone reporting their post for propaganda would get a similarly dismissive reaction.

• [Cowbee:] "Propaganda is good actually”: - and then you click on the link and now it’s changed to the lesser strawman - “Propaganda can be good!”… cm0002 is, again, making false statements to fabricate an extreme position out of some pretty boring factual claims, and then points to them and says “Look at all this extremism!”. Just look at the comments on that post, even they’re saying Cowbee is right, and that’s a politically-motivated circlejerk in a circlejerk community. cm0002 is inventing and exaggerating to create drama, and in my experience, drama spreaders are much more effective at driving people away than unpopular communities.

As a side note, and I want to point out that that I’m commenting about media propaganda practices and not taking a side (I support the working class in both Ukraine and Russia, I would pop champagne if Putin and their friends were shot tonight, and the same goes for Russian mercenaries, the Azov fascists and the US vultures prolonging their proxy war at the expense of Ukrainian people), but it’s always puzzled me that the phrase “illegal invasion” caught on. What the hell does a “legal invasion” look like? Laws are written by the victor, there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking law. 🏴‍☠️💿

[This user claims to have blocked the instance I registered on, so I assume they won’t read this]

Lemmy is what it is because of the beliefs and values of instances like lemmy.ml. There have been many other attempts at creating reddit alternatives, decades of them, from voat to raddle. The lead developers have clear values which guided Lemmy into being a better platform than reddit and the other reddit-like forums - free-and-open source, anti-commercial, decentralized, and counter to the pro-US media hegemony. These are not incidental, values aren’t a syncretic pick-and-choose buffet! They are a result of the socialist ideologies of the admins of each of those instances, and how they have been applied to material reality.

And keep in mind that these instances aren’t some outsider aberration, they were the three largest Lemmy instances until 2023, they remain large and popular, and host popular active communities frequented by users of many other instances.

And while Zedestrian perceives lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and Hexbear as problematic (and I have my criticisms of each of them), from my perspective, many of the big liberalist instances are far more problematic, tolerating right-wing bigots, allowing obvious pro-US think-tank propaganda accounts, and banning users from advocating for action (including, where necessary, violence) against the ruling class destroying us and our planet. That’s a big reason why many left, for were banned from, reddit. Should lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works therefore be removed, for being problematically close to the harmful behaviors of reddit.com that many of us are trying to escape? That’s a serious reputational liability too, it can drive users away if they can’t find the places they want to join.

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

Yep, I’ve also gotten responses pretty reliably from professional artists, including those I’d assumed would be far too busy to answer (including the directors and writers of famous tv shows).

Are you looking for the Animal Smoothness Scale?

On the topic, I’ve been seeing plenty of war-hawk think-tank accounts who only post propaganda, like:

• Scotty@scribe.disroot.org
• Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org
• randomname@scribe.disroot.org
• 0x815@feddit.org (and all their alt-accounts, including 0x815@feddit.de and thelucky8@beehaw.org )

They are clearly not involved in our communities.

I wonder if this has any practical benefits over running a Windows OS in a VM…

edit: piping, or easier collaboration between, Win32 and Linux programs could be an example. The creator mentions creative and gaming applications.