“Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union”
I only ever used Bitwarden after I switched from Dashlane and I couldn’t be happier. The Android app is incredible, it’s got a great browser extension and it syncs for free. If you don’t trust them to store your passwords on the cloud I understand that but I wouldn’t know what alternative to recommend.
It’s cliche to answer teacher but I think that’s where my skills would be best utilised. I have a passion for languages but teaching is such an alienating profession under capitalism, I don’t know if I could do it. Otherwise I’d love to do some translating work. But honestly, I would probably be happy doing whatever knowing it would serve the needs of the people at large and not just some fat cat capitalists.
In fact, Rosa Luxemburg made another great point here. Marxism should be treated as a living thing, at its best when it is interacting with the world, but all of the meaningful interactions of the past forty years have been Maoist actions. Marxism-Leninism and the respective, remaining ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organizations and parties have been caught-on-the-back foot, or docile, or lacking in direction, with few consequential actions taken, at best, and useless, irrelevant, if not outright misguided or wrong in many parts of the world at worst.
Marxism-Leninsm-Maoism has yet to produce a successful revolution, unless you are counting Nepal which I know you hate to talk about so let’s discard it. How can you look at what Marxist-Leninist countries have done over the past fifty years and say that Marxism-Leninism has not advanced? It has advanced greatly, but you just dismiss these advances as “revisionism”.
The evidence for the Marxist-Leninist position becoming increasingly correct is a few reddit posts and one excellent Roderic Day article. Lol. A lot of my pro-China comrades hate Duterte and support Maoist revolutions in India and the Philippines, as do I, not even Joma hates China as much as online Maoists do.
This chasing of ideological purity and discarding real-world information is undialectical.
I would like to stay here and work with the movement to improve things for the mass of people in the country. I’m pretty well off, so I’m not concerned with improving my life. I am however, a settler, so it doesn’t feel like my decision to make and if people tell me that me leaving is necessary for their liberation, I will go.
What this challenge has shown me is that attitude matters. When I switched to Linux in late 2020, the reason I switched was 1) Windows was pissing me off 2) Linux excited me in a way I cannot really explain. To this day, Linux makes using my computer fun. When I run into a problem on Windows my reaction is “Oh god, not again, how can a billion dollar company fuck up so badly?” whereas when I run into the occasional problem on Linux my interest is immediately peaked, because it teaches me more about the system and there’s guaranteed to be a permanent solution for it online at least in my experience. So, yeah, Linux is definitely not for everyone. If you want to get away from Microsoft for privacy or ideological reasons, it’s great. But right now, I don’t think that’s a priority for most people and asking them to abandon Windows which works for them, in favour of something they don’t understand and need to realearn is a little ridiculous.
I think the solution would not be to end fragmentation and standardize everything but rather to have one “silver bullet” distribution for those who don’t like to tinker and don’t care too much about what’s going on under the hood while the rest continues to use their preferred distro and tools. I guess Ubuntu is trying to be that, maybe SteamOS 3.0 can be that for gamers but I’m not holding my breath. At that point, I do have to wonder what people hope to get from Linux. If they want something that “just works” Windows or a console will always be better - I’m not saying that because I hate seeing the Linux community grow, I just don’t see Linux ever getting on the same level as Windows for gaming specifically.
I’m far from an elitist, heck I’m very much a Linux amateur, but the reason I love Linux is because I love learning, it makes using my computer fun in a way that Windows just doesn’t for me and so I’m willing to put up with the downsides. If you’re coming at it with the mindset that “I just wanna play games” and aren’t willing to work through some bullshit, as sad as it is to say, I just don’t think Linux will ever get there.
What’s the best alternative? Jami seems good and I generally trust the FSF and I found Revolt which seems to basically aim to recreate all Discord features and is currently in public beta.
Baffling that the suggestion that maybe minorities being harassed/made to feel unsafe in the workplace might influence their performance and therefore the quality of open source software is so controversial.
Let me guess, you’re a white dude. We have the luxury of being able to ignore “politics”. For other people their existence is a political question and affects every aspect of their life. Maybe we should do something about that. But what do I know I’m just a snowflake who is offended by everything, right?
I like GNOME a lot (currently using Fedora GNOME with a bunch of extensions), but I’m eagerly awaiting the release of System76’s COSMIC since it seems like it’s basically GNOME with all the customisations I end up making anyway, and will be far more modular and customisable.