What did you think about the point in the article suggesting millions of people dying on South America caused the earth to cool down due to reforestation absorbing more green house gas. I find this hard to believe.
There was a noticable (and well recorded) change in the climate for awhile when Ghenghis Khan went on his rampage. And he was a lot less effective at killing people than novel old world diseases.
I "belong" to a society? That suggests that a group owns me. Hrm I'm probably nit picking, but the idea of a society owning me isn't something I agree with. Also I'm free to leave.
This is linguistic nonsense on a par with disliking the phrase "my spouse" because it implies ownership. You can easily talk of "my country" or "my university" without claiming ownership, just as one can talk of "a sense of belonging" or of "belonging to a club" without feeling owned. Words have several meanings.
Instead of assuming the person you're chatting with is talking about slavery, and then when they clarify they're not talking about slavery, and you saying that it could be about slavery, you could just as easily say, "oh I misunderstood you". Sometimes humans have misunderstandings. Languages are messy. Just let it go.
They didn't misunderstand, they challenged the phrasing. Some people believe that words have power and language matters(or at least are entertaining the idea).
I haven't made any assumptions at all, reread what I said, then reread the replies. First one is a personal attack about being libertarian (an assumption), second one starts off as an attack too. I expressed a preference, in a light hearted way, hence the "hrm...". I come here for good faith debate and I'm genuinely grateful for it (I've said as much in other comments).
>> the idea of a society owning me isn't something I agree with.
Your agreement is irrelevant. Have you registered for selective service? Paid taxes? Have a drivers license? Check youtube for "sovcit traffic stop" to see what happens when people think they can live independent from the rest of society. The Amish must obey traffic laws just like everyone else.
>> Also I'm free to leave.
Nope. Many an american has fled to canada to avoid taxes/draft/jail. They are caught eventually. Citizenship is not property. You cannot just set it aside when you dont agree with its obligations. There is a process for leaving. It isnt short, easy, cheap or in any way guaranteed.
all rights are provided by a state or hegemon. Some rights are harder to take away than others. Some are easier.
the hegemon does not need to be defined.
However I think it is way closer to their original vision than anything else, i.e. It is a lot like the 1980s computers, the magic they were trying to capture.
Clockwork Pi experience with the CM4 is not good. 10 months to ship. Horrible Wifi performance, can't hold a link, and it only has around 50 minutes of battery life. I regret my purchase and it's sitting in my rack next to a bunch of old ham radios.
Read this around 2007ish, shocked by what the previous labour government did, so I had zero hope this lot would be any different and it's worse than I thought possible.
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are.
I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.
I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.
I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.
Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:
I was answering with the idea in mind that this is "HackerNews" and most here are not "average" home users, but I see your point.
Does the average home user care about any of these complaints though? In my experience, they don't really, and I'm not even sure how many use desktop operating systems these days considering everything has shifted towards mobile.
I'm not "pro" windows by the way. In fact if you look through my history, you'll see I resisted the change to Windows 10 and have tried migrating to Linux without luck. I would love to move away from Microsoft when given a realistic opportunity to do so. I loathe Microsoft trying to take up real estate within the private boundaries of my life. I just think some of these reported issues are widely exaggerated is all.
Ah ok I see, yeah for the hackernews crowd probably not an issue.
Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.
As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.
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