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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Admittedly I do have the bias of experience which could blind me to the difficulties, when I phrased my first two sentences as questions they were genuine questions. Between work and personal life I must’ve installed Linux in some form at least 200 times over the last 20 years, so I’m not most users.

    I’ve also not used Windows in many years, the last I think was when I had to use Windows 7 for work about 10 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to get it to do what I want. If it’s improved then it’s improved.

    On the other hand a novice user can ask somebody to install Linux for them, what about that? That’s what my non-techy parents have done, and it’s easier for them to use Linux (they say so) and easier for me to provide technical support for them.

    Also yes, avoid Nvidia.


  • How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?

    I’m talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, …

    Is proprietary software any easier than that though? Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?

    Whereas with Fedora my experience is more or less install it and forget it.

    The “it’s easier” argument for proprietary software I think died at least 15 years ago.

    Choice of applications is a different argument.





  • Very anecdotal but I’ve asked my normie friends about Threads and they think it was hardly ever a thing. It may be 100 million active users but that’s still a small percentage of the population it’s available to, and given it’s for profit that might not even be enough to sustain it. With Mastodon and Lemmy it’s quality over quantity, I’m happy to be smaller, just hope we can keep Threads out if they last long enough to get around to federating.




  • I remember being told off by a moderator in the 90s for not writing full-sentence replies. You can’t even imagine that today. Of course back then, as the video touches on, if you didn’t like the culture or policies of a forum you just moved to another one, there were no cries of “censorship” because you choose where you want to be.

    But I think that makes a good point, in the past people could choose whether they wanted to go on a forum for serious discussion, or a different forum for more casual low-effort posting. These days all these different “posting cultures” are forced to be together and end up annoying each other.



  • Interesting video, makes a lot of sense. Just a couple of things to add:

    In the old days of forums it’s worth remembering that people on the internet had more in common with each other than they do today - i.e. generally they were people who were in to computers.

    What really gets me down these days is the extremely low-effort of posting everywhere you go. I think that partly comes from the impersonal nature of online communication. Nobody knows who anyone is any more.

    I agree it would be better to go back to independent message boards but it’s a shame there’s no “call to action” - it would be nice but how do we get people to do it? This is a popular YouTube channel, it would be great if it started some kind of ball rolling.