From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.

So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.

Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.

I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.

Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.

Even if you’re right, those organizations still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing.

It’s not a quick solution, but the answer is more education about the space, so that there are more voices.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

+1 here for the arch recommendation as an ex ms sys op. Browsing their repos was outstanding for retooling, most of the config problems you hit are a great way into the ecosystem.

It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.

No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.

Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.

I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

Too many options to learn a new language.

If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.

It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.

Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.

Thank you for this, been hunting for a decent gesture typing option for awhile. Floris board had been decent, but the lack of actual suggestions was brutal to work around.

Things like this make me wish the traditionally anti government party wasn’t a bunch of loonies, because they’d be the ones pushing this to public conscious in a way that might move the needle.

I don’t doubt the intentions of (some) progressive members of government, but they’re outgunned and have a long list of priorities. Getting legislation to reverse this isn’t coming from corporatists, the infinite retention is going to seem like a feature to business.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

Thank you, added to the list. Gonna tear up some disks spinning up all these VMs.

I’m less worried on an intro to Arch than I am being able to just standardize on the same repos I’m already staring at when I inevitably have to answer questions over the phone. I know a few people like my dad (lapsed unix) who could afford to remember what it’s like outside of the walled garden, but too much friction is going to drive them off, ui or otherwise.

I actually started looking around for this myself as a way to recommend some easier intro points.

I’ll have to take a look at popos from the comments, but anyone have any experience with how well maintained Manjaro is these days?

I’d just like to have an honest conversation about the minimum standards every human being is entitled to, and then deliver and expand that, to everyone. These days I’m not picky how. The Nordic model is fine I guess, but it’s going to make compromises, and those aren’t always good ones. For instance I don’t think capital had any business being tied to necessities like food, but money is still the easiest way to ration it. UBI would be a decent start.

Im afraid technical models are in short supply, but if you want a philosophical model it’s the fundamental orientation towards positive social obligations I’m after. I can’t find too many recent examples, they tend to emerge out of conflicts. For one I’m sure doesn’t work everywhere due to unique circumstances check out Rojava, the grannies carry out patrol with AKs because that’s what their precarious society demands. The podcast ‘the women’s war’ was fascinating.

It’s funny you bring up the phone company, because it’s a great illustrator. It connected a country with subsides (sometimes over barbed wire), but in the end anything but it’s original purpose got locked behind bell labs iron grip until it was broken up. We wouldn’t have the modern Internet without both of those things happening, along with some Captain crunch whistles. Not every construction benefits from being totally institutionalized forever and ever amen.

The ideal is that everyone is fed, clothed, housed, receives medical care and is educated I’m totally open at this point on the how, all I know for certain is capitalism didn’t have the answer despite the greatest wave of prosperity the modern world has known.

it’s kinda like looking at some weird bizarro version of yourself finding your old handle.

If it’s also a zombie I’m more creeped out.

Welcome to the part of the Internet with a soul.

Seriously if you’re old enough to remember the Internet in terms of users weird passion projects you could do a lot worse than hanging off any part of activitypub.

There’s a lot more people than the old days with technical backgrounds, so there’s a lot more practical stuff.