Océane

Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it’s hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won’t tell people they’ll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won’t understand.

The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren’t up to date yet, and won’t be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I’m not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren’t FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let’s backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we’ll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we’ll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn’t vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

Simply put, if you want to install Linux you’re gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn’t paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).

As a CEO you may either attract more contents creators by paying them more or by lowering the quality of your editorial curation. It means you may either risk bankruptcy or knowingly foster depression at a global scale, unless like Mozilla’s Pocket you chose to piggyback on a decentralized model and have no skin in the game.

People have brought up Kendrick Lamar but I’m sorry, he’s never been recommended by my partner’s Spotify account. Not even once.

Some people recommend dual booting. I recommend having at least one cheap SBC in your home that’s dedicated to running Linux, and eventually to keep Windows on big enough machines for professional work, video games, and so on.

But the kids? Sure, they should run Linux, unless specified otherwise by their schools, until they’re old enough to decide by themselves.

I’d encourage you to push for free software if you’re stuck on Windows, but that’s another issue, I just think you might keep this machine on Windows and install Linux on a lowtech computer. It depends on what you need Linux for but with my eeePC the only bottleneck is the web.

Try spending 5-7 hours a day, for years, on a stupid website and you’ll figure it out.

I’m speechless with the way this community, not just you, has reacted – i.e. sure, I’m sorry for the leaps in my reasoning, but it precisely was the point.

Hi, sorry I was logged out due to 2FA, and I didn’t really try to log back until now.

I agree about the “unusual leap of contextual logic made to connect Twitter to Emacs”. For my defense, repeating the same idea over and over is exhausting, and this is precisely how social media addicts use microblogging.

I don’t have the time to answer right now, I know from experience it would take several A4 pages, but thank you for the kind answer.

It’s free software, funded by donations. Anyway, no, not where I live, and I’m autistic, you’re comparing the way I communicate with an ad.

Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.

Whereas Twitter isn’t meant for most people’s use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what’s happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.

Do you realize that calling it “Koscher” implies that any billionaire would secretly be a Jew? It’s antisemitic propaganda.

Anyway, I don’t think you got me. I implied that I was plugging peripherals on my Raspberry Pi, working on my university campus with better ergonomics than on a laptop.

A Raspberry Pi. I bought it out of a whim and now I use it as a portable desktop computer, I can use Alpine Linux with my files and my setup on virtually any system that doesn’t whitelist MAC addresses.

Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software, I feel like I’m breaking the law.