Enshitification commencing in 10… 9…

It runs my TV too, which is a 7-year-old Dell All-in-One touch screen that works great.

But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.

That doesn’t sound right.

Start with Linux Mint. I’ve helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”).

Mint.

I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.

Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad’s been running it for five years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”). It was also my son’s first OS when he was about 8.

In fact, my wife and I already have a self hosted LubeLogger.

I just donated money to her campaign.

I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.

Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

Jokes on them, I don’t keep shit in ~/Documents, all my goodies are on a network share mounted at ~/Netstore

There’s a learning curve, but if you’re familiar with WAF’s it’s not hard.

If you want to DIY something, I have a bash script that builds OpenResty with NAXSI from source. Most of the web apps I write anymore are actually in Lua, for OpenResty, maybe with an API written in something else. But I also help other members of my team deploy their Node and Python apps and stuff, and I always just park those behind OpenResty with NAXSI, just doing a standard nginx reverse proxy.

Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.

Posting this here again. If we want to solve problems, we need to understand their cause:

This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.

• People are like “Don’t they understand that it’s a war?”
• Most of these people think we’re idiots for thinking of it as war.
• Their high spending donors think we’re idiots for thinking of it as a war.
• They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can “get on with business.”
• They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).
• They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).

My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.

• “This will all blow over.”
• “You just watch, the system will slow all of this down.”

See, it’s not just our “elected dems in office,” who don’t seem to get it, it’s the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the “elected dems in office,” because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that’s why we keep seeing it.

EDIT:

The only way we’ll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They’re not “spineless cowards,” they just DON’T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people’s highest values are

• Stability.
• Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn’t really effect them that much).
• Maintaining their comfy “compassionate upper class” culture.

They DO genuinely care about

• Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
• Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn’t really cost them anything).
• Sound fiscal policy.
• Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
• They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they’re able to do because they’re rich / influential.
• On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.

Faced with chaos and instability they will

• Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things “back to normal.”
• Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
• Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to “find their center.”
• Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).

Importantly,

• They DO NOT see you as being “like them,” “their people,” or “part of their culture.” They’re actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
• They usually honestly think that that’s because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don’t think they OWE you anything.
• When I say culture, I’m not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I’m talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
• They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
• They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for “the good they’re doing in the world” and “how they were able to help people” the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
• This doesn’t mean they’re bad people or lack compassion for you.

When we’re asking our congressmonsters to fight, we’re asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT’S why they’re angry.

They’re NOT cowards. They just don’t actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren’t in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.

EDIT:

People who want to just STOP VOTING DEM, like this will do anything other than further degrade the world as you shit more ineffectual, inactive anger into it…

NO. Let me be very clear: Evidence shows you are JUST MAKING THE PROBLEM WORSE. Not liking it doesn’t make it not true. We need to find dems, especially state and local, who come from a different background and support those people. You could BE one of those people instead of whining on the internet.

See, these people I’m talking about here --^ will ALWAYS conclude that they lost because they were too far left and lost the moderate vote. Their political consultants will ALWAYS tell them they lost because they ran too far left. The DNC will tell them they lost because they ran too far left. And they will get feedback FROM THEIR PEERS (that is, other neoliberal rich people) that they lost because they ran too far left. Isn’t that a shame? Isn’t that such a bummer? That is who they will listen to, not your thrown away vote, not your abdicated power, not your hipster ass nihilism, but at least you have your fucking principals to keep you warm at night, as Palestinian children die, migrant families are locked in cages and Christian politicians look for ways to charge women who have abortions with murder. That all can’t possibly be partly your fault, can it?

That’s why I say above, we have to STOP ELECTING DEMS from that demographic if we want change. We can’t pressure those people into changing, they won’t. They are who they are, they do what they do. They’re richer than you, they think they know more than you and they’re not going to listen to you. We have to replace them.

But WHEN YOU DON’T VOTE FOR THEM WHEN YOU HAVE NO OTHER OPTIONS, you JUST EMPOWER REPUBLICANS. And Republicans are ACTUALLY stupid, evil AND crazy.

You can’t create change by not voting, and you can do nothing but harm by encouraging others not to vote or to throw their votes away on a third party. We have First Past The Post voting. Do you see it going anywhere? Are YOU doing anything to make it go away? No? Then shut the fuck up about your third parties and not supporting dems. You have no logical leg to stand on. At BEST you have gravely miscalculated the situation and failed to understand the math at work. At BEST!

Get out there and support DIFFERENT dems. And if those dems don’t win… vote AGAINST Republicans. PLEASE.

https://runforsomething.net/ or shut the fuck up. You are wrong in a stupid, destructive way, LITERALLY like climate deniers. There’s no point in arguing with them and I’m done arguing with you.

I know a guy who worked on Unix in the '80s and he is very clear that Linux / MacOS are just Unix.

We should all remember that this stuff is fringe until it’s not.

This is something I wrote on a recent post. I think it’s something that we should help as many people as possible understand:

This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.

• People are like “Don’t they understand that it’s a war?”
• Most of these people think we’re idiots for thinking of it as war.
• Their high spending donors think we’re idiots for thinking of it as a war.
• They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can “get on with business.”
• They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).
• They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).

My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.

• “This will all blow over.”
• “You just watch, the system will slow all of this down.”

See, it’s not just our “elected dems in office,” who don’t seem to get it, it’s the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the “elected dems in office,” because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that’s why we keep seeing it.

EDIT:

The only way we’ll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They’re not “spineless cowards,” they just DON’T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people’s highest values are

• Stability.
• Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn’t really effect them that much).
• Maintaining their comfy “compassionate upper class” culture.

They DO genuinely care about

• Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
• Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn’t really cost them anything).
• Sound fiscal policy.
• Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
• They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they’re able to do because they’re rich / influential.
• On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.

Faced with chaos and instability they will

• Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things “back to normal.”
• Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
• Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to “find their center.”
• Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).

Importantly,

• They DO NOT see you as being “like them,” “their people,” or “part of their culture.” They’re actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
• They usually honestly think that that’s because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don’t think they OWE you anything.
• When I say culture, I’m not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I’m talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
• They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
• They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for “the good they’re doing in the world” and “how they were able to help people” the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
• This doesn’t mean they’re bad people or lack compassion for you.

When we’re asking our congressmonsters to fight, we’re asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT’S why they’re angry.

They’re NOT cowards. They just don’t actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren’t in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.

I’m not going to spend more time on this today, but to be clear, I don’t think you’re a bad person or my enemy or your heart is in the wrong place. Just that this strategy is in a very counterproductive direction. <3

Let me take you one further: as long as we continue supporting the Democratic party at all, we will never have representatives that care for us.

I actually strongly disagree and think this is a super counter productive (and even dangerous) perspective. We need to change the two party system, I absolutely agree, but the political machinery in this country is basically engineered to create a two party system and abandoning the Dems is abandoning your seat at the table. Do I want to rebuild that machinery? Yes. Absolutely. Should we smash it and replace it with something better? 100%. Can we actually accomplish that by abandoning Dems? Not realistically. It’s a pipe dream.

All what you’re advocating for will accomplish, with the current balance of things as they are, is the further empowerment of Republicans. You’re like those Muslims that refused to vote for Kamala over Palestine and now Trump is giving Netanyahu all the guns he wants and talking about annexing Gaza. Those voters hold some responsibility for that outcome, as do people who speak as you do.

I’m not going to spend a bunch of time and energy arguing about this right now. I’ve said my piece (and doubt I’m going to change your mind, but this perspective needs to be responded to). Just abandoning the Dems is abandoning ANY meaningful seat you had at the political table for the sake of making a what amounts to an impotent and empty statement at the end of the day. HATING that fact to the point of not being able to process it or engage with it doesn’t make it not true.

They know it’s bad, and stupid and insane. But it’s not really directly impacting anyone that they know, or their standard of living. Yeah it might impact their businesses, but it’s not going to put most of them out of business. And the effects of destroying all of these government services haven’t even begun to be felt.

So they just can’t relate to it has anything other than some annoying chaos that will all pass and things will get back to normal. And in the meantime all these young progressives want to make things even more chaotic! How is this helping? If you want to change things, go to your local Congress person’s fundraiser dinner like a normal person.

“Yeah, bad things are happening to people, who aren’t me or my friends, isn’t that a shame? Isn’t that just dreadful? This is all such insanity! Oh well, The Judsons invited us to their lake this weekend. Do you want to come? Your sister will be there.”

       -literally my family

Why are we even giving her attention?