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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • Bill Gates has made anti-knowledge sharing his lifelong legacy, from crushing OpenGL by bribing game developers not to build in it, to pushing the US gov’t to give away COVID vaccines to poor countries rather than making the data available so they could make their own. His influence in the industry towards proprietary and closed source code is unmatched. Like, we all love the nerd jumping over the computer with the goofy smile but that dude is a piece of shit.

    My point was that if we (you!) were able to level the windows/Linux gaming playing field before he died, that would make him mad, and make me happy.












  • I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don’t think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:

    1. I was just rebutting that person’s claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don’t; physicality requires resources that “digitality” doesn’t.

    2. I feel like you might’ve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.


  • First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it’s physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

    Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value

    Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album’s reach was extended.

    Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don’t approach their subscription that way - you don’t subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let’s be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.

    As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can’t correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the “content providers” (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.

    This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they’re having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions’ profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film’s profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?

    It’s a shitty situation, and I don’t know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn’t whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I’m just going to step outside the market for a bit.

    I’m not living in some dream world where piracy doesn’t reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it’s just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their “line not go up” on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.

    Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.



  • I mean, if this is a package manager challenge then a distro is just a package manager

    And in a lot of ways, it kind of is - now that most distros are using systemd and most distros have all the same stuff in the repos, a distro - in the sense of how different they feel to use - is basically just swapping package managers.

    (Distro maintainers, don’t misunderstand! You folks do way more than just zip up a package manager! Your work is crazy hard and we appreciate you!)

    So if a distro is more than just the package manager, what would that mean:

    1. Default desktop env; obv a big one for Fedora since RH drives both Fedora and Gnome;
    2. Community; another big one for Fedora since it has one and it’s a pretty great one
    3. …? Idk this isn’t like an essay I had planned, I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head ;)

    Point one, yes, OP has betrayed the spirit of Fedora because Gnome isn’t featured in the screenshot - but if we didn’t know better, there’s not actually much in the screenshot that can’t be done in Gnome

    Point 2: any time you’re using a smaller-community WM or DE, yes, you’re going to have to reach beyond the distro’s community - but for a lot of stuff, you’re still in the Fedora community;

    Point 2.5 - and, when posting screens to unixporn communities, the F is what matters; it’s representation, it’s demonstrating what’s possible, it’s showing that Fedora is a viable choice for new ricers that aren’t aware that you can rice any distro; and - maybe most important - it’s cool - OP is literally improving fedora’s reputation by posting something awesome that uses it

    This isn’t a comment to argue, it’s meant as a discussion - what would make it more fedora-ish and less of a package manager challenge?



  • That’s basically been my path - I started with Ubuntu in 2007, then Mint, then Fedora, then BLAG, Crunchbang, god knows how many others, and then finally, Arch. After being on arch for a few years, I switched to Antergos, and endeavorOS when Antergos was retired (rip in peace, I loved it).

    I’ve been steady with Arch/Antergos/EndeavourOS for the better part of a decade and I have no inclination to hop any more.