The issue arises when people disagree on what reality is.
When most Americans are running on pure ideology and a (quite unearned imho) sense of moral certainty and superiority, they assume their worldview is the objectively correct one, and everyone who disagrees with them is "a bigot."
Both sides of our divide have some psychotic people who do things like murdering people. But absent actually harmful acts like that, disagreeing with you doesn't make someone intolerant. It could be that your framing is wrong, or that there isn't one black-and-white objective universal right way of framing an issue.
Congratulations on writing the most servile corporate apologia I've seen all week. This is a masterpiece of Stockholm syndrome.
"Accountability means money and paperwork." Beautiful. Just beautiful. You know what else means money and paperwork? A protection racket. "Nice app you got there, shame if something happened to it before it reached customers. That'll be 30% please." But sure, let's call extortion "accountability" because Tim Apple said so.
Your driver signing example is chef's kiss levels of missing the point. Microsoft said "hey, sign your drivers so we know they're not malware" they didn't say "only drivers we approve can run, and also we get a cut." You're comparing a bouncer checking IDs to a mafia don enforcing territory. These are not the same thing.
And oh my god, the Nintendo argument. You're seriously holding up Nintendo's lockout chip as consumer protection? The same lockout chip they used to squeeze third-party developers, control game production, and maintain an iron grip on pricing? "Until Nintendo cleaned out the garbage" yeah, they cleaned it out alright, straight into their own pockets. The video game crash was caused by publishers like Atari flooding the market with garbage like E.T., not by independent developers needing more "accountability."
"The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction." Holy hell. You're not describing a security feature, you're describing a prison. You're literally fantasising about a world where every line of code needs corporate permission to execute. That's techno feudalism with RGB lighting.
This isn't about protecting anyone from bugs. It's about trillion-dollar companies convincing people like you that you need their permission to use the computer you bought. And somehow, SOMEHOW, you've decided this is good actually, and the 1980s with its freedom and innovation was the problem.
The fact that you think general-purpose computing is a "danger" that needs to be locked down says everything about how effectively these corporations have trained you to beg for your own chains.
> "The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction." Holy hell. You're not describing a security feature, you're describing a prison. You're literally fantasising about a world where every line of code needs corporate permission to execute. That's techno feudalism with RGB lighting.
Yeah. It's gonna suck for us but the consumer market will eat it up. An Xbox that runs Excel. It's not a fantasy. What do you think the Windows 11 hardware requirements were all about? It's Microsoft's way of getting people to get rid of their old PCs without the necessary security hardware, so that when Windows 12 comes out the PC will be a fully locked down platform.
Again, consumers ate up the NES. They ate up the iPhone. This happened partially because of, not in spite of, the iron grip the vendor had over the platform, because they came with a guarantee (a golden seal even, in Nintendo's case!) that no bad stuff would slip through. It filtered out a lot of good stuff, too, but the market has shown that's a price it's willing to pay for some measure of assurance that the bad stuff will be stopped at the source. It's a business strategy that works in the broader market, even though it harms techies. Techies are a tiny, tiny minority, and it's time they learned their place in the grand scheme of things.
Said no one ever. GNOME is barely a desktop at this point. You need buggy extensions just to restore basic functionality, which says everything. In many ways, GNOME has become the epitome of a FOSS misfire: opinionated to a fault, driven by a loud minority, and offering users less choice instead of more.
Plasma, on the other hand, has made huge strides in usability, performance, and overall polish. It feels modern, extensible, and genuinely user focused. If anything is going to be the future of the mainstream Linux desktop, it’s Plasma.
Most of the time I hear the “basic functionality” complaint about gnome it’s someone missing a start menu and taskbar. Which makes sense if you are a clicker stuck on the desktop paradigm introduced in the early 90s.
Gnome is very keyboard centric. If you actually take the time to learn it without relying on your mouse for everything it’s actually extremely efficient.
... and misses the fact that not every valid computer use is keyboard centric too.
Sometimes I use my mouse and I do not want to switch to the keyboard and no, my life is not about being most productive and about saving 1/10th of a second if I use the keyboard only (which isn't even possible). I'm human after all and not a machine. I like my mouse. I paid a fortune for it.
Edit:
And it doesn't matter if this is the old way of the 90s and not modern. Being modern/new is no virtue in itself.
I was a GNOME fan in the 00s, then I really liked Unity from Ubuntu, and now in the 2020s I have switched to KDE. KDE is super powerful but (as a technical person) easy to discover options. The basic sound/wifi/system stuff is really easy to access, the global search in the menu is wonderful.
Best part about Unity was that you could hold down the meta button, and it would reveal the cheatsheet for all the other window manipulation shortcuts.
BUT... the person above you did literally say they think GNOME is better and that's fine too.
I like plasma as well, my main complaints with it rn are
- configuring stuff like the task bar has always been buggy, the drag/drop frustratingly won't drop stuff in the right place, I've even had to completely log out to fix being locked in the editing mode earlier this year
- settings app goes deep and it makes it harder to find simple stuff. one example for my friends is when they wanted to turn on gsync/freesync, the toggle for it on gnome is right inside of refresh rate like you'd expect
- I hate to say this because I know it's gnome/gtk's fault, but apps on gnome look much more consistent for me than apps on plasma. gtk apps don't look good, qt apps don't look good, and plasma apps do look pretty good but they're in the minority. It has been a year since I've tried ricing KDE though, so I'd accept if this has gotten better
I don't totally agree with the extensions thing, the only one I use is quake terminal so that I can have ghostty pop up (since gnome doesn't support the protocol needed for that to work natively) and I consider myself a pretty technical user. Even on plasma I like a lot of the gnome apps like nautilus for being opinionated/polished. it's been a struggle to get a good feeling environment on plasma without a lot of tinkering (which to its credit, is doable!) whereas gnome feels pretty good ootb
yes. we have PCs. AFAIK, the cheapest PC that compares for my workflow is an EPYC/NUMA or another very expensive CPU/latency optimized server. We have a complex stack, with clients running unique queries that we can't predict and gigabytes loaded into RAM, L3 cache doesn't always save us. I haven't found another solution, I wish we could drop the Macs cause the OS is pretty awful.
We're using Macs as servers. But it's a small operation.
Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well.
Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.
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