Mastodawn

i wish that YouTube had a parental controls category for Linux distro content (and wide market programming content, the "c++ is so much better" stuff) that is on by default.

no seriously. it rots the brain and creates a factional mindset and leads people to think that the point of it is having the Cool things without an actual use case, rather than being a tool to get things done. the part that should be cool is how it helps people using it to create things they're proud of.

i don't care what editor you use. i don't care what distro you use. it doesn't matter as long as it's helping you achieve your goals. i can have frustrations with the systemic social effects of some things (Microsoft monopolizing language servers or whatever) but that's not on the people using it! i can think that a distro does many things poorly without it being a value judgement on anyone using it.

i should not be able to notice that someone watches this stuff by talking to them and noticing their attitudes; the contempt culture and machoism in all of it has such nasty externalities to people who work on or use the subjects of it. we shouldn't teach new people like this!

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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 5d ago

@leftpaddotpy this ties into my long-running distaste for the way free software has largely turned into a weird cliquey dogmatic vision of prescriptive computing, the dominance of the reductionist philosophy that open software inherently has positive value simply because it is open (by the specific definitions of an ordained group), the resulting zealous self-delusion about the fitness of the systems for purpose as tools, and the outwardly user-hostile behaviour it engenders.

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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 5d ago

@leftpaddotpy I have a lot of complicated feelings about the whole thing, but to distil it down into a soundbite: it feels weird to have a culture of free software that doesn't unconditionally respect the user's freedom to choose what software they want to use.

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systemd-jaded 5d ago

@gsuberland yes exactly. i dislike the behaviour of the gnu project in restricting what people can do with their computer by making it deliberately a user hostile pain in the ass to run proprietary software. the point of all of this is that people can do what they want with their computer.

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jpl8

@leftpaddotpy @gsuberland that’s always turned me off a bit too. It feels a bit too prescriptive and holier-than-thou. I really like how the gentoo people handle it by just letting users select exactly what licenses software is allowed to have on their install[1], from FSF-approved licenses to whatever they want. It is fundamental pillar of the gentoo philosophy to just let users do what they want to do[2].

(It’s kind of why gentoo is no longer a source-only distro, by adding convenient support for binary packages. Users didn’t want to compile, and so the devs didn’t force it.)

Your machine, your choice.

License groups - Gentoo wiki