> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
That's pretty much it. A lot of the people I see using a BSD these days do so because they always have and they prefer what they know, which is fine, or they just want to be contrarian.
Realistically, aside from edge cases in hardware support, you can do anything you want on any modern *nix. There's not even as much of a difference between distros as people claim. All the "I want an OS that gets out of my way" and similar reasons apply to most modern well-maintained distros these days. It's more personality and familiarity than anything objective.
I went from Slackware in 1994 to Red Hat in 1998 to Fedora when they split into Fedora and RH Enterprise. Every 2 or 3 years I will install a different distro in a VM and see "Okay, now I see what it's about." But I have no interest in switching as long as Fedora does everything I need. I don't really understand the people that distro hop. I just assume they are really young and I have work to do and a family to take care of.
I get that. I stopped using Slack around...not sure, maybe 2007 or so when I tried to do my normal minimal setup and mplayer wouldn't run without Samba installed, and the community was hostile to anyone who didn't do the recommended full install. I never wanted it a a feature complete desktop but that's the market they tried to focus on.
Took me a while to settle on Alpine after trying Arch and Void, but I can't imagine why I would ever leave unless they change something drastic.
Not even remotely true. Some of the biggest changes recently have been driven by people trying to use Linux on their Apple Silicon. Or to play games. Or RISC-V chipmakers.
You're right - they allow additions of things like drivers that sit in isolation. But what about decisions with a tradeoff that favors one application or the other?
I'm not sure what culture or friends you live around, but to believe everyone has thieved is disturbing. What other ills may you believe everyone does, and so do flippantly?
It's literally all downsides, which you (not you personally) agreed to because of ego, thinking you can go back to a time when 'the sun never sets', when in actuality you've hastened much longer nights.
Sgt did personally agree to it because of ego. They cite wanting the UK to be a superpower again as one of the benefits of Brexit. He doesn't seem to understand the position Britain is in now.
> It's funny how people say that: "You'll get more conservative as you grow older". So far that hasn't happened.
It's not from 20 to 40, it's from like 50 to 70, as peoples critical thinking skills go and they become more gullible, more susceptible to manipulation and misinformation. It remains to be seen if it will happen with a tech savvy elderly population though.
No; what you describe is certainly a phenomenon that exists, but it's not primarily what people talk about when they say that you'll get more conservative when you get older.
IME, what they mean is two different things:
First, the fact that it can be hard to keep up with change—technological, cultural, all types—for several decades straight. When the world changes dramatically between when you're 10 and when you're 30, and then again between when you're 30 and when you're 50, it can be really hard to be willing to keep changing with it. New things become the enemy. Why in my day, we paid with credit cards by running an imprinter over them with a big ka-chunk, and we liked it! None of this newfangled chip and pin garbage. There are too many chips in things anyway! Etc.
And second, the fact that, before my generation, it was basically a guarantee that as you went from 20, to 40, to 60, you would be getting meaningfully wealthier, and as such, identifying with the financial political issues of your new socioeconomic class...and picking up their cultural politics by osmosis.
But two major things are breaking these assumptions.
The second thing above no longer holds. Starting with younger Gen X and elder Millennials, we just haven't had the opportunities to grow our wealth that our parents and grandparents did at the same ages. We're still identifying with the younger people who don't and can't own homes.
And there's been a tectonic cultural shift during our lifetimes, bringing queer people out into the light in ways that they had never been allowed to be before. Obergefell v Hodges broke open the closet and let gay people come out, and the rest of the queer community has been following them ever since. For those of us who genuinely believe in loving our fellow human beings and giving them true equality, that makes it much, much harder to accept a status quo (or reversions to an earlier one) that denies them those rights, simply because we all really know they're there in a way most of us didn't before.
> No; what you describe is certainly a phenomenon that exists, but it's not primarily what people talk about when they say that you'll get more conservative when you get older.
Strongly disagree. I think it's exactly what is being referred to most of the time.
> Why in my day, we paid with credit cards by running an imprinter over them with a big ka-chunk, and we liked it! None of this newfangled chip and pin garbage. There are too many chips in things anyway! Etc.
Right, this comes down to a decrease in critical thinking ability.
> Starting with younger Gen X and elder Millennials, we just haven't had the opportunities to grow our wealth that our parents and grandparents did at the same ages. We're still identifying with the younger people who don't and can't own homes.
Right, but this has nothing to do with going conservative, but in needing to overhaul the system that allows hording wealth.
Never is a long time but doesn't look like it's happening in a hurry at any rate. The UKs rise was based on leading the industrial revolution but it's a bit lagging in the AI one. The few leading companies we produce like Deepmind and ARM get bought by the Americans.
The UK has less chance at becoming a superpower than Canada or Australia, neither of which are in the race. If the EU becomes more cohesive, it might, and then the UK will be the smaller country allying itself with a superpower for protection.
The real problem is that for >10 years the a green-left coalition was in power, at least in most of Europe and immigration was greatly encouraged because it would provide clear economic benefits for everyone.
There's many stories, but let's call this the average story: "Immigration brings growth, growth advances everyone".
Well, it doesn't, at least not at the moment. Oops.
Now we can argue why, of course, but a certain amount of backlash was to be expected. It was clear for 20 years or more exactly what would happen when "the alternative" to the prevailing "left+green" coalitions gains power. To an extent I don't understand how anybody can claim to be surprised.
Also, in a democracy I would think that arguing that "the uneducated masses" are wrong is a quick path to irrelevancy. That, by the way, is exactly how we want the system to work. The system needs to work well for the uneducated masses. Figure it out, or accept that the other guys are going to win the election.
> Maybe, but the uneducated masses shouldn't be making these decisions, which is why democracy is the real problem here.
Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?
... which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way. Because if that's the case the only outcomes are bad, and worse.
> Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?
I think a superior system to the one we have now is one where progressive values are embedded in from the start. Objectively, they are superior positions that can be backed up by data.
> which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way
These people routinely vote against their own interests. They shouldn't have a say.
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