I think their main point was that under capitalism, people will only ever be viewed for their economic utility - exploitation of affected groups is inherent to that reduction in a human’s rights and their contributions beyond menial labour.

So the take isnt defending the status quo, it’s saying how the best case scenario in an inherently soulless and uncaring system is to be paid cents on the dollar, and that more intervention to secure better pay, respect, and working rights, by definition, will always move further and further away from “capitalism” in it’s purest, most discriminatory forms.

lol have you ever tried to use windows baked-in support or MS forums with “expert answers”?

And low-powered doesnt even make sense, there is less bloat and bing/copilot shit dragging the system down, my system on the exact same specs and drive boots into Linux in like 1/10 the time as windows.

As for useful software packages, services like Flatpak, snap, and deb are a breeze -and not being able to use enshittified adobe software instead of their now better free and open source alternatives is ridiculous - Linux on any distro is what most developers would prefer and browsing is exactly the same. Hell, even gaming which was peoples major “missing piece” has made leaps and bounds last year alone.

thats a fun example and and all, but what situation does “MyAssMy$1” arise from? 😳

I agree with intentionally provocational speech hiding behind the ‘free speech’ disguise being stupid, but I think its also important to see a difference between racial slurs and discrimination based on things that people can’t change, versus legitimate criticism of religion - which, although not always easy to get out of (I.e. cults, trapped family members, cultural norms) I see as still a fundamentally voluntary behaviour that you can to an extent opt out of as a belief system, as opposed to discrimination on race, sex, disability, nationality, etc.

Now of course that doesnt mean I will go into religious buildings and shout obscenities or try to have edgy atheist rants at inoffensive elderly worshippers - but the saying that “your freedom ends where mine begins” holds true for me, and I won’t tolerate outward discrimination on religious grounds, the forcing of those belief systems inside secular systems like schools or courts or governments, and I think I’m well within my rights to criticise harmful and unacceptable behaviour undertaken for ‘religious’ grounds, which would otherwise be crimes or offences. (I.e. animal torture/sacrifice, child marriage, slavery etc.)

it’s for pixel phones only.

don’t worry, Im a native speaker and I also have no idea…

I mean, there’s no singular reason for Kamala’s loss - but abstentions over the middle east were still a reasonably noteworthy problem for the campaign.

With that being said… more broadly, people are just generally awful and a lot of people bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledging how backwards the majority really are.

Not sure what you mean, you can get a used Pixel 6a for 120 EUR, which will continue to get updates for another 2.5 years. Show me another phone with such a great value proposition. That’s exactly my point, outside of the EU and north america, you’re just very unlikely to find that scenario. I don’t want to doxx myself here, but the going rate for the phone you mentioned is at minimum 300 euro equivalent - comparable flagships significantly cheaper. I have nothing against Pixels specifically - before the re-brand, I had nearly every Google Nexus phone ever made, and they were all amazing. They’re just not acceptably priced in all markets for what they are, even used.

I’d argue however that there’s much more to android than either Pixels OR chinese spyware crap - Samsung, Sony, and LG aren’t always perfect, but often make very good products that if running a custom ROM, are every bit as secure as any pixel, while the hardware of pixels is generally a bit worse, but compensated for with better software optimisation. Buying into a false dichotomy that there is only one good android manufacturer puts us no further ahead than apple fanboys beholden to a largely good, but sometimes flawed ecosystem.

My ideal is that development can expand to other mainstream brands and OEMs, and that the interest in the graphene/ROM community picks up steam more broadly, rather than being siloed into pixels alone, and bound to the fate of google-specific hardware going forward.

graphene is ONLY for select Google pixel phones though. I wish this was made much clearer by the team and advocates.

its a real shame because pixels, although big in the USA are typically a minority of most android ecosystems elsewhere, and bootloader hijinks keep some perfectly capable phones from being easy to switch over to, even if they were supported.

Even on samsungs, which are much better for flashing than they used to be - my options on a year old flagship for a decent ROM are pathetic compared to the old days.

so I would really love to use graphene, and go back to an open source ROM without crap on it, but pixels are such a bottom tier phone for their price in a lot of places, as much as I really really want the project go gain traction for their transparency and objectives.

“it prevents some users’ preferred operation of using the mouse while its charging”

…

“It’s not a stupid decision”

the fact this is even being suggested shows a lack of familiarity with Australia’s position on asylum seekers.

People from war-torn countries or fleeing genocide are held in international-law-violating limbo for decades, there’s no chance in hell that somebody from a developed country is getting political asylum here, especially with the current poisoned rhetoric on immigration.

absolutely. I had tried Linux on various machines long ago but was one of the people that was put off by older distro’s learning curves - I’m now daily driving Linux on both my laptop and desktop and the main push for the switch is microsoft fucking around with settings, installing candy crush after updates (on a paid OS), adding more and more dumb, unsolicited, privacy invading AI bullshit with every feature update, and running like shit on a perfectly adequate machine.

Modern Linux, with flatpak support? I haven’t looked back once - had to help a friend fix something on a win11 desktop recently and was reminded of every reason I made the switch. Even if I had to jump in the terminal every day like long ago, it would still be worth it to not have bing, copilot, and edge rammed down my throat, whether I want them or not.

Windows is getting so shitty that completely non-technical users are tired of it… as soon as somewhat open minded users start to experiment and realise that Linux feature and UX parity has been achieved - I hope microsoft fucking collapses and we can all finally walk into the sunlight that open source OSes and software represent.

I mean, technically - the most secure option is irrevocably destroying the laptop everytime you have a break.

dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.

Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.

The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.

as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.

Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.

The issue is WhatsApp from a few years ago versus WhatsApp today - meta/favebook is probably the worst possible company to have bought it, their record on security, privacy, and features is horrible.

The app today is full of enshitification (meta ai being shoved down my throat by the communication monopoly) and nobody can ever fully trust their security or privacy because its not open source.

Signal sadly doesn’t yet have the ubiquity of whatsapp - but for everyone that has it (now I’m finding even non tech-savvy family are switching over) use signal, and where you have to, use WhatsApp.

imessage is no better in that case - and outside America barely anybody still uses either SMS or RCS, apple is a smaller share of the market meaning the ubiquity of imessage isn’t there.

If you want anything beyond SMS which is a universal standard, you both have to be using the same service - I’m just saying that signal is available for anyone who wants to use it.

I was also upset at the removal of texting from signal, but in hindsight its for the best - if its a secure message service that youre not charged per message to use, the support of a dying platform which is difficult to distinguish when in use is an issue - now its extremely clear whether youre reaching someone through signal or text, cause signal only sends signal messages.

Signal is better than any other common alternative, and its on both android and ios

I think PC gamers tend to overestimate their importance in OS distribution these days - gaming on Linux is just as passable these days as on Mac, and there’s much more to PC use than only gaming for 90% of users.

I feel that PC use is more complicated than gamers/productivity - but having switched over full time this year, Linux clearly has some work to do so the average user doesn’t need to touch the terminal - but even compared to 10 years ago its infinitely more capable and user friendly.

Customers of paid software need to start either voting with their feet meaningfully, or lobbying to get software support on Linux if they want it - complaining that titles aren’t available for Linux and then continuing to suffer through windows instead of making that known to the devs is seen exactly the same way - a sale.

I certainly miss some windows only software - but I’m not going to be held captive anymore for programmes I paid for, that refuse to consider my needs, when they are a part of my wider usage and expectations.

Only Melbourne was previously the official capital of the federated colonies which became the Commonwealth of Australia. Sydney was, and still is, the capital of NSW - but was never the capital of the country.