In your discussion yesterday you indicated that you might be moving to Linux specifically as a boycott move. I thought I might take the time to expand on it and to see what others are saying and thinking. You can’t be the only one doing this, or the only one who’s had this kind of idea connecting the two.
Oh, wow, man, I must be trippin'... It's like Deja Vu all over again.
Yep, this time fer shure... Hey, ya never know...
*TECH PING* ??
Linux on my portable.
What shall we do for our tablets and phones?
Though I’m not a rabid Linux person, I use it on occasion. The Linux desktop has existed for years now. You could get Dell’s with Linux pre-loaded for many years now.
Leave Amazon and find your stuff elsewhere.
Tech Ping
Been on Linux fir over 10 years...no great techy....I run Mint
Most distro’s come with at least 1 of every imaginable programme and if u need others there are web tutorials/explanations to take u through it.
It’s super fast, super stable, will run for months and never lose speed.....a small contribution to the makers and tr off and running....plus it is almost virus/bad guys free.....
In short it is wonderful
As those of you who don’t work in the industry will soon find out, “Small Tech” is just as rabidly leftist as Big Tech.
Linux certainly has matured enough to be a contender.
Desktop still runs Win7 but my laptops are on Linux.
Mozilla have apparently gone all woke.
Will Firefox limit speech of all kinds for the unwoke soon?
Here’s the problem with this... it gets very messy to know who to support and who not to. Personally, I’ve never used Twitter, Amazon, Apple, FascistBook etc. and I avoid google like the plague. However, if I have to fly somewhere, is there an airline left that goes where I need to that hasn’t done something stupid or taken some ideological position on something or other that I find untenable?
Case in point... I don’t normally think of Mozilla but then there is this headline that was posted yesterday here “ Mozilla Threatens to Go Beyond Deplatforming in Creepy Statement” https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3923653/posts Then of course there are all the linkages between these folks that one never necessarily thinks of right away. As noted at the above link... “According to Computer World, 91 percent of Mozilla’s funding in 2018 came from Google (as they secured being Mozilla’s default search engine). This deal was renegotiated in 2020 and extended for three more years, with approximately $400-450 million more landing in Mozilla’s lap.”
If this was just a case of not dealing with a known mafia member, that’s easy. However, expecting to know who all the legitimate businesses are that the mafia is laundering money through gets to be extremely difficult....
“Business runs on Microsoft”
Whatever ones feelings about the Microsoft Corporation and its various agendas, they have (and continue to wield) a huge presence in the computing world. Gargoyle and Linux platforms make up less than 10% of the field, compared to Microsoft, at approximately between 77% and 87.8%, and IOS at approximately 9.6–13% (numbers courtesy of Wackypedia).
If your agenda (editorial “you”) is to knock MS off the block, you have your work cut out for you.
However, advocating for Linux based software for personal consumption is a worthy and worthwhile endeavor. I worked in the IT support industry for 25 years. That meant supporting Windows - almost exclusively. The last outfit I worked for hired a guy to be the Manager for Desktop Services. That meant he was in charge of everything non-network and non-server for the organization (approximately 5500 computers and a roughly equal number of phones). His previous gig was as a manager at Amazon where the default workstation ran on Linux. He assigned me to several projects to bring Linux into the environment. Not necessarily to replace MS, but to augment what we were already supporting. I worked out strategies for imaging, deployment, and support. Every one of those initiatives failed to garner any support by management.
Despite the dedicated efforts of the manager in charge of the environment, he failed to generate ANY interest in changing things. It’s difficult to make inroads when you have a group that is so stuck on stupid.
I’ve had ready access to software for the last 25 years so naturally my machines have run on Windows. But I am an experimenter so I haven’t limited myself solely to MS. Now that I am retired I no longer have access so I imagine that my next machines will be Linux based. I can live with that.
While I find the presentation of Linux OS’s awkward and somewhat amateurish, they get the job done. I dislike how they operate in a network, but I continue to find ways to make them function - at least adequately.
I do see Linux in my future.
I think too many people just aren’t committed to accepting the inconveniences that come with taking a stand. Linux is great. But there is a learning curve, though it has gotten much less lately, but still. Tske Amazon for instance. I don’t think a lot of folks are gonna want to do away with the convenience of going to a site that has practically everything under the sun, and good shipping policies etc. Places like youtube have many 1000s of people there, and people looking for clicks and likes in order to make money likely won’t switch to l0ess populated sites where they can’t make as much.
Linux is great, and I wouldn’t be without it, but you can’t really play all the cool games as well as you can on windows, without the “hassle” of having to use emulators that don’t really work well sometimes
I 5hink a good portion will boycott, but not enough to make a serious dent in the giants bottom line, so it will come down to it being a personal choice rather than an effort to send big tech a message. I think they have probably factored in how many will leave their product and have decided it won’t hurt them too much
Regardless of which distribution folks go with, I would strongly advise you get one that has “LTS” (Long Term Support) somewhere in the description, as it means you’re going to end up with a more stable environment in the long run.
I would also strongly suggest you get an external drive to back up your computer to. Personally, I use ‘backintime’ to do my daily backups, because it is an extraordinarily efficient program. On any given day I can do a full restore to a previous day’s backup. There are several other programs that use the same basic mechanism to manage backups.
If there is interest here, it might be worthwhile to have a couple of threads that discusses the process and pitfalls of migration from non-free to free alternatives.
Big tech is silencing conservatives and it leaves their web sites with only liberals and other losers it make their sites as useful a Etch-A-Sketch.
My sentiments and experience mirror the points in the column.
Have used Linux as my home system for about 15 years.
And, in most respects, I find Linux system administration for everyday matters to be far easier than Windows.
Find Linux easier to use in most cases with the rare-as-hen’s-teeth exception of trying to do something that is tied proprietarily to the Windows (or, as I call it, “Microsoft Updates”) platform.
The author refers to Linux software as “less bossy”. I concur 100%. Use Brave as your browser. No real need for Microsoft Updates.
We need to put satellites in space. Preferably ones with the ability to take out other satellites.
When there are pro audio tools available on Linux of the quality required to record, mix & master on Linux, I will be 100% Linux.
Till then, I have to stick to Win 10 in order to do my work.
Most of the techies behind Linux and other open source products are more communistic than the tech companies are.
They want to see all capitalism, as an economic model, destroyed. They believe companies should be replaced by “communities.”
There’s no warranty, or liability, either. I wouldn’t put any private info on any of them.
And before you mention Red Hat, it’s owned by IBM, which is the original Evil Empire.