With all due respect; do you think that Marx, let alone Engels and myriads of Marxist thinkers over the centuries overlooked the idea that people are dependent on wages and therefore not likely to throw their lives to a revolutionary effort? I think the historical intricacies of revolutions are perhaps the most studied part of history for Marxists.

That said, there is obvious truth in the fact that obviously people will not join a revolutionary mass movement today or even tomorrow in the world that we live in. The circumstances ought to be life-or-death for many of them to consider that much of a sacrifice; not that I advocate that at all of course, but revolutions have not historically been staged as fun and games for all those involved.

The sad truth is that the permanent solution to our woes is a revolution that can only really happen when things are already boiling.

Marxism has a rich history of thousands upon thousands of books, millions of adherents, influential thinkers across nations, disciplines and social stratae; it’s not as if there is no-one with a solution on their hands. They are just being willfully ignored.

Trisquel is literally the most popular libre-only distribution, endorsed by the FSF, it is hardly obscure. Parabola/Hyperbola are libre-only Arch derivatives, and EXE GNU/Linux is the only distribution shipping out of the box with TDE.

Trisquel is the only one out of those that is really friendly for newbies, admittedly, but given that it has Gentoo in there out of all things, it just seems like a very “Reddit” distribution list.

There is nothing wrong with Devuan, though? It is a very solid distribution built by a team of people who constantly work on improving and supporting alternative init systems. Just because you seem to consider it a “rage fork” out of ideological reasons doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Eh I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to know many distros such as Trisquel, Parabola/Hyperbola, EXE GNU/Linux and so on, leading to odd choices. It also has false information here and there, and the “do you want a Windows-like or a macOS-like UI” question is pretty asinine.

leave then, it’s a net positive

I will switch to Hurd as soon as it is in a usable state but so far my experiments unfortunately never really worked out.

“old”

1. Thinkpads are popular, well supported, generally well built and sturdy. The indie startups may or may not provide proper support, have the proper experience to build a good product and are harder to find resources for.
2. Thinkpads are cheap and easy to get for the power they contain. Devices like the Purism phone are extremely expensive for just a tiny bit of the power and plenty of problems in tow.

We need to find a way to reform them, sure, but these views and opinions should not be tolerated.

Russia would certainly impose its oppressive social stances on the territory including its homophobia, sexism, racism, patriarchal order, lack of freedom of press and so on. This would probably not be as bad under a NATO-aligned European government (although the West has been known to bring fascists to power if necessary), which uses its slight edge in progressivism as a useful propaganda shield.

Both would however use it as a geopolitical pressure point for further aggression, stationing nuclear weapons, economically colonize the war-torn ruins by “helping rebuild”, and subduing the local population and labor rights. Zelensky disbanded unions and the right to strike, abolished gay marriage for the duration of the war to prevent gay refugees from taking their husbands with them, banned socialist movements and is draconic against draft dodgers and peace activists (even those without Russian ties). The Ukrainian army stations troops in civilian places to hide them, endangering their own people, incorporate and welcome neo-nazis into their military as part of some kind of popular front, and use banned weapons. On the other side, Russia does all of these too and commits war crimes left and right, so it is not like they are any more welcome in my eyes.

Either outcome would (in the long term) be worse for the people of Ukraine, Russia, the rest of Europe and probably the world. The war would not stop after Ukraine.

As long as our economy is steered by the whims of wealthy people seeking to maximize their profits and not by any democratic process, we will have these issues over and over again as at some point the only direction the economy could grow is into other countries. It’s no coincidence that China and Russia are the “enemies” of the West when they are the two biggest economies that mainly act in competition to the Western economies. For instance, Amazon would literally kill to get the entire Chinese market, let alone all other American multinationals. And with the power that money and capital has, a war is possible to incite based on that desire to expand to “enemy countries”. Same with the Chinese and Russian economies. Tencent and Gazprom would love to control their respective Western markets.

Why are they sending hundreds of thousands of working class people of both Ukraine, Russia and third countries to kill each other then, if it’s really about the governments’ wrongdoings?

Why not support revolutionaries within Russia, helping the Russians to dispose of their own government? Why does NATO have to be involved as an actor in the first place? Why do workers have to murder each other on front lines? The governments’ and militaries’ support should be constrained strictly to humanitarian support and help, not weapons.

Both governments and their national capital are the enemy. It is a war between two economies over geopolitical control over Ukraine, fought by and written in blood of people who don’t profit from either side of the war. No Ukrainian soldier or Russian soldier wins at the end of the day. Whichever side wins, it is going to end in a bloodbath and further oppression. Sure, a Russian win would be worse in the long run, but the Ukrainian government and NATO countries ain’t no saints either, and is certainly not the side I would like to die for.

Political views aren’t like football teams or favorite colors. Not all political views are valid, should be protected or accepted. If there are people who want to restrict gay marriage because they find gay people disgusting, and on the other hand people who want to leave gay people in peace, why would any sane society tolerate both views?

The democratic obsession with protecting violence, hate and bigotry under the guise of “just an opposing opinion” is infuriating. I don’t think people of opposing views should have the right to argue for them. I want them to stop having those opinions or be removed. Politics isn’t something you can agree to disagree on, it’s a permanent struggle of life and death, poverty and wealth, peace and war. It’s not something I want to stay civil over.

I mean, the thing all people in this thread probably can agree on is that athletes should perform under some kind of flag. Common ground and all.

Both words, “extremist” and “right-wing”, have no real hard definitions.

Is being socially conservative right wing? Is supporting capitalism right wing? Is inertia right wing? Is being progressive and, for example, anti-racist and pro-trans left wing? Is socialism left wing? Is only communism left wing?

What about extremism? Is someone an extremist if they condone violence? Is someone an extremist if they seek to change the system fundamentally? Is someone an extremist if their political beliefs are very strongly held, no matter what they might be?

Since these terms have no real definitions, it’s just shit-slinging.

I do use it daily, yeah. :)

There are a bunch of paper cuts simply because their team is so small that maintaining technical integrity itself and refactoring (e. g. the move to python3 that was completed recently) is a monumental task in and of itself, with new features or bugfixes being a distant priority at best. That’s why there’s still some inconsistency whether some niche features really work or whether things are adapted to work with TDE instead of a stock KDE 3.5; up until I made a pull request to fix it a couple of weeks ago, Konversation still by default pointed to Freenode instead of Libera.Chat for example.

I mean it makes sense, maintaining a desktop environment with dozens upon dozens of programs and features like KDE is really something that needs about as big a team as the KDE team itself was back then, and the handful of people who maintain TDE now are definitely not enough. There’s still apps without a dedicated maintainer, for example, who only have generalists looking if it compiles for every update. It’s not ideal.

That all considered, it runs very well out of the box!

As for positives, it’s my desktop of choice because I disagree with the design philosophy of modern DEs. It seems like they all tend to converge into the exact same direction. It’s all either a macOS knockoff or a Windows knockoff. I can’t even tell Plasma 5 from Windows by default! It has a taskbar on the bottom with a start button to the far left, the clock and date in the bottom right along with the tray and notification area. Desktop icons, right-click context menus, the same general UX. It looks, feels and works exactly like Windows 8-11!

The flat and blur-heavy corporate design that was originally created to be as cheap and agreeable with as many people as possible to maximize profits is entirely uncritically copied by almost all desktops now. Every IRC/XMPP/Matrix client now needs to look like Discord or WhatsApp! I miss when there was still playfulness and personality in design; something like early video game UIs with crazy fonts, materials, textures, colors. UI widgets that felt physically hefty to use, like a button that actually looked like it depressed into something, or tactile, sharp scroll bars. Window decoration that was themed after fantasy creatures, or if you want it more professional, something like wood or marble. You know, something human!

Even the app packages themselves show barely any divergence: every DE nowadays ships with Firefox or Chromium, for example; while in the past, almost every project had their own browser with different features and design goals. Remember Konqueror? I use it on the daily now and didn’t know how cool a file manager-browser hybrid was until I tried. I realize that this is a technical issue and not a motivation issue, but hello?

Innovative features and really experimental design choices are also a thing of the past apparently: ROX Desktop with its drag-and-drop mantra, WMaker with its dockapps, the various 3D environments that cropped up over the years… hold left-click on an empty desktop for an application menu… iconified windows… it’s all gone. It’s all Windows or macOS clones now.

Have you tried Trinity Desktop? It’s a continuation of KDE 3.5 and it has many of the things you miss and will miss.

… “So for Plasma 6, we have removed them, to steer people towards better options.” Things that I don’t want to hear from a software projects that supposedly respects my intelligence. I don’t want to be “steered”.

I don’t know why some people insist on making every single desktop look, feel and work the exact same.

Just use Gnome. Nobody needs your “UX” ideas here. Otherwise we’d also use Gnome.

Me meanwhile, on KDE 3.5 / Trinity Desktop, with my two perfectly fine sound themes I can swap on demand… and more desktop features…