I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The IT world is full of people developing their own thing because they think they can do better, and sometimes they succeed and make something nice. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn out alright?

Then they took crypto bro venture capital and my charitable optimism went out the window.

everyone who talks about linux seems to be a programmer /coder, and uses jargon that i don’t even understand

I’ve been pointing that out for a while, but unfortunately there is a vocal subset of the community that thinks referring people to just read technical manuals is fine (if you can’t, just learn to read it, duh).

Some things are concepts you’ll learn easily, don’t worry, and for the rest, you’ll always find someone willing to break it down if you manage to look past the snobs. If you want, shoot me a DM if you just want to understand a specific term without someone making you feel like an idiot.

The problem is there are a billion versions of linux, idk what one to choose

There are plenty of suggestions here. Ubuntu is what got me started and I still think it’s a good start*. Mint is from the same family, “Pop! OS” too (the name sounds silly to me, but it’s legit and popular for a reason). Just look at pictures and see what seems prettiest to you, then go with that. The usage won’t be too different.
The grandpa of that family is Debian, but I’m not sure it’s quite as user-friendly out of the box. I’m mentioning it in case you come across the term.

The other big families are Fedora and Arch. I personally use a Fedora-Child, but to keep things narrow, I recommend the three mentioned above as starters.

* If you come across people hating Ubuntu - including myself - it’s usually for ideological reasons rather than usability ones. Don’t worry about that for now. Getting into the weeds of things is a skill you don’t have yet and that’s perfectly fine.

if i can play my steam games on linux

Steam, fortunately, is the one platform that works best with Linux. For their handheld, they decided to flip off MS and made their own Linux, along with a wrapper tool to make all the games run on it anyway.

You may hear the terms “compatibility layer”, “Proton” and “wine”, which is exactly that: A tool to make Windows stuff run on Linux. Again, don’t worry about the specifics, just believe me: I’m playing almost all of my steam games just as I used to.

If there is a specific game you care about, https://www.protondb.com/ has a large store of knowledge. Some things run out of the box, some may require a few extra settings that are usually easy to add, and if there ever is a thing you don’t understand, my offer stands.

The whole idea of moving to linux is overwhelming.

It’s a scary plunge, a leap of faith, but I assure you: There are people ready to catch you at the bottom. The reception wasn’t as warm when I jumped off of Win7, and the snobs are still around, but things have improved a lot over the past few years. Trust me, trust us: You won’t be left alone.

I can’t recall ever trying it with peanut butter, that sounds interesting

If the insulation doesn’t insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don’t know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I’m way off.

Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.

That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.

The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.

I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).

b-b-but muh communism

As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I’m starting to regard paywalls as a more “honest” type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don’t fault them for it.

And how does the host pay for them?

I heard the Eldar have a really fascinating new-
Why are you all aiming at me?

Short version to save others a click: Proton’s CEO tweeted an endorsement of Trump’s FTC pick, going on to praise how apparently the Republicans are now the party for the “little guys” and crediting the ongoing antitrust proceedings to Trump’s first term.

And if “yourself” is just not likeable, working on that is also hard in a number of ways, from first realising and acknowledging the things you can improve to actually committing to self-improvement. But for the same reason, someone will appreciate it at some point. If being yourself is respectable, being a better version of yourself is even more so.

I mean, I get it. If I’m working on something and hit a snag, posting in a forum where the response time may be measured in days or more until someone replies with further questions, to which I then reply at my earliest convenience and wait another day for a response, then have to see when I next have time to try the advice and hope that settles it…

Well, I’d certainly prefer to get input right when I’m working on it, while I have the time and mindspace for it. In that light, maybe forums simply aren’t the best solution anymore, or at least not by themselves. But integrated chats have been tried before, haven’t they? What was wrong with them?

Oh but there’s a shit ton of documentation that’s only available on discord and that’s not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.

I absolutely agree. That’s part of the point I’m trying to make: The death of Discord might well cause those things to be lost. Hoping for it to crash and burn is counterproductive because thay will only do damage.

Instead, we should figure out why people moved to Discord in the first place, because…

Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions

…clearly, whatever makes forums “the best” isn’t enough. Then what is it that Discord does better? How can forums work to match it and entice people back?

I don’t know. I’m not one of the people that preferred Discord and I can’t speak for them. But maybe we should listen first instead of wishing ill on them and hoping their favourite places die.

Well, you have one part right: it won’t disappear magically. If it does, it will do so quite naturally, unless someone actively preserves it, e.g. by archiving the chat histories.

Of course, you might mean the people with the knowledge that wrote those histories in the first place. You know, the people that used Discord instead of forums. The people that left forums. The people that apparently didn’t want to use forums.

Why would you assume they’d move to forums? Clearly there was some reason they chose to use Discord, so why wouldn’t they just find a replacement?

Discord isn’t the issue. I mean, Discord has plenty of issues, but this particular one is a cultural one. Unless we find a way to entice people back to forums (or some other publically indexable platform), they’ll just keep going elsewhere.

So maybe instead of condemning Discord we should ask “Why do people prefer it?” Then we can figure out how to address that and actually do something about the root of the issue.

They probably don’t intentionally use it to store information so much as quickly and conveniently exchange answers and questions. Forums have evidently proven inadequate for that purpose, so unless people find a better solution and make it stick, the lesson sure won’t.

assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access

That’s what I mean by issue of culture. I don’t think the habit of gathering on discord-like services to quickly exchange info will change, and if the explosion of bsky is anything to go by, people will just find the next shiny, pretty and well-funded platform that totally definitely won’t enshittify somewhere down the line to pay back their venture capital investors.

We’d be cutting the weed without pulling the root.

It’s still information. I agree that it should be available publically, but information available to few is still more than information available to none. I agree that you shouldn’t have to join a Discord server to get that information, but eliminating it entirely so that not even those who do join can access it doesn’t help anybody. It would only hurt a few, but a few is still more than zero.

It’s an issue of culture, so simply eliminating one repository doesn’t fix anything. They’d find some other messaging service to congregate on.

That’s not to say Discord are saints and there is nothing wrong with either their business or their platform. That is a separate issue I think we all agree on.

My point is strictly about the hypothetical deletion of Discord over the drift towards opaque information silos: It won’t help.

It will still have the social platform inertia that keeps many people on Twitter despite wanting to leave. If enough of the other people you want to talk to are there, what good is leaving?

In the case of communities, it’s even worse: you can possibly operate multiple platforms as an individual, but a community splitting its conversations across two platforms is now two communities. The best you can hope for is that most of the active members on the old (also) join the new and eventually bring their activity with them, but that relies on a lot of individual decisions.

It also has plenty of utility for non-information-storing purposes. It’s more of a cultural issue than an issue with the tool.

Besides, wouldn’t it take all the information there to its grave as well, making its death a net information loss? After all, information confined it is still information stored somewhere, just not as easily accessible directly from the Web.

Is [that] legal?

The question of legality hinges on the courts’ willingness to hear the case and make a judgement. Doesn’t matter how many public sector union lawyers press charges if they end up thrown out by corrupt judges.

In other words: Darth Sidious Voice “I will make it legal”