I'm actually constantly surprised by the diversity of experiences I'm seeing here. It's very much not a small bubble, at least not in comparison to any other social network/activity in my life.
I've been out of the powerpoint loop myself for almost 20 years too; does it actually have any valuable functionality that you can't get on the free alternatives?
Well, the hope was always that those of us inconvenienced by M$ would all collectively contribute to making Linux distros more convenient for everyone. But we can't ever seem to get inconvenienced enough to actually sufficiently mobilize and/or coordinate such an effort.
It does seem like linux is having its moment right now. there's the money and effort valve is putting into KDE making the steamdeck and steammachine polished for their hardware which helps all users of KDE. cachyos is making having a rolling distro really smooth and snappy on old hardware and making games work mostly ootb. stuff like winboat and wine will let you use the few windows apps you need. you are kinda stuck though if you want to use something like fusion360 or solidworks. freecad has improved quite a bit but it's still like gimp where it's slightly worse UX in a lot of ways.
Now… maybe we could condense the 10,000 pointless distros down to a dozen? Oops, nope. Now 10,001, except this one has the menu bar in the middle of the screen and it moves around.
The distros are not pointless. For every one of them there was a human being that wanted something to work differently and the nature of open source let them do it. That should be celebrated and the day we loose that flexibility would be a very sad day.
This. Not to mention that for the mainstream users there are mainstream distros that are largely the same they have always been: Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, so I never really understood the issue of having tons of distros out there for enthusiasts.
I think that both perspectives are right. We should celebrate diversity, but there's also power in consensus.
There needs to be some competition between ideas, but if every bit of disagreement about direction ends in "I'm going to build my own distro, with blackjack and hookers", then we as a community won't ever end up building something that can compete with the megacorps.
Wait, what?! I was sure that the agenda of Big Tinfoil was to generate FUD so that we buy more tinfoil for our hats. Are you implying their agenda goes even deeper?
Have you tried to buy tin foil lately? Big Aluminum has taken over, and just see how far you get soldering the grounding strap to an aluminum foil hat.
But it is NOT necessarily a factual statement that one of the main uses of electromagnetic radiation is for humans to send information over long distances; nor that I first learned about tinfoil hats from some random piece of information that was being broadcast by means of electromagnetic radiation. It's just a vibe.
IQs more than about 140-150 don't really mean much. They typically come from mathematical extrapolation that tries to account for age (this young child performs very well on the test, just think what they can do when they're an adult). Adult scores usually show this not to be the case
Well, if they did, it would probably be shooting themselves in the foot, seeing that the Claude Code source is out there now, and people are waiting for an excuse to "clean-room" reimplement and fork it
Performance regressions are different from ABI incompatibilities. If the kernel refused to do any work that slowed down any userspace program, the pace would go a lot slower.
Or be a lot uglier. See: Microsoft replacing its own API surfaces with binary-compatible representations to workaround companies like Adobe adding perf improvements like bypassing the kernel-provided kernel object constructors because it saved them a few cycles to just hard-code the objects they wanted and memcpy them into existence.
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