I wish you were right. I don’t mind governments and political parties who aren’t fascist. Democratic socialists and responsible environmentalists can AI-pump their ideology all they like and it’s not going to do much harm to civilization. But if they are doing it at all, they’re not doing it anywhere near the level that fascists and kleptocrats are. The latter benefit from radical change, and they are using AI to achieve that.
This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.
I think we can all agree it’s probably a bad idea.
Does that mean you shouldn’t? Maybe. But maybe not. Sometimes it’s fun to do something “wrong”, because you want to, and maybe you’ll really enjoy it anyway. Maybe you’ll learn a lot about why it’s a bad idea, and maybe you’ll find those learnings enrich your life and give you stories to tell. I’m not trying to recommend this at all, I’m just saying you should consider it from all angles and outcomes before you make a decision, especially if this is something he really wants to do for whatever reason. Life is for living, it’s not for making a series of optimal choices to result in the highest score. Experiences, both good and bad, are their own reward. And as long as nobody’s going to get hurt, and you go into it with your eyes open and an understanding of the risks and potential downfalls, and do what you can to mitigate and protect against them as much as you can, maybe it’s something you can try.
If it’s really something you’re not comfortable with, and he is, well then you two are going to have to have a long and hard talk about it and come to some mutually agreeable compromise. But even if it is objectively a bad idea, you also need to think about whether he’s just naive and is going to hate it, or whether it’s going to make him happy that he tried it, and whether it’s an experience he needs to have in his life. Meanwhile, is it going to cause you resentment if you go there and hate it and he loves it? Will he listen to you if you decide you really do hate it and don’t want to continue?
That’s not something anyone can answer for you, but it has little to do with whether it’s a bad idea and much more to do with what both of you want out of life.
PikaOS is Debian based, and they’ve built the deps they need for Steam in 32-bit, so it’s not the end of the world AFAIK. GloriousEggroll seems to be part of it too, so if any refugees are looking for something not Fedora-based there you go. Although his efforts for now seem focused more on Nobara (which is Fedora-based) maybe this will cause some shake-ups there too. I can see Pika is already picking up speed from this though, the Discord is super active.
Even if Fedora doesn’t ever drop support I think even considering the possibility is shaking people’s confidence in using it as a base going forward, sort of like how Unity’s quickly-walked-back disasters drove people irrevocably towards Godot and other engines. Arch and Arch-based distros are probably starting to look much more appealing too.
and why they treat their drivers like subhuman robots already.
I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a “luxury” anyone can live without and it’s hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it’s low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who’s not a very invested “gamer”.
Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.
I’m convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you’re going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you’re also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn’t care about games but does care about society (at least once they’re properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).
I still just can’t respect a rainbow road that has guardrails.
I absolutely love that you describe PikaOS as porno filthy. No judgement, no defense, no argument, I just think it’s a hilarious description while perfectly making your point, and is pretty much the best thing I’ve read today. Thank you!
And just to stay on-topic, yeah I’ve found flatpak invaluable in working around some of debian’s unfortunate packaging limitations. I try to use the debian packages first if possible, but if the version is too old, not available, or has crappy dependency conflicts, flatpak to the rescue!
No nobody ever has to admit anything, they just have to be able to be plausibly implicated and plausible deniability is achieved.
I would absolutely and unironically fly this flag, although to be even more inclusive it also needs an alpha layer. Perhaps it should be a cube? Actually even that might not be inclusive enough, we need more dimensions. BRB I need to figure out how to attach a tesseract to my flagpole, I guess I’ll need some kind of gordian knot?
For what it’s worth, Nobara’s another good option and being Fedora-based might be more familiar if you’re coming from Bazzite. I think the developers of PikaOS and Nobara are the same, or at least I think the projects share some history and some effort. Either way both are great distros depending on which flavor of package management you prefer. I’m definitely “an apt person” so Pika birb OS is the one for me, also it’s got a pretty cute art theme.
Mathematically right, the best kind of right.
I think it’s a great OS and it’s absolutely amazing how far Linux Gaming has come even in the last few years. Personally, I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite’s immutability-based design. I know there are pros and cons, and they just don’t balance for me. I’m a tinkerer, I like to play with the OS internals and have full control of them. Sometimes that causes problems, but it also causes learning, and I like to learn how the OS works and what it’s doing “under the hood” and in my mind Linux is great for that and that’s part of the appeal. For a lot of people, an immutable OS is probably the right way to go, it’s much safer, and stabler, and I know most people don’t care. But I do think it’s worth considering that Linux is not one-size-fits-all and while Bazzite might be best for some people it’s not best for everyone.
As soon as you start getting into more customization, if you find annoyances you want to fix, sometimes it’s much easier when you’re on a traditional, non-immutable distro, and I consider it an important bonus that this will help you learn. You do have to be more careful, and more respectful about running shell commands freely that might destroy your system, but I think that’s good experience to have.
Personally I run PikaOS (debian-based) with KDE Plasma 6 and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I have found some of the above mentioned annoyances, but I’ve fixed them to my satisfaction and I’m extremely happy with the result. I have yet to find any game that is difficult to get running, I have yet to find anything that is difficult at all really. It’s been straightforward and rock solid stable. I give a lot of credit to not just the distros but also to projects like KDE, Wine, Proton, Lutris, etc. which are building this incredible gaming ecosystem on Linux. It couldn’t be a better time to dump Windows, and soon we’ll be at the point where no one will mourn it.
It works: You can tell the real humans because they’ll be the only ones unwilling to do this invasive bullshit. The bots will just come up with something fake to scan and carry on as they always have.
It’s actually low-key brilliant. Start a gold rush, when you realize the gold isn’t actually there, pivot to selling shovels and keep hyping the gold rush. Fools and their money are soon parted, and there seem to be an endless supply of them.
xmpp is still the best, nobody’s ever going to change my mind. jabber 4 lyfe!
Piefed(.ca at least) is great. It doesn’t really matter much to me where the community is hosted but it should be wherever you feel comfortable hosting it and I agree the Lemmy devs are very toxic.
Also nice design!