ProdigalFrog

The author is suggesting that a distro that's extremely locked down, reliable, and with very limited user choice would be desirable traits for mass adoption by non-tech enthusiasts.

There'd no reason that a community built version of that vision would have to include data harvesting as well.

I use Debian as well, but there's an incredible amount of previous knowledge required to understand what its doing and how to set it up that experienced users take for granted. An innate curiosity and lack of fear of breaking things can make learning all that knowledge seem trivial to us, but to someone without those traits, it's an impassable obstacle.

A mostly tech illiterate person being plopped in front of a Debian install would have to learn on the spot:

Huh, what's this root password thing for?

Partitioning? What's that mean? I guess I'll select guided.

XFCE, KDE, cinnamon, gnome? What are those? Guess I'll check them all.

Okay I'm logged in, ooh this is neat. How do I install something? Ah, a store! (Only if they happened to log into gnome or KDE), this app looks cool, let's install that. Huh? I'm not in the sudoers file? What's that? I just want to install an app! Ugh, this is way too nerdy for me. I'm done.

Oh no, my Windows is gone!

If we assume that they had figured out how to install software and continue to use it, there would be nothing to inform them their firewall is off, nor that they would need to install GUFW to configure it with a GUI.

All of that is trivial for us. We know much of the basic concepts already, know what sort of questions to ask and where to find trustworthy information, and don't mind learning new things.

But for the tech illiterate, what we're doing may as well be magic. A locked down, dumbed down experience is what they would feel comfortable with.

The immutable distros are very chromeOS-like. Bluefin GTS from UBlue in particular would probably fit the bill if it wasn't developer oriented.

Ah, I see they mentioned that in the article.

Dexed is a great free FM synthesis with tons of great presets.

I try to donate to projects I use the most.

• Mint/Debian
• Krita
• KDE
• Archive.org

Superb stuff! The dithered shading on the robot really makes it pop with dimension!

(Or is it an observatory? The black hole at the base could be an entrance, but I was second guessing myself since the scale of the grass would make it very small. Perhaps an entrance for an advanced species of intelligent lemmings who learned not to dive off cliffs? 😄)

No worries! Slrpnk.net was down until a few hours ago, perhaps that broke the alt-text from showing up? Last time it went down, I noticed a banner and community icon I had uploaded from slrpnk to a community on a different instance broke. I was surprised to learn that it had been pulling those images from my instance the entire time instead of it being stored on the outside instance, so maybe the same thing happens with alt-text?

Currently a general strike in the US is planned for May 1st 2028 to coincide with the UAW's contract ending. Unfortunately that's 3 years away, and I doubt climate policy is going to be a focus of that strike.

Hopefully we can organize one sooner, but we'll see. Syndicalist unions independent of corporate control would be the most likely to initiate a general strike, so I'd recommend joining up and unionizing your job with them if you can.

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

I also hope the rest of the world pushes for their own general strikes.

It should already have a quite detailed alt text. Does it not display when the image is hovered over with the mouse?

I'm afraid that's quite outside my field of expertise. I can only report how my experience on XMPP has been as a user, though perhaps @poVoq@slrpnk.net, who hosts it, may be able to weigh in on that. Edit: ah, I see you already have 😄

Though from my untrained eye, it seems that Jabber.ru was compromised due to not enabling a particular feature on their server

"Channel binding" is a feature in XMPP which can detect a MiTM even if the interceptor present a valid certificate. Both the client and the server must support SCRAM PLUS authentication mechanisms for this to work. Unfortunately this was not active on jabber.ru at the time of the attack.

And it seems that hosting it externally on paid hosting service (hetzner and linode) left them particularly vulnerable to this attack, and tgat it could've been mitigated by self hosting the XMPP locally, as well as activating that feature.

Slrpnk hosts an XMPP/Jabber for our users, mods and admins to communicate. Its worked pretty darn well for the past couple years, with very low resource needs.

The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles for mobile, and movim is an excellent web app with support for group calls.

I'd certainly recommend it over Matrix/element.

It's good practice to try and get as many signatures as possible beyond the 1m mark, as there can be invalid signatures that can bring it back down below 1m after they are counted.

I agree syndicalism is not the answer today.

While I advocate for unionizing with syndicalist unions like the IWW, it's not going to provide a long term solution on its own. I see it as one piece of a larger puzzle.

It helps gain some people a bit of breathing room with something closer to living wages, helps educate people of the power they can wield collectively, and pushes the needle forward in regards to realizing a general strike.

I think what holds it back from being able to achieve victory on its own is that a lot if collective effort us expended toward simply gaining back what is stolen by corporations, and less on community prefiguration. It's also hard to keep members in such a politically diverse umbrella focused on revolutionary class warfare, instead of being satisfied at a certain point of reform or concession from the corporations.

It'd still a useful tool, and one method I haven't really seen tried or described, is the idea of a worker coop actively funding syndicalist unions for their capitalist competitors to make it easier to compete.