Bazzite’s been working pretty good for me. Was honestly easier to set up too, and fights me less, and runs smoother, and also doesn’t spy on me.

Joke’s clear, it just only makes sense if you’re privileged.

Lovely, romanticizing gendered labour. You guys know poor people have always been around, right?

You’ve assumed that I’m in a tech knowledge bubble. I use Linux for work, but I am not in the tech field even remotely. Even though I have some professional training and a hobby interest, which prepared me better, I had to use textbooks and online forums to learn how to use my Linux desktop comfortably. I regularly deal with students and am therefore very familiar with low tech-literacy, let alone others in my own life that I have helped. I know there is a skill barrier for entry into Linux.

What I am much better equipped to handle is broad social and economic developments historically, with a particular concern for capitalist erosion of community wellbeing and mutual aid. As I have said, I do not doubt there is value for consumers in this service and I do not doubt that this service appears to be reasonably priced to those consumers. My concern regards the potential attraction that such profitability could generate and that same tech-illiteracy would make users more easily coerced into capitalization. Those conditions are exactly why there is a social as well as skill barrier of entry into Linux. As you said, many consumers have been primed to accept convenience over skill-building, which in turn makes them less capable of choosing when something is not worth the price and abandoning a convenient user experience.

Again, it is good that more people try to make this switch – Microsoft’s near monopoly is undeniably a social detriment – but we do not benefit from suspending criticism of how this switch happens just because we are happy it is happening.

I think it is very purposeful that Zorin has expansive marketing and frames features in terms of price value.

My concern is more oriented toward how capitalization of consumer-facing Linux will look if it proves to be a profitable site of expansion with Windows’ decline in popularity. I don’t care about licenses or the utility of the feature, though I do question its value when there are free options. The support is the more valuable thing, but again I worry about this success given that other distros have communities that serve the same purpose for free with only a little more labour from the user. It’s a good thing this is happening at all, but we should be critical of how it happens.

This is a good point, particularly in the context of value for new users. My comment is more regarding the precedent of framing desktop environments as some sort of premium feature. I do question how much value users still get out of that though, since so many Linux distros have communities that provide essentially the same service for free with a bit more labour on the user.

I really hope these people don’t accept that it’s normal to charge for different desktop environments.

Yeah exactly. Sucks if you have a job that forces you to use Windows though, which is largely how MS has this stanglehold on PC share. Once this becomes an expensive security risk, maybe more businesses will switch to paid Linux OS’s.

Consumers are not the main driver of profit, speculative value is. Microsoft knows that Windows is guaranteed to be on the majority of PC’s, which means they can afford to implement hostile features that increase the speculative value on data collection and AI investment.

Yeah, libs have been very open about homophobia and ableism since Trump was elected and they had a crisis that warranted a suspension of the performance. Statistically, we know most men in the US are complacent with or perpetrators of sexual violence and a significant amount – even the majority in some places – fetishize youth and teen women. For Americans, it really is more reputation destroying to have done queer shit than to be a rapist pedophile (this includes “ephebophiles,” sorry).

It actually makes more sense tbh. Being queer is far worse to fascists than being a pedophile rapist. This is especially damning when the person he sucked off is prominent in the conspiracy theories he depended on for the past decade.

They have to because the capitalist imperative of infinite, progressive growth forces them to constantly seek out additional speculative avenues for profit. The potential for a valuable product (stock) is more valuable than a good product and is cheaper to produce than a good product.

It is important to note that you are also a product in a surveillance capitalist state thaf commodifies every second of your day. The speculative value on more profitable avenues to source and sell your data has more speculative value than anything your patronage would generate.

Damn, I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. 😳

Wow, they really are just gonna make you kill them eh, for like, no good reason.

Did you seriously not read my explanation and then called it disingenuous? That’s in there.

My guy, you’re the anti-intellectual person here. I’ve been nice and here you are getting to extreme levels of arrogance.

Could you tell us all how you learned about what these words mean? Have you gone to university for it? Are there any professional educators you follow that offer free courses or lessons? Could you name any books you’ve learned from? You mentioned looking it up earlier, where?

Compadre, I don’t know how you could think someone would spend that much time trying to explain something to you and be completely faking.

Yes, that is what it is. It is not my definition, it’s how the people who study these topics professionally use the terms. You can take your time to live with it.

Okay, what you’re misunderstanding is that what a political or social philosophy is differs from how it is colloquially referred to. It does not mean, “a person who values people” and if you knew the history of this brutal system you’d see just how insidious such an assertion is. Yes, “liberal” is an abused term in NA as it benefits liberalism (yes, capitalism is liberalism and vice versa) through the occlusion of any alternative way to understand the world. When they say that liberals are radical socialists, they are purposefully misrepresenting what socialism and social justice is. They are not talking about liberalism when they use it that way. Liberalism is fundamentally an individualist way to understand the world that emerged through the processes of European imperialism and settler-colonialism after the sixteenth century (but we really consider it recognizable once they start talking about republics and individual liberties at the turn of the nineteenth century. You’ll see why in a moment). Private property is at the center of its way of organizing and the value of individual human bodies (not beings) is built not despite of that but to facilitate it. Racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are all systemic constructions that emerged to devalue human bodies relative to their position in the hierarchy and consequently the form of exploitation they experienced in the service of white-settler-colonial reproduction. (i.e. Slavery preexisted chattel slavery and racialization. Chattel slavery was made possible through the naturalization of an othered group as deserving of generational forced labour, and so racialization emerged as a means of rationalizing that violence).

“Capitalism” refers to a social order wherein capital is the primary organizing principle in society, which is to say individual pursuit of capital. It is described economically by its imperatives of profit maximization and infinite growth, both hallmarks of colonial perceptions of land and bodies as commodities. It is the economic system that settler-colonial countries grew into because it is already consistent with how they viewed the world.

Liberalism’s appropriation of “progress” and civil rights (“equality”) is how this social order effectively responded to challenge of the hierarchy. The narrative that people “earn” their rights through civil disobedience presupposes that what we imagine to be rights is in fact an absolute truth that we either restrict or permit access to. Conveniently, those rights are legally constructed in terms of pursuit of capital and private property as a metric of human fulfillment. The black Civil Rights movements of the mid-twentieth century is imagined to end when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968, which intentionally secures the state’s authority over the determination of inequality and redirects challenges to racism into the legal framework of the state. When Black Liberationist militant groups persisted, you get the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex (which is itself enabled through the legal end of slavery that still permitted forced labour of prisoners). There are many other examples of how this works, but slavery and racism tend to be very clear demonstrations. Message me if you want a reading list.

What you have done here is made the understandable mistake of assuming how the words are used is exactly what they mean, and yes language is fluid which is why they push these misuses in the first place. Make no mistake though, these are not distinct ways of organizing society, they are cooperative in their endeavour to reduce the living world to property. When you see this, liberal inaction at climate change is not only comprehensible, but expected.

What exactly do you think liberalism is?