I would like to add David Graeber to that, and Kropotkin even. I don’t mean to start a snowball effect that turns this into a huge list, but I feel like not enough people (especially the average person) know about them; especially Graeber who is a lot more modern.

Are we really doing the “yet you participate in society” meme?

I think this is it.

The historians I know of actually seem to lean quite left of the average person; it’s the light hobbieists, who are often more interested in the aesthetics/surface stuff, who seem to fall victim to the alt-right stuff.

What you described is socialism; a communist society would also be a stateless, classless, and moneyless society.

The scale on the left doesn’t start at zero, so the difference is smaller than the size of the bars make it seem. The difference between #1 Slackware, and last spot Arch, is 0.75 points in a 0 to 10 scale, but the bar size of Slackware is about 2.5x bigger than the bar for the Arch users.

I can’t vouch for every Linux distro that claims to be user-friendly, but I’ve fully switched to Linux Mint a couple of months ago, and I’ve had no issues. The only times I’ve used the console are when I want to use it.

My biggest worry before fully switching was playing pirated games, or games that I bought outside of Steam, but using Lutris it has been pretty straight forward.

I agree with you, but Kamala will probably still be the most left leaning president the USA ever had by quite a bit (AFAIK), and has a good chance to start shifting the Overton Window; if only by showing the Democratic Party that choosing more left leaning candidates actually gives them better chances of winning.

Voting for Biden/Dems isn’t much of a plan either, it’s just stalling. But you need to stall for something, you need something that you are buying time for.

In regard to third parties, my country has a different system, a parliamentary one (technically semi-presidential, but for the purposes of the topic, it’s parliamentary), but nevertheless, up until recently we had 2 major parties, and so far only one of the 2 ever won an election, and all my life I’ve often heard the argument of “useful vote” (“voting for someone else is a waste of your vote”) as a justification to vote for one of them, even from journalists and pundits. But the far right, for one reason or another, simply didn’t care about a “useful vote”, and just voted for who they wanted; that is why in our last elections, and for the first time since we’ve had elections, everyone was now talking about 3 choices for a useful vote.

I know it’s a different system, but the point of the story is that you are engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Neither democrats nor republicans will ever want to change the system because it will hurt them. Voting blue instead of red is a stalling tactic to stop/delay the fascists, but it doesn’t actually solve anything.

Ah, thank you for the explanation, I think I get it.

I don’t know about this in depth, but from what another user in this thread said, a flatpak can’t ask a portal to have access to two files at once. If I’m understanding correctly, that would explain why Librewolf needs permission to access ~/Downloads, since it can be downloading more than one file at once, and it needs access to all those files in ~/Downloads at the same time.

EDIT: I got a bit mixed up with what you were saying, but nevertheless, if this is true, then Librewofl would still need permission to access ~/Downloads and so be marked as “potentially unsafe”.

Not for the average/casual user, which is why this post exists.

The average person will look at that and see the ‘!’ in a triangle and became scared of what it can do to their system, even though it has no more permissions than a system package. Alternatively, they will become desensitized and learn to ignore it, resulting in installing flatpacks from untrusted and unverified sources.

Overall, I just think the idea around having to sandbox all flatpaks is not a good idea. To give a concrete example, Librewolf is marked as “potentially unsafe” because it has access to the download folder, but if I want to use it to open a file that isn’t in “downloads” I have to use flatseal to give it extra permissions - it’s the worst of both worlds! Trying so hard to comply with flatpak guidelines that it gets in the way of doing things, and still not being considered safe enough.

Perhaps not very patient gamer, but I think I’ll give Another Crab’s Treasure a go.

It’s very hard for me to feel motivated to play new games nowadays, but that one did spike my interest - seems more fun than Elden Ring tbh, which kinda feels like a generic souls-like - and it’s got great reviews and isn’t too expensive, so I think I’ll try it out.

Mind if I ask what you are basing this on? Because the experience I’m having in my country tells me that would probably just reinforce the status quo, and then the far-right would have a huge increase.

In my country the center-“left” soc-dems (who have been leaning more and more liberal) were in power since 2014, with a majority on the left; in 2022 that party got a majority of votes, and the rest of the left loss a lot of votes, but the right was still in minority. This has essentially resulted in them being able to keep doing whatever they want and what they’ve always done and not keep their promises because they know a bunch of people always vote for them anyway because “it’s them or the right wins!”. Then in late 2023 there was a corruption scandal that resulted in us having new elections early this year where the far right saw unprecedented growth, the “center”-right party won the elections, and there is now a majority right in parliament. At no point during these 10 years did our country turn further left; the right certainly didn’t.

My point is, based on that, I would guess that having liberals (who are the ones in charge of the Dems) in power so long with a majority would just result in them consolidating power, the rest of the left to be pushed out, and eventually for the far right to see a renewed growth.

The real solution would either be for everyone to vote for a new different left-wing party (if we’re already talking about convincing “everyone” to vote for Dems, why not dream a little higher?), or turn to mutual aid and grassroots movements. And a party that wins elections will almost certainly never want to change the electoral system because they benefit from it the most; again, the best hope for that might be getting behind one party whose mission purpose is exactly to turn away from a 2 party system.

When I studied Computer Engineering, I met several other students who had a lot of trouble using the Windows file system, and navigating a file system through a terminal was a Herculean task for them.

Most people growing up now, and since over a decade ago, are only tech savvy in the sense they know how to use smartphones, tablets, and social media; none of those require any understanding of file systems, and even using desktops doesn’t really require it that much for most people.

I know what you mean, I felt the same way when I first saw it, and even when I started playing. But the concept intrigued me, so I kept going, and after a while I got used to the art style. If the concept of the game appeals to you, I’d still recommend you give it a try.

Final Fantasy 6. There are technically several protagonists, but the one with the better claim to “main protagonist” is a woman.

Also, Heaven’s Vault isn’t an old game, but it’s not very well known or talked about, so I’ll throw it in anyway.

Haha, well, to each their own, but the way I see it:

The second has a skill system that I like more than the first one, and it starts to have more of a semblance of a story. The NPCs in the first one basically just exist to tell you to go to place A, then B, and so on. To be honest, I couldn’t even finish the first one.

Like others have said, there’s no reason to play in order, but to be more specific:

• If you ask someone what their favourite FF is, 90% of people will answer something between 6 and 10, so you should probably start with one in that range.

• 1 is probably not worth playing at all, it hardly even has a story and is very simple.

• 2 is better, but I would say 3 is where it really starts to get good.

• 4 and 5 are also very liked and popular.

• 12 doesn’t have the best story, but it’s good and it has a lot of people’s favourite combat system.

• 13 isn’t bad, but a lot of people didn’t enjoy it. I hardly hear people talk about it nowadays, but maybe that’s just me.

• 15 is probably more liked than 13 but it also gets a lot of criticism. It’s quite modern, though, so it’s probably one of the easiest to get into for most people.

• 11 and 14 are MMOs. If you like MMOs, you should probably choose 14 because 11 is quite old and doesn’t have a lot of players.

EDIT: Forgot to mention 16 because it just came out, but from what I hear a lot of people like it, so it may be a good entry point, although it’s console exclusive.

I just wanted to say, this is a very good comment.

When people say it’s not “we” and it’s just a few people, or just companies, it always seems to me that they are - consciously or subconsciously - just making excuses for not having to actually do anything and hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. They want the problem to be solved, while not having to do anything or change their lifestyle.

There are some very obvious and clear examples of this; here’s two of them:

• Studies have shown most people are in favour of carbon taxes. But with carbon taxes, companies would just shift the extra cost onto the consumers by increasing prices. One thing affected by carbon tax, would be the price of gas itself. And when prices (especially gas prices) increase, that usually results in a lot of anger and protests. So why would any democratically elected politician ever implement a carbon tax? If they did, they would be voted out, and the next one to come in would just undo it.

• Another obvious example, is meat. We know one of the major protagonists in CO2 emissions is animal farming. Red meat especially is responsible for a huge source of those emissions. And yet most people don’t even wanna think about eating less meat, and they will still crack jokes about vegans and look at them sideways. And as for regulations regarding meat, the example from before still applies.

As you seem to be implying, what really needs to happen is a whole cultural shift. Trying to shift blame onto to a few people and hope they get the guillotine, won’t change anything as long as people keep demanding all the same things because then someone else will come in to fulfil that demand. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that it’s the sum of all our actions that will determine the future, and our actions can influence other people’s actions; therefore, one way or another, we are all responsible.

Sorry for typing some much at you since you’re basically making the same point already, but I just felt like adding on.