Hell fuckin’ yeah! Y’all best slap an email to the IWW and get that ball rolling so you’ll be able to join the general strike planned for May 1st 2028 (May day).

Fedora 42 even eliminated X11 as an option (I think they’re reversing that stance now, though), which made it unusable on my (now dead) Nvidia laptop with dual monitors. I thought they really jumped the gun on that one.

I ended up jumping to AMD graphics so I wouldn’t have any problems with Wayland, but then discovered there’s a nasty bug that causes frequent system freezes on AMD systems. Thankfully I was on Debian, so I could easily switch back to X11. Things have been stable now, but I just feel like I can’t win with Wayland 😅

Wayland does seem to work well with Intel graphics, at least.

Sorry! Messed the link up. Should work now.

A lot of Linux distros don’t make money, I don’t think that’s a huge factor. A lack of interest so far is more likely (though I do recall there was a distro that was trying to be a 1 to 1 chromeOS replacement.

I just wanted to point out that us techies take a lot of our knowledge for granted, and it can be easy to lose perspective on what its like for tech illiterates.

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 can make it 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.

I try to donate to projects I use the most.

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