The US has a “left” it has just been beaten into submission and told to vote for D or it gets the hose again. And I think now it’s realized it’s not alone, and it’s fighting back. This country fought a war to depose a king. This country fought a war to end slavery. This is a country that has spent basically all its history trying to protect itself and others from what exactly is currently happening. Yeah obviously they didn’t do a great job stopping this earlier, but this is not a country that is going to let itself be taken over by conservative right-wing religious fascist authoritarianism, despite the current evidence to the contrary. The country just needs a little time to remember who it really is and shake some of the rust off, because yeah, it’s been quite awhile since any of us in the west actually needed to fight for anything significant in our lives. But I also think it’s silly to expect we won’t. I don’t think the great American experiment is over, I think it’s going to continue and we’re going to see how that actually works.

Maybe I’m wrong, but there are still way too many good people down there, and there are good people outside the US who want them to succeed too. The real fight will come eventually. It’s anybody’s guess when, where, and how. They may be down right now but don’t count the US out just yet I think they’ve still got lots of rounds left in them.

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.

It worked for Enron! Until it didn’t.

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).

That “are we the baddies” clip is starting to feel closer and closer to reality every day.

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.

Free speech for me, but not for thee.

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.

All the greatest rockets in history have been made by Nazis, Elon is no exception.

xmpp is still the best, nobody’s ever going to change my mind. jabber 4 lyfe!