Cool!

One thing I always find amusing about these kinds of write-ups is how much the writer is desperately trying to replicate the Windows experience. It’s most exemplified in the section “Mission Center is the task manager you really need”. Half the issues mentioned in this section are effectively aesthetical, from what I can tell. Mission Center looks a hell of a lot like Task Manager. I almost skimmed past the screenshot without realizing it was not a screenshot of Task Manager.

This theme comes back again with the section on KDE: “So far, I like this KDE desktop better because it feels more like Windows 11 or Windows 10. There’s a Start menu and a taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The Start menu pops up as a small box, rather than taking over the whole screen like the Gnome menu did.”

I don’t own a Streamdeck, and I hear they’re really useful, but reading this section about Boatswain I really wonder what’s going on in the brains of the average computer “enthusiast” because if you’re only using the Streamdeck as a push button interface to launch Gmail of all things… I really want to question what, exactly, makes you a “computer enthusiast”. It also really exposes how little the writer seems to understand about “advanced” computer usage.

There’s no option to launch websites,

Yes, that makes sense. Since you can perform almost any task via the terminal, there seems little reason to have a “launch websites” function because…

but the workaround is to just but the command to launch your browser (in my case, google-chrome) in front of whatever URL you wish to launch.

You can just call your browser of choice using its command parameters. This isn’t a “work around”, this is base functionality of the software. I wonder if they understand that they could do this on Windows as well.

I wish this process were a little more seamless and you could get a menu of preinstalled apps to choose from or a dialog box that let you put in the website you want. But this is a process that works and, for that, I am thankful. Kudos to the makers of StreamController and shame on Elgato for not having a native Linux version of the Stream Deck app.

If you want to use Linux, then you should learn how to use Linux. Heck, it’ll even make you better at using other operating systems like Windows and macOS because what StreamController is forcing you to do here is learn how to execute applications via the command line.

I’m trying to find a good, free PDF editor where I can enter text on a medical form I have to fill out. I’ve tried five different editors and all seem to have issues that make it difficult or impossible to put text on top of the form. Very lame. Any suggestions?

Pretty sure both Chrome and Firefox can do this in the browser window. Maybe I’m wrong.

Anyway. The closing sections are interesting.

For example, StreamController allowed me to configure my Stream Deck Neo, but it’s not nearly as easy-to-use or powerful as Elgato’s own Stream Deck software.

What is the measure of “Powerful” here, exactly? StreamController features a plugin system where you can build your own actions using python and their code library, which the Stream Deck software also has. If you can launch an application like chrome and feed it parameters to open a specific website, then you can probably tell StreamController to launch a bash script that does a whole list of tasks for you and more. I guess you’d have to learn bash, though.

Community versions of software are a mixed blessing: There are community versions – apps made by independent developers – that fill the gap where first-party software lacks Linux versions. However, these are often made by volunteers who have other things to do and don’t have the kind of insight that would come from being part of the original hardware or software team. For example, AutoHotKey, a major macro app for Windows, is not available for Linux at all. There’s a community version called AHK_X11 but it still hasn’t been updated to work with the latest versions of Ubuntu, the most popular Linux flavor, because it’s incompatible with the Wayland window manager that Ubuntu uses.

I have to highlight this whole section because it is mind-boggling. “There are community versions – apps made by independent developers […] these are often made by volunteers […] and don’t have the kind of insight that would come from being part of the original hardware or software team. For example, AutoHotKey” AutoHotKey is FOSS! It’s maintained for free by a non-profit foundation. You can volunteer your time and submit a pull request on their GitHub page. This isn’t exactly the “first-party software” you’re talking about, and it also shows you’ve fully missed the point of what the Linux ecosystem is doing, and its foundational ethos.

This also makes me laugh a little because I wonder what exactly they were using AutoHotKey for? The most we get is: “I write AHK macros that select menu items you can’t get to with a hotkey in Google Docs or in Photoshop Elements or elsewhere”. If you desire a fully keyboard-driven experience, if that’s what sits at the heart of this AHK thing, let me introduce you to a little program called GNU Emacs.

Too many ways to install software

Again, fully missing the point here. If you desire a monopolized, centralized, authoritative experience where you are locked into the precise workflow as prescribed to you by private interests, then go back to Windows or MacOS. It is a fair critique once you’re well acquainted with the ecosystem, but it’s something that is only resolved through centralization and mass adoption of a single distribution method, and that is never going to happen.

Changing Desktop managers is too much work

I would say that’s a step up from having zero ability to change desktop managers but, who am I to say exactly?

Code editing: There are a lot of code editors. I still haven’t found one I like as much as Notepad++ which I use in Windows. Notepad++ will run using Wine emulation but on my home desktop, which uses scaling, the font is too small to read.

This shocks me a little. Even in the world of VSCode, people are still loyal to Notepad++? I mean, the options are infinite really, Notepad++ really hasn’t evolved in a long time. What exactly could Notepad++ be doing that can’t be replicated even with VSCode? I know that Notepad++ is at least less of a resource hog then something like VSCode but is that really a concern given the systems they’re using? VSCode isn’t even a great option, it’s just the most popular option with the most broad appeal and support. Again, you could be investigating things like Vi or Emacs.

Logi+

I have an MX Master mouse as well. I fucking hate the Logi+ bullshit, and it’s insane that you are allowed to create a mouse like the MX Master and lock all its functionality behind software that wants to run all the time in the background, and phone home to Logitech with “telemetry data” for “enhancing user experience”. I shouldn’t have to have privacy concerns regarding the mouse I use on my computer. I’m glad Logi+ doesn’t exist on Linux. When you set up the device on Windows it tries to automatically install the Logi+ software, it should be considered a virus at this point. I had to wipe my work computer recently, and uninstalled Logi+ after Windows was up and running again, and actually just used AutoHotKey to remap the side button on the mouse. Out of the box, all the button does is emulate a WIN+TAB keyboard command, which I intercept and change to Win+CTRL+S which launches screen capture.

Phone Link:

God only knows what Windows is doing with all the information it is nabbing off your device while connected to their operating system. “These work, but their UI looks very primitive in comparison to what you get from Microsoft.” Again, aesthetics.

I really like Linux and, if it had just a little bit better support for the hardware and software I rely on, I could see myself switching to it for 90 or 100% of my daily usage. As of now, though, I’ll still be using Windows, at least some of the time.

It’s funny that they walk away with a positive experience, yet the real takeaway is that “it’s not enough like windows”. Learn Linux. Learn it for real, and you’ll never need whatever you’re missing from Windows. Decolonize your brain from decades of Windows lock in. You’ll be better for it.

Edit all your posts then request a purge.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.isoron.uhabits/

Loop Habit Tracker is an app I’ve been using for years now to help me maintain daily, weekly, and monthly routines. I find it’s “sticky” notifications very useful.

This looks a lot like Loop Habit Tracker which, in my experience with the app, works differently than Better Counter. BC is like a digital click counter, allowing you to tabulate things by quantity whenever they happen. Loop Habit Tracker doesn’t really have a feature like that. If you wanted to track how many cups of water you drank in a day, you would need to remember how many you had and enter it manually every day. Loop Habit Tracker is designed to help you build daily, weekly, or monthly habits with handy and difficult to dismiss reminders.

Does the export have a timestamp attached?

Ok I’ve spent a few hours now tinkering and figuring things out, and I totally see the power here. I wanted to install the 1password Linux application and discovered I could do it easily using distrobox, and I wouldn’t even know that’s how it was running considering the GUI experience is the same as if I had installed it directly on the system.

Very cool. It’s a little to bad the gaming experience isn’t great, but this is a 8 year old laptop with intel UHD graphics, so not shocked really. Windows gets better performance naturally.

huh, very interesting. I think I’ll give Bazzite a shot and see how it goes. I have an T490 kicking around, but it only has the Intel UHD graphics (no NVIDA Mobile chip, sadly), but on Windows it could handle some gaming. So, I’ll be curious to see how it works out. The Bazzite site says it doesn’t support the “Steam Gaming Mode”, which just means the steam big picture mode.

Your user configs and home files are never changed when you ‘image hop’.

So I have an older Lenovo Laptop that I’m looking to put Linux on to replace an even older Lenovo Laptop I currently have Linux on, and this bit really has me curious about Fedora Atomic. I’m only learning about it now through this post.

I have intermediate experience with Linux, as it’s not my daily driver, how far into the deep end would I be plunging if I gave Fedora Atomic a try?

I love discovering little things like this. That’s a interesting find!

I stand corrected.

Kind of a disappointing read when 2 out of the 3 are not actually services you can use yet.

Could you provide some reading material for those off us who want to have a better understanding of their political process?

Bespoke artisanal stars!

This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.

Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.

Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.

He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.

The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.

• Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.

However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.

A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:

1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.

• Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA

In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.

Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.

In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …

Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…

• Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.

Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:

It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.

• Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)

This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.

Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).

We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…

The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).

• L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG

We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.

All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.

You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.

Anytime comrade!

Before Marx, the term communism was used by many utopian socialists to describe an idealist, egalitarian society.

Its modern usage is almost always traced back to Karl Marx’s usage of the term where he introduced the concept of scientific socialism alongside Friedrich Engels. The theory of scientific socialism described communism not as an idealistic, perfect society but rather as a stage of development taking place after a long, political process of class struggle. Marx, however, used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and he drew no distinction between the two.

Lenin was the first person to give distinct meanings to the terms socialism and communism. The socialism/communism of Marx was now known simply as communism, and Marx’s “transitional phase” was to be known as socialism.

Prolwiki > Communism > Etymology

So yes, there is a distinction between the two, but I have a feeling this isn’t the distinction you were referring to.

Could you be talking about Social Democracy? Because, that’s not socialism, or communism. If you’re interested in this distinction presented by Lenin, you might want to read Chapter 5 of The State and Revolution.

So I think the CIA is talking about specific camps, and it could be possible that these camps were operating different working hours, but maybe what Callcott is describing is an average or generalized notion of an eight-hour day across the entire system. From the first page of the CIA report, section (2), subsection (a), it states:

Forced Labor Camps ia the USSR: This six-page report provides detailed information on the organization of labor camps and on working and living conditions in camps the area of Bratsk (N 56-02, E 101-4O) and Tayshet (N 55-57, E 96-02) in Irkutsk Oblast. The bulk of this information concerns Ozerlag, [ REDACTED ] Other camps described In the report are Kraslag near Tayshet, Minlag in the Vorkuta area, and Vyatlag rear Verkhne-Kansk in Kirov Oblast.

So these camps might have been operating 10 hours days for a reason, and then changed that policy later.

We’re talking about WWII, so actual Nazi’s. You define them by the uniforms they wore and the allegiances they swore, it’s not some mystery.

This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.

Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.

Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.

He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.

The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.

• Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.

However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.

A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:

1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.

• Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA

In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.

Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.

In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …

Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…

• Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.

Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:

It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.

• Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)

This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.

Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).

We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…

The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).

• L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG

We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.

All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.

You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.