TheTechnician27

Flip Windows and macOS and I think the meme works again.

Maybe I can start building up savings if I work overtime by zoning out of movies and thinking about stocking the grocery store for half an hour…

Hell wait, if I just think about being Nvidia CEO, can I split Jensen’s salary?

OP, I would seriously consider trying the Arch Wiki for this. I really hope you had a backup, but you probably need expert-level advice here (at least below “paid data recovery specialist”) if you have any hope of unfucking this. Obviously you’ve learned your lesson about running random commands you don’t understand in response to an error message, so I don’t think people should be scolding you for that.

• sudo is telling the computer to do this with root privileges.
• chmod sets permissions.
• Each digit of that three-digit number corresponds to the owner, the group, and other users, respectively. It’s 0–7, where 0 means no access and 7 means access to read, write, and execute. So 077 is the exact inverse of 700, where 077 means “the owner cannot access their own files, but everyone else can read, write, and execute them”. Corresponding 700 to asexuals is joking that nobody but the owner can even so much as touch the files.
• / is the root directory, i.e. the very top of the filesystem.
• The -R flag says to do this recursively downward; in this case, that’s starting from /.

So here, we’re modifying every single file on the entire system to be readable, writable, and executable by everyone but their owner. And yes, this is supposed to be extremely stupid.

Basically what @meekah@lemmy.world said: the idea is to be practicable. Here’s a stream of disconnected thoughts about this:

• What you pointed out is actually consistent with how a disproportionate amount of vegans are staunchly anticapitalist.
• A cut-and-dry example of someone who’s still vegan but eats animal products based on “practicable” is someone whose prescription medication contains gelatin with no other pill type; vegans aren’t going to say “lol ok too bad bozo you’re not vegan anymore”.
• The core focus of veganism has traditionally been non-human animals with the idea that a reduction of cruelty and exploitation toward humans is, at most, peripheral. This is changing in my opinion, especially when questions like “vegan Linux distro” don’t involve animals short of what the devs eat.
• Based on what you say (as someone else pointed out), a distro based solely on FLOSS would probably be regarded as “the most vegan” if that were ever measured by anyone (it never would be).
• It’s a weird analogy, but after you’re done using and purchasing products derived from animals, what’s “practicable” from there is kind of like a vegan post-game. Many vegans, for example, won’t eat palm oil because of how horribly destructive it is to wildlife.
• Growing all your own food is in that post-game area of “practicable”. It’s up to you to decide if that’s practicable for you. It’s up to you to implement that if you think it is or, if it’s not, to maybe think about how else you can reduce harm with how you buy vegetables. It’s up to you if you want to share that idea and help other people implement it themselves. It’s widely accepted that it’s not up to you to determine if it’s practicable for others.

I would say that most vegans, even if they’ve never heard it, at least approximately follow the Vegan Society’s famous definition:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Striking the parts that seem irrelevant to this specific question:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for […] any […] purpose […]

Keep in mind that “animals” in that first part is widely treated as “humans and non-human animals”. So you would have to decide 1) to what extent cruelty was inflicted to create the distro, 2) to what extent people and non-human animals were exploited to create the distro, and 3) if there exist practicable alternatives that meaningfully reduce (1) and (2).

“Play has no limits, but your credit card does. Let’s aim for that.”

blackbox/BlackBox

Currently, Karton is actively developed by Derek Lin, a University of Waterloo student participating in Google Summer of Code 2025. His primary aim is to deliver a virtual machine manager that truly belongs in the KDE ecosystem.

Neat, but celebrating this as “finally getting” seems premature at best.

Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?

Because it’s called “lifetime”? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that you close your account? “Why pay for anything if there’s nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?” The gardener advertised a “whole-yard mow” for $100, but I’ve already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?

You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of “lifetime” users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it’s even possible is what’s deeply disturbing, because it’s deliberate. Lifetime’s meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising “lifetime” subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like “approximately five years or so but honestly we don’t really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to”).

People are assuming it’s for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn’t seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like “probably for the lifetime of your Plex account” with no sources to anything. I’m not trying to sealion here; I literally can’t find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what “lifetime” actually means to the end user. If Plex isn’t going to rugpull, why can’t they add a couple sentences to their TOS saying something like: “The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]”?

They could, they should, they don’t, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would’ve offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn’t overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the “lifetime” pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I’ll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I’ll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using “lifetime” in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.

Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don’t make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.

If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, “fine”, but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I’m certainly not paying you a dime. I’ll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.

You literally said you have Plex pass in the other comment, why are you playing dumb?

They care about the people who don’t have a “lifetime” pass? Having empathy for others who don’t have what you have, caring about the ethics of a company whose products you use and pay for, and taking a stance that software should be as free and open as possible aren’t “playing dumb”. If anything, as someone who isn’t just using Plex for free, they’ve earned more of a right to complain, because they’ve shown they’re willing to pay for quality services but think this one is exploitative.

Maybe even disregarding empathy, they’re worried that existing features will become locked behind a tier that the “lifetime” pass doesn’t apply to? Maybe they’re worried that their “lifetime” pass won’t be so “lifetime” if “lifetime” wasn’t explicitly defined to mean lifetime at the time of purchase? Anything bad that can happen will happen with VC-fueled enshittification.

I also want to emphasize that relicensing from the GPLv2 to something proprietary is damn-near impossible for a project this large with a team who are so ideologically motivated to make FOSS. If I today submit a PR to the Jellyfin codebase, they can’t legally relicense to a proprietary license without 1) getting my consent to give them ownership of my work (I’m not likely to be paid off or convinced it’s a good thing that work I submitted for free is being enshittified), or 2) removing my work from the project if they can’t get in touch with me or if I say no. To emphasize: this consent is affirmative.

Thus, the process is to survey who’s contributed to the project, reach out to anyone whose work is still in the project (preferably in writing in a permanent, court-admissable format like email), ask them to transfer ownership of their copyright to you, keep track of who’s said no, said yes, or not answered, fulfill conditions for anyone who wants something in return, and meticulously rip out all of the code from people who say “no” or don’t answer. One of the project’s major contributors died 10 years ago? Legally, too fucking bad: they didn’t relinquish shit to you. Rip out that legacy code and start over.

Just like for instance if you want to take a Wikipedia article and own it for yourself, you can’t just go ask the Wikimedia Foundation nicely. You have to contact every single contributor whose work is extant in that article, and rip out work that isn’t explicitly given to you by its owner.

Some points as someone who does not use Tailscale:

• Tailscale the software is under a BSD license. Plex is proprietary.
• The discussion in this thread about Jellyfin is less corporate versus non-corporate (where in the context of proprietary software this would be payware versus freeware) and more FOSS versus proprietary software.
• To be clear, Tailscale is proudly doing the same Series C venture capital bullshit as Plex. They’re seemingly just as corporate as Plex, but at minimum, the software as it exists right now isn’t tied down to Tailscale.
• Additionally, this isn’t Tailscale versus Plex; it’s Jellyfin + Tailscale versus Plex.
• Jellyfin + Tailscale means that you’re using Jellyfin, which is FOSS. Using FOSS doesn’t just benefit you but also everyone else using it because it benefits greatly from the network effect. Any money that goes to Jellyfin that would’ve otherwise gone to Plex is given back to the community and hard-working developers rather than lining some soulless venture capitalist’s pocket.
• With Jellyfin + Tailscale, everything you’re using locally is FOSS. With Plex, none of it is. And even taking corporate into account, with Jellyfin + Tailscale, most of what you’re using locally is non-corporate. With Plex, all of it is corporate.
• Tailscale is giving you a real service through use of their VPN. Because Plex is run on the end user’s infrastructure and barely touches Plex’s server for remote streaming, they’re basically just making you pay them a “fuck you, that’s why” subscription fee.

TL;DR: This isn’t a binary “corporate versus non-corporate”.

Dollars to donuts it’s the corpo-fascist “tread on me harder, daddy” version of “freedom” they’re advocating for.

Not quite. Jellyfin does take in donations, but they intentionally hide this feature on their website – first you need to go to their Contribute page, then you need to read “Find a way to contribute” blurb and notice and click Other, then you need to click Help Pay for Expenses, then they give you a speech practically asking you to reconsider:

As a project, we generally do not like asking for donations - we are entirely volunteer-run and intend to keep Jellyfin free as in beer, as well as free as in speech, forever. We do not wish, support, nor intend donations to privilege any user’s voice or priorities. That said, if you do want to help us cover some operating expenses like our VPS hosting, domains, developer licenses, metadata API keys, and other incidental expenses, check out our OpenCollective page to donate. Our entire budget as well as all expenses are publicly visible there.

And then you have to click that link and intentionally donate money – any amount you want either one time or monthly. The level of integrity compared to Plex – who take in VC money hand over fist and are descending into nickel-and-diming their customers – isn’t night-and-day: it’s the surface of a star and the center of the Boötes Void.

same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

“you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. That’s how the license was designed to work. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)

Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project (no matter how large): 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.

The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time reading the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

Absolutely true for FOSS. For freeware? My opinion is that it’s money wasted because, unlike FOSS:

• I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
• There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
• Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about and make progress toward bettering the world.
• Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page, incidentally, for no particular reason. Let Plex eat up their $90+ million in venture capital instead of taking money from the little guy and then fall off a cliff into an abyss of enshittification.