Gender neutral pronouns might be pretty huge too, but nobody’s private data is getting hacked because of gendered pronoun use.

The issue is that you lump people closer to the peasant class in with the modern feudal lord class.

The CEOs and major shareholders of said companies already have all the wealth they could ever need. They do it just to make number go up. They COULD spend their money and time on enterprises that benefit humanity, but that’s just not profitable so it’s not fun. Most employees, however, could last maybe a year or 2 without their salaries if they’ve been saving up a lot. Or maybe a week if they haven’t. Average case for software engineers at huge companies, probably a few months.

They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.

There’s just a lot less money in that, and thus fewer jobs (and the ones that DO exist, pay worse).

If you want to retire early, or if you have kids whose future you want to secure, you want to get the best paying job possible. It’s well known in my country that the online casino software companies pay way more than most non-casino software companies. You know when people start looking into those jobs? When they start families.

Let’s take a look at an example here: You’re currently being paid to work on the Windows operating system itself. Certainly spies on its users, puts ads everywhere, etc. Good news, there ARE companies that develop counter products. You could work at Apple (comes with its’ own ethical issues), or at one of the companies working on desktop Linux distros. So mainly Red Hat or Canonical, because most desktop Linux distros are community-driven, but Fedora and Ubuntu are two great examples that have paid devs.

Canonical is trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (through enshittifying the desktop with snaps and ads, as well as selling you on Ubuntu Pro), whereas Red Hat is… trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (by reducing source accessibility of their enterprise offering, though at least they’re not doing that with Fedora). Oops!

What IS the alternative here? Work on desktop Linux software for free, in your free time. But that doesn’t put food on the table, so you’ll still have to work at one of those evil corps.

Similarly for Meta. Facebook is huge. What are the alternatives? Lemmy for Threads, Friendica for Facebook itself. What are the devs being paid? Nothing, really. I think Dessalines is slowly starting to approach a livable salary for Lemmy, looking at his Patreon. Friendica’s Tobias doesn’t even seem to have a donation page anywhere.

If you’ve got the luxury of plentiful free time, definitely contribute to open source alternatives to commercial projects. But if you don’t, you have to put bread on the table somehow…

How hard is it to get into Microsoft?

The privacy nutter part of my brain hates them about as much as the other (insert acronym here) companies. The “I have a family” part wants me to get paid enough to secure our future, so I’m looking into getting a US tech job in the next ~5-10 years (I’m aware that it’s a PAIN of a process if I need sponsorship, but luckily Microsoft has EU offices too)

It’s called OpenStreetMap and there are many apps for it! Organic Maps is a good one and I like it for when I go abroad and want to preload an entire country instead of downloading maps on my paltry 33 or whatever gigs of roaming allowance (that also only works in the EU - if I want to visit the US, I get to pay out the ass for 250 MB or 1 GB at a time)

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Oh definitely

You’re right, I believe the only thing Switzerland mandated (or wants to mandate?) is for projects built FOR the government to be open sourced - and even then, there are exemptions.

Of course, unlike you, I don’t live in Switzerland, so I’m probably not as informed.

More limited, but also less enshittified than Windows.

If you want a good, well-polished experience for certain creative workloads, or even programming, MacOS is great and their Apple Silicon CPUs are excellent.

If you want to do ANY gaming besides WoW (which surprisingly enough has always had great MacOS support) or you can’t stand the lack of configurability, Linux is immediately the superior choice by far.

Just never go outside without leather gloves and a ski mask

Follow me for more excellent tips that definitely won’t make you look like a serial killer to everyone

We just see incremental performance improvements for enthusiasts/professionals and little more than power draw improvements for everyone else.

For several years we didn’t even see those. When AMD wasn’t competitive, Intel didn’t do shit to improve their performance. Between like Sandy Bridge (2011) and Kaby Lake (2016) you’d get so little performance uplift, there wasn’t any point in upgrading, really. Coffee Lake for desktop (2017) and Whiskey Lake for laptops (2018) is when they actually started doing… anything, really.

Now we at least get said incremental performance improvements again, but they’re not worth upgrading CPUs for any more often than like 5 or more years on desktop IMO. You get way more from a graphics card upgrade and if you’re not pushing 1080p at max fps, the improvements from a new CPU will be pretty hard to feel.

Did you get a kernel binary from them? If not, I don’t think they’re bound to you by GPL.

I was just making a joke about your username being a distro tbh

It’s Puppy Linux, isn’t it?

Ah might be right. I believe the one side hinge replacement netted you a new display cable, not a new antenna now that I think of it.

Not just an uninitiated person. I had done thousands and still occasionally severed them.

I believe in this model the antenna is replacable though?

Might be true for people buying their own WiFi routers.

Which already isn’t most consumers, because most people use what their ISP gives them.

I don’t think Windows uses a microkernel. Hybrid kernel is the term I’ve heard used.

FIFA 17, Roblox and Minecraft? Yeah I reckon a modern integrated GPU is just fine.

But unfortunately it seems like your friend’s preferred games aren’t all that Linux friendly. Maybe get him addicted to a Steam library on Windows first and then you can win him over using Proton lol