>"I'd say the same for YouTube. It's used to watch videos. The number of people who comment on them is minimal compared to the userbase."

That is exactly what I came to post. I use YouTube all the time. I have *never* logged into it. So for tons of people, it is not "social media".

Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly useless without a login. You can see a bit of it, then it stops.

>"I'd be very curious to the exact definition of "social media" they use is. I don't think it's what most people consider to be social media."

Bingo. Plays right into my comments last week about the stupid Virginia law trying to force "age checking" for "social media" and they don't even define what "social media" is or is not. As if everyone knows exactly what it is. Yet, somehow, stripping adults of their privacy and rights will save children (since parents refuse to restrict or withhold internet-connected devices from their children).

Is Slashdot "social media"? How about my local LUG's forum? What about the comments section on Amazon or Walmart product pages? Or reviews of apps on Google Play? A USENET group? Chat sessions in online games? If just watching videos is "social media" does that make broadcast TV or cable TV or a movie theater "social media"?

>"but really HSR should be focused on interstates. "

Exactly. That is about all we can expect would be workable/affordable. Otherwise it requires extremely expensive elevated tracks. The problem with many Interstates is that some of them now are nearly "full", having expanded multiple times for more lanes. There isn't an usable center area and sides are pinned in.

>"The majority of the people you show it you will download it and do a full nuke-and-pave"

Doubtful. Although it might be a significant minority.

>"then wonder why this new 'Windows' can't run their favorite programs".

Like a browser? Because for a huge chunk of home users, that is all they really use now.

>"Even if all 1 million downloads turn into real OS installs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to Windows installs."

True. But if even if a small number of those people then show someone else and that other person switches, and on, and on, awareness keeps spreading. That is a great thing.

Generally, I don't care what OS people use (as long as I don't have to support it), but I do care if they are unhappy. Having Linux as an option is really great and works fantastically for a large number of people willing to really try it. The fact that it is free, fast/efficient, has no licensing mess, is more secure, more privacy-oriented, more controllable, more customizable, more open, easier and faster to update, and without forced cloud crud, no AI creep, no ads or nagware, and very little fake/forced hardware "obsolescence" all make it a very compelling option for lots of use cases. Not all use cases, but a surprisingly large number.

>"However, after Microsoft's recent announcement their own updates have broken their own system [slashdot.org] combined with no longer supporting W10, this can only lead to good things."

Microsoft obviously has its own agenda that doesn't mesh at all with what many (perhaps even most) users want now. And it shows. As MS-Windows has gotten significantly worse and more hostile over the decades, Linux/distros have gotten significantly better. Even people who haven't tried it in 5 years are often pleasantly surprised.

I tend to point people to Mint, but Zorin might be just fine, as well (I just have no experience with it).

>"I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working"

Generally, that is Linux. I have installed various Linuxes over decades on hundreds of various machines. For the most part, modern Linux detects all the typical hardware and just configures and uses it. There is no need to "install drivers".

>"I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up"

Again, that is generally the case with modern Linux. All the good distros can be completely managed through a GUI.

Could you end up with trying to install a not-so-great distro on a machine that has some unusual hardware? And have to take a dive into stuff? Sure. But that is the exception, not the rule, at least not in 2025.

As I already said in the previous post:

"MacOS mostly doesn't really even use ~/.config, because, well, "Apple".

We don't know if Mozilla will do that on MacOS, which does not follow all Unix conventions. Especially desktop ones, of which this is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

>"Linux" appears ZERO times in the specification."

And yet, 99% of who this change will affect will likely be Linux users. MacOS mostly doesn't really even use ~/.config, because, well, "Apple".

>"This is a specification for UNIX. Linux copied from UNIX but is not UNIX."

If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is probably a duck. Linux is Unix, in all ways that matter to anyone now (and for a long time before now). Worrying about exact Linux vs Unix vs UNIX vs Unix-like vs BSD vs POSIX is kinda no longer relevant.

>"Apps should keep their files in their own directories. Spreading them across a 1000 different directories makes no sense and just make uninstall a hassle"

It will still be in its own directory. Just in ~/.config/mozilla instead of ~/.mozilla

For example, LibreOffice stores its settings in ~/.config/libreoffice, GIMP is in ~/.config/GIMP, Thunar is in ~/.config/Thunar, VLC is in ~/.config/vlc, etc...

>"To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~/.mozilla rather than the likes of ~/.config and ~/.local/share.

That is not technically correct. They have been using ~/.cache correctly for a very long time. So it is not *all* files. But it is true the other files have been in ~/.mozilla. I manage an ACTUAL multiuser system (something you rarely see today; yes, hundreds of different users each often running Firefox on that one machine), and even I don't care much that it is ~/.mozilla instead of ~/.config/.mozilla, but I will have to adjust a lot of scripts.

MacOS has its own barriers to calling itself a professional operating system. A good part of my job is forcing it to conform to basic enterprise system management practices.

Calling them names and leveling false accusations at them is kind of the exact opposite of ignoring them in peace. Unless that's what brings you peace, in which case you're the mentally ill fuckup in that equation.

Demanding that people who are different from you to explain themselves to your satisfaction before you're willing to leave them the hell alone is peak conservative asshole.

I can manufacture outrageous events from my imagination and then extrapolate that fiction into a nation-wide systemic problem too!

There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.

You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.

The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.

You're just starting to acknowledge the possibility?