ageedizzle

You could argue that our way of life in wealthy countries is impossible without the exploitation of the third-world. Does that mean we are a higher class of humans? No.

Let’s just strive to be as harmless as possible and leave our grand philosophical ideas about who is better than who aside.

Compare: it’s rape to have sex with someone underage, but two underage people can have sex with each other without it being rape.

Not everything is black and white. You are painting a picture where we have two options: (1) cause as much harm as we please and not worry about the consequences, or (2) cause no harm at all by eradicating our species from the face of the Earth (which would actually cause a lot of harm to members of our species but we’ll sidestep that for now).

But this is of course a false dichotomy. Because there are degrees to this. A vegan diet is undoubtably less harmful, both in its carbon footprint and in the direct harm in causes to other species. So if someone wants to reduce the amount of harm they are causing it’s the way to go. So why try to diminish that with this ridiculous dichotomy between death to all humans or unmitigated animal torture? If someone wants to decrease of amount of harm they are causing shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of prosocial mindset?

Bro would rather exterminate all humans than admit that he should just go vegan

Right. But in this particular case it doesn’t make sense. If microbial life were found on, say, Mars then that would be a discovery by NASA, which is a civilian agency. As far as I’m aware you don’t need a security clearance to work at a civilian agency.

On the other hand if the US  found some unknown craft flying in their sky that would immediately become a military matter and so be classified by default

Yeah. If they classify microbial life because it conflicts with religious dogma then you’d expect them to classify any scientific finding that conflicts with religious dogma, which doesn’t seem to be the case.

Why would they classify that information if its just microbial? The motivation for classification is clear if the aliens are flying around in UFOs (so they can reverse engineer their tech without adversaries of the US finding out) but there is no realistic motivation for why they might classify microbial life

Yeah especially if OP sticks with their Mac. The WiFi drivers won’t work on Mac without proprietary drivers

Also worth noting: you don’t need to get ride of MacOS to try linux! You don’t even need to make any permanent changes to your computer. You can also just boot from a USB and see how you like it. This is different from adding the distro to your computer with a USB. Because when you’re just booting from a USB it doesn’t make any permanent changes to your hardware; it literally just runs linux off your USB. Files won’t even be saved between sessions (unless you really tinker around with it, but even then the files will only be saved on your USB). This is a low risk way to play around and check out how well different distros work on your Mac.

I suggest trying Ubuntu. It’s super beginner friendly and has great documentation which should guide you through booting from your USB. I put Ubuntu on my Mac back in the day and it worked great but the speakers didn’t work because the drivers weren’t open source. You should boot Ubuntu from a USB and play around with some sound sources to see what I mean. Since this will likely be the biggest problem you face with Mac its worth checking out before making permanent changes

I was being hyperbolic but the point is the article didn’t point any real negativity towards the users of big tech, just the corporations or CEOs or whoever behind big tech

That was literally my point. Some people bought electric cars because the could, not because they wanted to effect any social change.

Okay. Then don’t really see the relevance here. OPs point was clearly about trying to effect social change.

Is activity pub only used on Linux desktop apps? Can’t a Mac or windows user participate in mastodon?

I wasn’t trying to suggest that they couldn’t.

Fediverse use and Linux are separate issues.

Literally speaking they are different projects, but they are also similar in that they are both open source projects, often both FOSS, so the underlying philosophy behind their development is the same

product of Facebook. Google has poured Fons of money into FOSS development. Should we shun these tools?

Shunning doomscrolling is not the same thing as categorically shunning everything that Google or Meta has ever output. I think its great they contribute to open source projects, I hope they do continue to do so

Op posted create a completely false us v them narrative that just isn’t there.

Personally speaking I didn’t find OPs post to be especially divisive, it I didn’t make me feel compelled to go harm some Windows users or anything like that, but your mileage may vary

Interesting article! Linux seems very techy to me so I never thought of it as being similar to Luddism but it makes perfect sense when you spell it out like that. Thanks for sharing!

Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you are treading into virtue signalling territory and your article has the superior tone of those who bought electric cars in the late 2010s

Except electric cars are hella expensive and linux is free. It is true that OP is making a moral judgement but I don’t think thats the same as ‘virtue signalling’. Open software is a morally charged topic. Some the main reasons why people like open software are moral reasons (the goods of collaboration without profit incentive, the harms of big tech, etc.). So bringing morality into the discussion seems appropriate.

Using Linux is not going to stop your doom-scrolling,

Linux itself might not prevent doomscrolling (though it can help a bit, since default Windows and MacOS settings are always trying to push news and other articles onto the user to plug their respective news aggregation services). But other FOSS software (like the ActivityPub protocol) can for sure make a very sizeable dent in the amount of doomscrolling in one’s life. I agree that OP could have done more to distinguish the Linux project from other FOSS projects, but I think the point still got across.

nor is using Linux by itself telling the big corpos anything at all.

Microsoft is a big corpo. If one of its biggest competitors were free and open source linux distributions with libreoffice suite installed would that not be telling it something? Same goes for Apple as well

Edit for typos