Sorry! Messed the link up. Should work now.

A lemmy user emailed Slate about tracking and data collection, and they responded that the Slate will have no wifi or tracking capabilities.

Also @[email protected]

I'd noticed your comments advertising that site in past, but since you regularly engaged with lemmy outside of advertising your battery deals site, I didn't feel the need to step in. But astroturfing your site as though you're a random activist who 'just so happened to be looking at this cool site that's totally not mine™' is a step too far, treading into scummy territory.

I don't want to see any more links to gearscouts on slrpnk.net communities from this point forward. And if you decide to continue to advertise on other instances; for gods sake man, just own that it's yours.

A lot of Linux distros don't make money, I don't think that's a huge factor. A lack of interest so far is more likely (though I do recall there was a distro that was trying to be a 1 to 1 chromeOS replacement.

I just wanted to point out that us techies take a lot of our knowledge for granted, and it can be easy to lose perspective on what its like for tech illiterates.

It is an odd thing to disqualify it as well, since the Ostree stuff is not used by normal users on those distros, and at least on uBlue distros, they are even replacing the DE store witg their own that only offers flatland, essentially making it as simple as android to use.

There are still some kinks to work out to make it a true replacement to ChromeOS (if there's still a single app on the store that needs flatseal to get working or fix some visual glitch, or allow to view a certain directory, then it wouldn't be as smooth as ChromeOS), but it's getting pretty close to what the author wants.

The author is suggesting that a distro that's extremely locked down, reliable, and with very limited user choice would be desirable traits for mass adoption by non-tech enthusiasts.

There'd no reason that a community built version of that vision would have to include data harvesting as well.

I use Debian as well, but there's an incredible amount of previous knowledge required to understand what its doing and how to set it up that experienced users take for granted. An innate curiosity and lack of fear of breaking things can make learning all that knowledge seem trivial to us, but to someone without those traits, it's an impassable obstacle.

A mostly tech illiterate person being plopped in front of a Debian install would have to learn on the spot:

Huh, what's this root password thing for?

Partitioning? What's that mean? I guess I'll select guided.

XFCE, KDE, cinnamon, gnome? What are those? Guess I'll check them all.

Okay I'm logged in, ooh this is neat. How do I install something? Ah, a store! (Only if they happened to log into gnome or KDE), this app looks cool, let's install that. Huh? I'm not in the sudoers file? What's that? I just want to install an app! Ugh, this is way too nerdy for me. I'm done.

Oh no, my Windows is gone!

If we assume that they had figured out how to install software and continue to use it, there would be nothing to inform them their firewall is off, nor that they would need to install GUFW to configure it with a GUI.

All of that is trivial for us. We know much of the basic concepts already, know what sort of questions to ask and where to find trustworthy information, and don't mind learning new things.

But for the tech illiterate, what we're doing may as well be magic. A locked down, dumbed down experience is what they would feel comfortable with.

The immutable distros are very chromeOS-like. Bluefin GTS from UBlue in particular would probably fit the bill if it wasn't developer oriented.

Ah, I see they mentioned that in the article.

Dexed is a great free FM synthesis with tons of great presets.

Superb stuff! The dithered shading on the robot really makes it pop with dimension!

(Or is it an observatory? The black hole at the base could be an entrance, but I was second guessing myself since the scale of the grass would make it very small. Perhaps an entrance for an advanced species of intelligent lemmings who learned not to dive off cliffs? 😄)

No worries! Slrpnk.net was down until a few hours ago, perhaps that broke the alt-text from showing up? Last time it went down, I noticed a banner and community icon I had uploaded from slrpnk to a community on a different instance broke. I was surprised to learn that it had been pulling those images from my instance the entire time instead of it being stored on the outside instance, so maybe the same thing happens with alt-text?

Currently a general strike in the US is planned for May 1st 2028 to coincide with the UAW's contract ending. Unfortunately that's 3 years away, and I doubt climate policy is going to be a focus of that strike.

Hopefully we can organize one sooner, but we'll see. Syndicalist unions independent of corporate control would be the most likely to initiate a general strike, so I'd recommend joining up and unionizing your job with them if you can.

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

I also hope the rest of the world pushes for their own general strikes.

It should already have a quite detailed alt text. Does it not display when the image is hovered over with the mouse?