You are wrong in that, yes. Voting is the most basic form of civil participation. It’s like paying your bus fare. Riding the bus is not praxis.

It’s a whole lot easier to organize when you’re able to pressure those in power, though. There is a meaningful difference in organizing conditions under leaders like Zohran Mamdani and even liberals like Joe Biden than it is under fascist regimes.

I’d rather have leaders who are afraid of getting voted out than leaders who want to crush all resistance, and you’re a fool for acting as though it doesn’t matter.

Please go outside.

I condescend idiots who act as though voting does nothing. We managed to elect a socialist mayor in Seattle. The margin was under 1000 votes. Fucking vote.

And stop assuming just because someone is pro-voting means they don’t participate in other effective forms of praxis. You have no idea what people are up to.

I suggest you go outdoors, maybe visit your local library, talk to some people. Ride a bus once in a while. It’s good for ya.

So you’re positioning yourself against “voting” as a concept in this argument, if that isn’t clear by the 23 downvotes

Is this at the Museum of Flight in Washington, near Boeing Field?

If you’re on a Mac, you can likely use an app called “Balena Etcher” to create a bootable Linux USB… if it’s an Intel mac, you can just boot that right up by holding option at boot-time. If you’re on an Apple Silicon Mac, you are not going to be able to boot most Linux distros there. If you’re on PC, you can usually stick the flash drive in and mash F12 at boot-time to get into a menu, select the USB stick, and then it’ll boot you into a “live environment” to test with. That way you can just poke around and see if you like it. Almost all distributions come with a live environment by default.

There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities between the operating systems here. It will take you time to get used to no matter what you do. Start by swapping your apps on your existing Mac, trade out any apps that you know won’t work on Linux with apps that do. That way, you spend some time in your existing environment with the new apps you’re going to need going forward.

Next, make sure to test out your peripherals in a live environment. Does everything you use with your computer work correctly? If not, find out why. See if you can mitigate it, or if you’ll need to replace stuff.

Finally, be willing to experiment. I know others in this thread will recommend various desktop environments and distributions to you. Try many of them. GNOME is good and simple out of the box, feels kinda mac-like, but if you want to completely replicate the functionality of macOS, KDE Plasma has more options for that like global menus and the file management app (Dolphin) is incredibly extensible and customizable.

Try to have fun with it, and don’t give up. It takes time to learn a new way of working, and you will likely have frustrations along the way, but ultimately the goal is to learn and figure out what works best for your needs.

Yeah, and I’m not here to say Windows Server is always the wrong choice. Windows Server is the champion of directory services, because Active Directory is king. Windows Server can also do neat things like run WSUS and stuff. It has its place. In larger deployments, it’s likely typical to run a variety of servers in GUI-less mode, and then have one GUI-equipped install for management.

That being said, my experience is that almost all Windows Server deployments I’ve found in the field have had the GUI, and have therefore been rather sluggish. It’s just part of how it works.

Linux has an extremely flexible architecture. Before Linux, most servers ran on UNIX, and before that, well, networking was in a very early and rudimentary stage.

When UNIX licensing shenanigans kept happening, Linux was a more and more attractive option as it matured.

Today, Linux is an incredibly flexible, reliable and performant OS. It’s free, in most cases. Why would anyone use anything else? HPC software all runs on Linux and UNIX. You can run it on a tiny little SBC like a raspberry pi, you can run it in an embedded system like car infotainment or a smart meter, and you can run it on ultra high-performance supercomputer clusters. It doesn’t give a damn; it just works.

Why would we use anything else? Apple’s ecosystem, while great, makes no sense in the server world. They have their own unique directory service that nobody wants to support (unless they’re trying to sell something to Apple themselves), they have total control over the OS and its capabilities, and it’s technically illegal to modify. Windows has a heavy GUI, and its command-line interface is middling at best and difficult to learn. Windows excels in backwards compatibility and ease of deployment, which makes it ideal for small and medium businesses, but it quickly becomes irrelevant once you scale to a certain point. This is why they’ve got their Azure AD product, for example. It’s attempting to fix the scalability issues with Windows Server. Having spoken to some of the developers of Windows Server, it’s also plain as day that Microsoft is only really maintaining Windows Server to collect on their existing contracts. They have no desire to grow that part of their business.

With all of this in mind, Linux the most obvious choice. It takes no time at all to slap a copy of Ubuntu Server on a pizza box and have a functioning server up in an hour. Everything else is more complex, slower, and costs money.

This is a specimen of the fabled “blue maga” disease. Watch out! It’s contagious if you’re particularly dull.

This is just TOS enforcement, they updated their TOS in October. From the article:

Github updated its acceptable use policies in October 2025 to forbid “sexually themed or suggestive content that serves little or no purpose other than to solicit an erotic or shocking response, particularly where that content is amplified by its placement in profiles or other social contexts.” This include pornographic content and “graphic depictions of sexual acts including photographs, video, animation, drawings, computer-generated images, or text-based content,” according to the terms.

I just buy whatever games come out that strike my fancy. It’s an industry problem that can only be solved by unionization.

How does this sort of thing usually get handled in Canada anyway?

This has become standard practice in this industry now. The play is to work for indie companies or bust.

I don’t know what to tell ya. This country sucks and always has. I’m just hoping this is things getting worse before they get a lot better.

My favorite hotel is the “C’mon inn” in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, etc. It’s a small family-owned chain that charges about $100 per night and has rustic decor and always has a pool and a bunch of jacuzzis. Amazing service, tasty breakfast, low price, and I’m not feeding some gigantic corporation. It’s a matter of finding the smaller outfits, I tell ya.

Yes, that’s the result of this. A better government would pay its citizens a few hundred bucks a day for jury duty.

Most middle class jobs tend to give paid leave for jury duty. If you can’t get that or can’t afford the lost income, you can usually get out of having to appear because of that.

Yeah you would have to study it. I am sure the tracker itself has much data on this, which is why private trackers structure their rules the way they do. In my personal experience, I try to stop seeding torrents that have more than 10 seeders already and a ratio above 1 on my client and more than 60 days seed time. That keeps me from hitting the limits of my torrent client / network / storage / etc.