The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.

I don’t know anything about games and thought it was a reference to The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).

plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.

Isn’t it a bit arbitrary to just divide time into generations like this? It makes more sense for big events in history, like the world wars, but now, I don’t know. According to this I am a millennial, but what does that mean really? That I saw the internet become what it is now? Not a very defining thing for a whole generation imho.

There are some old interviews with George RR Martin where people ask him about various characters, and GRRM would adjust his pronounciation to match the person asking the question. So he’s pronouncing names differently in different interviews depending on how others pronounce them. I wonder if it is to make the other person comfortable, or if he just doesn’t have a canon pronounciation.

A good story about a bad day doesn’t have to be about complaining. It can be about learning from mistakes, a strange irony, the absurdity of coinciding factors, etc.

Glad midsommar! Hade ni något regn med?

I guess it becomes a matter of strategy. Maybe progressive women aren’t the ones who need to hear it the most, and they may feel offended at the suggestion that other women could be part of reinforcing the patriarchy. It mirrors the way men are asked to shut down other mens sexist remarks and actions. I’m sure such behavior is prevalent, but I never witness it. So the question to me is, how do we communicate this whole thing to women as a group? The ones willing to listen aren’t the ones who need to hear it, and the ones who need to hear it are probably not willing to listen.

Yes, that’s a good point. And maybe sort of the reason I’m interested in these topics, is trying to figure out how to influence the social circles around me.

I agree that those are sane approaches. I do think that there can be immediate unintended consequences. If someone didn’t pay for a meal, there’s propably less chance of a second date. Etc.
I imagine women went through similar consequences while entering traditionally masculine jobs and behavior.
What I’m getting at is that I think that we often think that this pressure is all in our minds, and to some extent that’s true, but there are many stories of men opening up and being vulnerable and then their partners lose attraction. That’s a hard sell to young men. “Yes, you will be alone forever, but it’s necessary because in a couple of generations from now things might be better.”

By refusing to take part in the hierarchy of dominance you will eventually be subject to a more general and, frankly, human set of standards.

You mention some examples, like defending your partner from a mugger, calling out your boss when treated unfairly, paying for meals, etc.
Let’s say a man stopped doing those things, what do you think the immediate and short term consequences would be?

It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”

If you don’t want to touch anything, you could boot from a live USB image and try it?

I wonder how much work would be needed to make a “FreeDesktop Linux” complete OS, with the runtime + whatever it needs beyond that. Then when you install a flatpak, it’s just like installing, uh, I didn’t think this through tbh.

Maybe I am hung up on the word, but I feel more forced into it. I don’t feel bad about myself for failing to live up to that standard, it’s more feeling unvalued as a person, as myself. It’s an external invalidation.

Maybe Debian with a wm? I like cwm, but there are many to choose from. You can add pretty much any cool feature on top.

Which features are you looking for beyond what can be done on Debian?