We overcame feudalism and abolished slavery in the strict sense of the terms, but did we really overcome the whole concepts or did they just shift to a more socially acceptable and insidious version of them? We do have what are commonly called “Technofeudalism” and “Wage Slavery”, and while they’re substantially better than the “original versions” for the “vassals” and “slaves”, the outcome for the ones benefiting from them are relatively the same: corporate giants can still get free money/services just by “renting” stuff they still have ownership on, and billionaires can pretty much “own slaves” from their perspective, since they get labor at a cost that is insignificant in relation to their net worth.

So, again the pessimist in me says, did we really get rid of those concepts with our own efforts or did most of the elites just “allow” us to do that after realizing it wouldn’t really be a problem for them (Mostly speaking about slavery, as quite a bit of time passed between feudalism and technofeudalism)? Will getting actually rid of those concepts be as “easy” as that? (Not that it was easy to get rid of slavery, but we did manage to do it in the end)

And most importantly, in the time since we abolished slavery we did gain more ways to organize across a country or across the world, but at the same time the ruling class gained mass media and social networks which are a MUCH more effective way of spreading propaganda than simple newspapers. What if that was the missing piece that ultimately allows them to make sure we can never get meaningful change going?

When something isn’t going well and we don’t think it’s our fault, the first instinct is to point the finger at someone else, and they know. That’s why the ruling class made sure that we keep pointing our fingers at each other so that the people pointing at them are never enough to consistently organize for change.

Thank you too! I feel like a lot of times online discussions get derailed by tribal mentality, and that prevents both sides from understanding each other’s points, even when they might actually be similar. I think if we all focused on discussing our ideas without personal attacks or assumptions there would be a lot more intelligent dialogues, and while apparently not everyone agrees, it’s always nice when it does happen.

I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it’s consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.

This is a valid reasoning, the issue is that mass media does its best to first convince you that there’s no issue, then that there’s an issue but the consequences aren’t that bad, then that the consequences are bad, but we can’t really do anything about it (the fact that Learned Helplessness is a named concept should be enough to tell how prevalent it is).

And even if someone manages to not fall for that and conceive a plan on how to change things, in a society where you have to work 40+ hours weekly for enough money to get by, how many people have the resources, time and willpower to work towards that plan?

I admit that my outlook might be too pessimistic, but I really feel like it’s going to be hard to correct course until there’s a very large amount of people in a situation so dire that they have nothing to lose. And while that could theoretically happen over time with the political landscape, I fear that for climate change we don’t have that much time.

I wouldn’t say it’s any generation’s fault, it’s simply that, even in a (supposed) democratic age, the elites still have way too many tools to sway the public consensus in their favor. Most people ultimately get greedy when they have the option to do so, and there can never be enough safeguards to prevent that from happening (or maybe there can be and we just haven’t thought of them yet, who knows).

Our generation (but mostly, the Silent Generation and Boomers) have in a sense enabled the elites to do so, but can you really say it’s our fault when the game was rigged from the start?

The problem is that pretty much everything economic still moves on a left/right axis. Capital market reform/redistribution is a left-wing concept, and polarization of wealth, or lack of market regulation, is a right-wing one.

Then at present time there’s a lot of other concepts that have been stapled onto the simple economic axis to further divide the population, such as culture war, religion, discrimination and whatnot, but even if you remove all of that, there’s the fact that a lot of people simply don’t want wealth redistribution. The infamous “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”, as they’re often called. You can’t convince them to “stop fighting” if the very thing you want to achieve is the same one they’re fighting against.

The only way to convince them is to straight-up depropagandize them, to make them realize that the “American Dream” is bullshit, that they’re never going to magically become a billionaire and benefit from all the stuff they’re fighting for, and that wealth redistribution would benefit pretty much everyone on the planet. But there’s people that have tried and failed to do so with their own family, how possible is that to successfully do for the whole country? Especially when every form of information, whether it’s mass media or social networks, work to convince them of the opposite?

By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

Then by that logic, how do you explain Republicans going more and more off the deep end after they kept on winning? The system isn’t “fixed on the status quo”, it’s actively getting worse.

Both parties serve elites, that’s true. But they can only afford to do that because one party promotes Christofascism and half the country joyfully votes for them, so the other can basically do nothing and still be the better choice for a sane person.

There’s a lot that we could theoretically do to change the system, but is that possible when the majority of people in voting age are forced to have a stable job to survive and mass media does everything they can to push narratives in the few spare time they might have to get informed? I’d love if everyone could afford to organize general strikes to, for example, put in place an actually functional voting system instead of FPTP, but that’s just not a likely outcome and probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying all we can do is vote for “our team”. But we NEED to keep doing that, at minimum. Then, if you can afford it, you can also organize to push for reforms, protest, strikes and everything else. But if we keep on letting fascists take office because “the other side was better, but still bad so I didn’t vote them”, soon it’ll even be illegal to do anything else.

The more a party wins, the more the Overton window shifts in its favor.

If Democrats win enough times, Republicans will have to push less radical ideas to get a chance at being elected.

And if Republicans aren’t as much of a threat, Democrats will have to come up with an actual platform that isn’t just “we’re not Republicans”.

You can see the difference in Democrat Presidents from before and after the three consecutive R terms of 80-92, and how Middle-of-the-road the following ones have been. Which allowed Republicans to get more extreme.

We just need to make that happen in reverse.

Understood, thanks!

I think most games I play have Linux compatibility so this shouldn’t be an issue, but is there any other filesystem I could use for a shared drive where I install Steam games and access them from both OS or is it generally a bad idea and I should stick to one?

Thanks for the answers (and additional info)! There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t fully understand but I’ll reread through the comments when I have more questions after installing so it’ll definitely be helpful!

A couple more questions just in case:

If you go for Fedora, make sure to enable “third-party repositories” or “proprietary repositories” when installing the distro, as it is needed to install Nvidia drivers, Steam, and a few other things

I’m assuming you said Fedora as an example but it’s something I should do on any distro which asks that on installation, correct? And is there any downside of doing this besides maybe taking up more space?

Also being a “recent convert” and maybe having it more fresh in your memory compared to other commenters, do you have any recommendations on sites/documents/videos/guides I could use to get a better understanding of how to use Linux in general (or even specifically Mint/similar distros)? I read a few pages of TLDP’s guide but I realized it was very outdated and I might’ve ended up reading hundreds of pages only to find out most of it worked differently nowadays.

Thanks for the answers!

Also, when running Windows software through Wine, you do have to be careful of malware. Generally, Linux is extremely resistant to malware, even in this case, but if the Windows program you’re trying to run includes malware, there is a chance that it could end up doing undesirable things to your Linux system, or at least that it could infect or mess up your Wine installation.

The most likely way this could happen is if you download an infected file in Linux, then boot into Windows and open the infected file.

In both of these cases though, I would have to consciously run a program/open a new file though, correct? Is running it through Bitdefender first good enough to ensure it’s safe?

OHH dammit it wasn’t that hard, I really didn’t make the connection sorry lol

Understood, thanks for the clarifications (…though sorry but I still didn’t understand the “exfat is widely supported b6 “everything”” part lol)

not sure exactly what metadata you mean, i don’t really know well about NTFS’s advanced features. i just tend to have some version of windows installed in another partition or a drive and ocasionally copy files from and to it, never had any issues.

Mostly the common user-facing properties stuff like date created/modified/taken, did everything get saved/transferred correctly or is it just something you didn’t personally care about?

Start up virtualbox or any virtual machine on your windows machine and test drive a few different distributions until you find one you like.

Spin up virtual box again and restore your machine into it. You may have license activation issues but you’ll have access your data. Move your data out of the VM and onto your home folder.

My plan was to, respectively, try distros from live versions and transferring files by copy-pasting everything onto a different drive and back, are there benefits in doing them the ways you suggested instead?

Also note that win11 isn’t nearly as bad as people here say.

Ehh… I tried booting that other “test” PC that I have with W11 and I got a ton of random popups, plus I really don’t like the interface and all the stuff baked in like CoPilot and Recall. I know you can disable them in some way, but if I have to go through the hassle of doing that (plus circumventing the hardware requirements), I might as well use that time to try and understand Linux a bit.

Linux has malware. It’s just different.

First time I hear this, what do you mean? Other commenters said that the permission structure prevents them, are there malware who circumvent that or do you mean like phishing/baiting you into giving permissions to a trojan?

Thanks for the answers!

I’m pretty sure there’s no problem with NTFS on Linux now, but I don’t guarantee though…

I heard I might have some metadata issues due to it being a reverse-enginereed version, I assume in your experience that didn’t happen?

It surely can corrupt a file e.g. you run a document editor in WINE and the program crashes while the file is open.

So I assume I should still check for compatibility before running something that opens other files, I guess?

What you’re looking for is “Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC 21H2”.

Understood, 21H2 and 2021 are two names for the same thing, correct?

But anyway, I don’t recommend regular Win10, just switch to IoT LTSC :)

Yeah, the options are in order of preference so of course regular W10 would be the worst option, I asked just in case I didn’t manage to activate LTSC in time (by the way, are there any downsides to activating it with massgrave and the others compared to buying a key from… certain sites? It’s relatively cheap so I wouldn’t mind but if it’s exactly the same I might as well save some bucks)

Thanks for the answers!

1c: Firefox profiles are fully portable to any other Firefox install.

I knew they had an export/sync feature, but does it include stuff like browser history as well?

1e: Nothing. It doesn’t touch any of your filesystems unless YOU touch them. Don’t delete anything, and you’re fine. It should even automount your existing identified partitions for you to browse through.

I was mostly afraid of deleting something by mistake since I don’t know much about how the commands work, but by your reply I assume it’s not something easy to do unintentionally (?)

2-3: I wouldn’t even bother trying to figure any of this out, because Microsoft constantly changes their mind about this, and they’ll soon just force you into this abomination of Windows 12 they’ve been talking about recently.

Yeah, I’d avoid doing that too, but I have a lot of hoarded stuff and might still need a windows partition in case some of my friends really want to play something with anti-cheat. Of course, even if I do end up going the LTSC way for the main pc, I’m still gonna try and learn Linux at the same time on the secondary one, I know it’s just delaying the inevitable.

Thanks for the answers!

exfat is widely supported b6 “everything”

Sorry, could you ELI5 this part? (and I heard exFAT doesn’t have journaling so a power outage could result in data loss, did they add it or should I get an UPS just in case?)

So in other words, if you boot from a live USB, you have to actually try to ruin anything on your disk - I’m having a hard time imagining how one would do this by accident.

So my persistent storage isn’t mounted by default when I boot from a live version, correct? And if I do mount something, it should still be ok unless I do some weird specific thing with the CLI?

I posted it here because it had some non-Linux related questions, but where would you suggest posting it otherwise? Simply on !linux@programming.dev?

I’ll admit I’m not that informed in the field, but did Samsung have any controversies that caused everyone to consider it worse than Chinese-owned companies? The only negative I’m aware of is that their stuff is really overpriced.

Was it? “Danny” is saying people are “celebrating him getting punched”, and context says he’s the one who got banned.

(I also think/hope the one you replied to said “I hope he’s alright” in response to “I’m not yet sure what happened to the kid that punched the fascist”)

So sure, all you “non-essential” personnel stay home. We saw how useless your jobs were during COVID. After this day, your companies will see that too and well, you can easily participate in more of these without fear of losing the job you don’t have.

I respect the ideal of a General Strike

It really doesn’t seem like you do, to be fair.