I’ve played Skyrim and Fallout 3 & 4 on Linux, and Uncharted. They worked just fine.

You need to enable Proton for all ‘unsupported’ titles in Steam (literally two clicks). After that…the only games I’ve found that don’t work are down to anti-cheat. I used to occasionally have to change the Proton version for some games, but it’s been a while since I had to do that.

It’s nothing like gaming on Linux was 10 years ago. It’s much more like gaming on Windows, the last time I did it: you occasionally find a game that needs tweaking, but 95% work flawlessly.

Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

Whew, okay.

food deserts

…Are a thing. They’re around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This…just isn’t a huge deal. It’s a public policy tweak away from being solved.

the complete market domination of amazon

Amazon has a shitload of competitors in every sector. AliExpress, Best Buy, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, etc etc etc. But Amazon is solid as hell, so people stick with them. If they slip, people have endless options.

local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise.

Don’t care. I mean, I feel for the owners, but…you know that like 90% of everybody in the Western world worked in agriculture? Including all my great-grandparents. But then they got outcompeted by more successful farmers (including corporate operations in some cases) and ended up shutting down and selling their place. None of my grandparents worked in agriculture.

Was that a tragedy, for me or for them? Do I wish I still owned a dozen acres of land in the middle of the Canadian prairies, on which I could grow just enough to sustain myself? Lol, the fuck do you think?

Small businesses are lost to progress. This is great.

planned obsolescence

I’ve been buying more repairable devices. Thus the Framework laptop. And the government is putting pressure on companies to allow repairs, which is good. In the end, though, this is our fault, because we’re a bunch of short-sighted assholes who are distracted by shiny things. We don’t have to be.

the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you’re referring to are produced by like two corporations

Why on earth would I care? Again, beyond those two companies, there are a thousand up-and-comers, so if the big guys slip there will be alternatives. In the meantime? They do a really fucking good job. If the government operated like Post, I’d enjoy going to the DMV.

the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves.

…In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it’s authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans.

Yeah, that sucks, we should do something about that.

the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.

But the ‘wealth’ bar falls every day. People in Africa are able to access AIDS medication so successfully that I read recently it’s on the path to eradication. And there just isn’t a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it’s kinda fucking irrelevant, isn’t it?

capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering.

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it. Suffering is normal from any sane reading of history. But we’ve driven the share of people in serious poverty, on the verge of famine and starvation, from 80+% a century ago to well under 20% today. There’s a lot of causes for that, but capitalism is high on the list.

East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India

East India Company was a monopoly grant by the crown of England. They had an army. They weren’t capitalist, they were colonialist. I know you can’t tell a difference between Amazon shipping you a shirt you bought from them voluntarily because you wanted a shirt, and the East India Company using their military to extract taxes from the natives using fear and violence, but to me it’s a pretty significant difference.

and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently. Look up the the most fatal events in human history, and a whole lot of them are famines in China or India–most of them long before Westerners ever turned up. Saying “capitalism sucks, because there were famines that overlapped with the rise of capitalism!” is like saying “This house sucks, because while we were in the process of building it, before we had a proper roof, we got rained on! We should tear the house down again!”

Fuck this is exhausting.

It’s true that capitalism isn’t perfect, and even more to the point, it doesn’t exist in a perfect world: people trade for goods on open markets, and at the same time there are enslaved people in Africa. People pool their resources to fund enterprises that offer goods & services for sale, and even as they do so, the American government works to achieve policy objectives which I don’t personally agree with. Giving people the freedom to buy, sell, work, and invest as they please has fantastically increased the wellbeing of those people & countries who participated, but it hasn’t solved literally every problem in the world (especially in places that have very specifically not participated).

So you want to rise up and shut down the markets and ban enterprise. In it’s place you have nothing. You have no working system to replace it. Nobody has proposed anything that could take it’s place in anything but the vaguest, most loose terms possible. “What if everything was like…better, man?” Fucking useless. Anyway, even if you did have a goal, you have no politically viable means to reach it. Historically, the best anybody has come up with was, “hey, how about we just kill a bunch of people who are better off than we are, then sit around and talk about how much better things could be?” Then somebody with charisma gathers enough followers to seize power, and things get really fucked up.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you’re just whining. And I haven’t seen anything even beginning to approach a half-baked vision. I am profoundly unimpressed. At the same time I think you (and others like you) suffer from a profound lack of perspective on where we are and how impressive it is that we got here.

me: looks at cereal aisle at the local grocery store

No…I think i’ve got plenty of choices, thanks. In which areas do you feel like your freedom to chose is badly impinged-upon?

Do you want a list of tech companies that have been allowed to fail? It’s a very long list.

I’m typing this on NixOS on a Framework laptop. Very happy with both. Both were products of (*gasp*) capitalism!

I’m sitting in a 20-year-old La-Z-Boy chair. Not the most beautiful, but it sure is comfortable, and it’s in good condition for it’s age.

Sipping on a nice red wine. Don’t remember the company–it was a random pick, one of thousands of choices. Anyway, it’s great, I’m enjoying it. Snacking on some corn nuts from Trader Joes.

That’s just a few companies whose products I appreciate, and am interacting with right this instant.

Google annoys me sometimes. I’m kinda de-googling, and it’s harder than it ought to be. Still: totally doable. Microsoft was a huge PITA back in the 90s and 00s, but these days they don’t affect me at all. It didn’t fail, but it changed in major ways, and more to the point it became irrelevant in important ways.

Overall, when I compare the system I’m living in with the alternatives that we’ve tried in the past…well, it’s very much a no-brainer.

Like asking ‘how can you be a marxist if you don’t love every single person?’

There are companies I like and companies I don’t like. Capitalism is all about having the choice to pick what I buy and what I use. Shitty companies are free to fail. That’s actually a really important part of capitalism.

Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t even load the context anymore.

I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed “it’s not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!” That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.

I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?

Yeah, if there’s a -r (sometimes -R) in the command line, be careful: it means ‘recursive’, and it’s gonna do it to all the files.

Likewise with *. It’s a wildcard meaning “match everything”. I think that’s widely understood?

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Mainly /home/. As long as you have a backup of that, you can usually recover almost everything if something goes wrong by just installing all the same software. Configs, documents, downloads, saves, and so on are almost always stored in /home.

Trans is something we made up.

Gender non-conformity is a real thing and happens across all cultures. Our approach to understanding it is culturally specific, and kinda fucked up.

I love Linux Mint: it’s perfect for my parents’ computer.

There’s a few different community browsers:

browse.fediverse.de

lemmyverse.net

It’s still got the problem of being repetitive.

I’m…not sure you’re really in sync with a lot of the people here. I’m 100% in favor of all of that, which I would just call healthy capitalism.

I guess I’m reacting to other conversations I’ve had today. A lot of people with Mao banners and Che Guevara profile pics, calling for the total overthrow of capitalism.

If people are just talking about capitalism with accountability, hell, sign me up.

Fair enough. I know Achilles’ and Patroclus’ affair has been discussed for more than a century.

I subbed to Reddit’s community on this topic (SapphoAndHerRoommate?) out of curiosity, and it struck me at some point that none of the examples posted were historians denying the possibility of historical figures being gay. So at some point I actually went through like 3 pages of the top stories…like 50+% were tweets saying basically “Boy, those historians sure do like to pretend gay people don’t exist! Imagine them pretending Achilles and Patroclus were just buds lol!” Seriously most of them were specifically about A&P.

Then another 30% or so were religious fundamentalists posting complaints about how people were trying to queer up history.

There were a handful of historians saying “hey guys, gender roles were different back then, it may not be accurate to label a history figure ‘gay’ even if they did have male lovers”

Then there were like 3-4 quotes from popular biographies from the 1800s that used funny language about “never married” and “lifelong friends”.

And finally there was one article from the BBC about two dudes from the Roman period in Britain who were buried in an embrace, and it was like “What could their relationship have been? We can only speculate…maybe they were both apprentices?” or something. It was pretty egregious. Maybe a historian was involved in that.

Anyway, that was one example in the 60 or so top stories. It seems like a meme that just keeps on going even though it’s been obsolete for a century.

Yeah. And it’d be pretty stupid to say of most adults "You don’t agree with me? Must be because you never read a book before.

As opposed to what?

Jesus Christ returning and establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth? Yeah, capitalism is probably worse.

Compared to Soviet Communism? Way better.

When people say “we need to stop capitalism”, do they mean add some new regulations? Or do they mean overthrowing society and replacing it with some as-yet-completely-nebulous leftist system? Cuz, like, I could get on board with the first one. But the second, or variations thereof, are downright ridiculous.

As bad as it is in many ways, it’s better for the environment. There’s less actual consumption.

There’s a certain strain of Leftism that sees that people are taking the climate crisis seriously, so they’re like “Oh shit, it’s my chance to make good! If you care about the environment, you gotta give me shit! Capitalism is bad for the environment, and the opposite of capitalism is money in my pocket, let’s get going!”

It’s purely self-serving.

Certain strawman historians…

I’ve been reading and studying for decades, and yet somehow your worldview remains inconsistent and incoherent to me.

I’m sure it’s my fault.

Careful! By including more of the world in the Global South, you’re gonna start seeing more and more thriving capitalist countries, which kinda underlines my initial point.

You know that Hong Kong (occupied by the evil British!) provided the inspiration for Deng Xiaoping’s U-turn? Now it’s a joke to call China communist, and it’s GDP per capita looks like this…

Yes, Britain is capitalist these days. No, it was not a modern capitalist society in the 1700s–or at least, it was only just emerging. India was given to the East India Company by edict of the King.

Maybe spend the time to minimally educate yourself on the subject you’re attempting to debate here instead of opining about things you very clearly don’t have any clue about? The fact that you think communism could ever work in the real world is just the cherry on top.