amanneedsamaid @ amanneedsamaid @sopuli.xyz

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1

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495

Joined

2 yr. ago

They said they would do one thing, and haven't followed through. I would call that bullshitting, I just think it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Yeah but when it comes to corporations saying they'll do things, its almost always just whatever garbage will benefit the company at the time, regardless of the fact they likely will never follow through.

I think the lesson is that you should never believe these statements about the future, the only times major corporations can be honest is if they're reporting something that already happened.

Obviously I dont think theres no racism, racism runs deep in many aspects of the USA.

However, there is no racism in the college admissions system, and if there is, anonymize race during admission.

If anything race as an AA factor is a straw man distraction, as there is actually a correlation between your economic state and what colleges you can attend, while your race has no effect on this.

Yes, this country has never once in its history been "race blind", and minorities have historically (and in many ways still are) at a disadvantage. Getting into college is not something minorities struggle with because of their race, if one race struggles disproporionately to another, that is almost certainly due to that races average economic condition, not a direct result of race.

So why should we discriminate against people based off of race, at best enforcing stereotypes, and at worst being completely unconstitional. AA would be much more fair and effective if applied to low income individuals and communities, as your income actually has an effect on your ability to go to college.

So in your opinion minoritie are less capable of getting into college. Besides economic reasons, (class-based affirmative action actually makes sense) what disadvantage is placed on someone because of their race?

No problem! Pop! is a great distro, and if you end up really loving it you could go for a System76 laptop at some point in the future, because S76 makes Pop! it integrates really nicely with their laptops.

We never stop learning!

I would use Briar if it had an iOS app, i dont consider any messenger that is android-only a real option for my main messenger.

No problem! About the USB drive, running it in a VM would not tell you anything about how it will run on the Macbook itself. I would recommend booting into the usb in a 'live environment'. Essentially, you boot into the linux operating system off of the usb and are able to play around and use it in a non-persistent environment. You simply plug in the usb and select it as your boot device. If you decide you like it and it works well, installing should be as easy and following the steps in the installer. The reason running a VM wouldn't tell you anything is that VMs are virtualizated, meaning they don't directly run off of your computers hardware. The drivers used for virtual machines are their own unique virtualization drivers, so for these reasons running linux VMs is separate from linux compatibility on bare metal.

Here is an explanation of those questions:

2. This is less important when choosing your first distro, but some users have varying preferences on package managers. The package manager is responsible for installing and updating everything on your system (everything; applications, libraries, and the kernel) that has been installed via the package manager. Some package managers are distro-agnostic and are installed alongside your distro's package manager, like Nix or Guix, although you don't really have to worry about these. The package manager is baked into the distro you used and cannot be changed, and some distros have the same package manager. For an example of a preference, dnf (Fedora's package manager) commands are much more verbose than pacman (Arch's package manager) commands.

To show what I mean, here's the command for installing a package with each:

dnf install

<package>

pacman -S

<package>

Some find the letter arguments of pacman more confusing.

An example of a preference I've observed is that I prefer dnf's search results over apt's (Debian's package manager), although apt search is much faster than dnf's. Little things like these don't make a huge difference, but the package manager is something you will interact with a lot, so watching a quick video or guide on a distro's package manager can't hurt.

4. A display server is responsible for displaying your graphical environment. If you have your laptop open and you're looking at a few windows, the display server is responsible for the placement, size, and content of the windows. Everything graphic on a linux system is handled by the display server. You have chosen to get into linux in the middle of a sort of transition period from the older X11 display server to the newer Wayland display server. Wayland is newer, more secure, and overall snappier / less screen-tear-ey. X11 is older and not receiving development, but is tried and tested, much better for accessibility needs than Wayland, and more "self-contained" (i.e X11 is not just one program, it contains many programs to make interacting with the graphic environment easy and consistent. Wayland leaves these integrations in the hand of each "compositor")

Desktop environments and window managers will either:

1. Support Wayland and X11
2. Support only X11 (Many X11 only examples have forks that support Wayland)
3. Support only Wayland

As for your applications, some may or may not support running on Wayland natively, which is a non-issue as the program XWayland will automatically run X11 only programs through X11 on your Wayland desktop.

TL;DR on the display server section here: One day you will have to use Wayland, but today is not that day. If Wayland covers all the functionality you need, and you do not use NVIDIA (Wayland on NVIDIA is not in a good state currently), I would go with that. If accessibility or easy software compatibility is your aim, go X11.

5. This one is easy, let's say you've decided you 100% want to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint has three spins (All that 'spin' means is a version of the distro with that desktop environment pre-installed): Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE, however not all distros offer a Cinnamon spin. If you wanted to use a distro that does not offer a spin of the desktop environment you'd like, download the 'minimal' iso for that distro. Some distros call this iso a different name or might only offer a 'server' iso that fulfills the same purpose, but basically you'll boot into a tty (terminal prompt) and you can simply install the desktop environment you want via the package manager.

I hope this helps and isn't confusing!

Random question as Im very interested in using XMPP: Are public homeservers fine as long as you enable encryptions? And is there a list of recommended homeservers?

Im aware you can self host, that just is not an option for me currently

For under $300, I would go for a used Thinkpad. I got a T460s for a few hundred bucks that runs linux wonderfully (jesus was the pre-installed Windows slow though). Linux usually runs much better than Windows on old low-end hardware. That 2015 MacBook has an Intel processor, so I would try Linux on that first as it might be more powerful than what you can afford to buy.

Kali is not an OS you would want to use for your main desktop, if you need those security tools you can run them in a virtual machine / live usb. I see you've tried to base your distro choice off of what you intend to do in school, which I think is a mistake. Choose your distro based off of the merits of the distro itself, as once you get past the package manager and release cycle, you can get the same experience on any distribution.

Before choosing a distro I would make sure you know the answer to these questions (in terms of what you want):

1. Stable or rolling release model?
2. Package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, etc.)

and these about your desktop environment:

3. What desktop environment (or standalone window manager) do you want to use?
4. Do I want to use Wayland or X11 as a display server? Does it matter to me which I use?
5. Does your distro have a spin preinstalled with your desktop environment of choice?

^ Also, if you are unsure about what some of this means, feel free to ask.

I'm pretty sure within the last decade France made it illegal to wear head coverings (with no exception for religious articles like hijabs) in school buildings. I could be mistaken, but I remember thinking that was extreme to the point of racist policy.

I don't know if you've used Emacs, but NixOS almost feels to Linux how Doom Emacs is to GNU/Emacs. Not including all the benefits like reproducability, it feels like a reliable framework placed on top of Linux in the same was Doom Emacs is a framework on top of Emacs.

Yes, higher education is now less accessible to non-whites. Which is good, because affirmative action was never a fair solution to the issue and was simply unfair in principle imo. We shouldn't raise the eligibility of people based on their race, college admissions and race should have nothing to do with one another. Class-based affirmative action actually makes sense instead of deciding off race.

If you like Facebook containers, try the Firefox Container Tabs extension.

+1 for rutracker, also yts.mx is my go-to for films.

"How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want."

No one has ever said the Fediverse will be as easily accessible as Reddit, I think it's pretty much impossible because of the lack of centralization. But in my opinion, this just doesn't matter. The only solution would be, as you said, would be some form of central management. It is impossible to have a platform which both fixes the issues Reddit has experienced indefinitely AND has central management. Any social platform which cedes some kind of control, or even just legitimacy, to a centralized source (regardless of how the implementation starts out), will eventually turn into another Reddit. (Assuming the growth is there).

From my point of view the only downside to how Lemmy operates vs. Reddit is the slight learning curve of understanding Federation. Once you understand the concept, your concerns about the platform "fizzling out" would be moot. If you understand Federation, how is it confusing that your different sports communities are in different instances? Each community is distinct in its values, rules, and moderators, they get to choose where to exist, and the alternative would be impossible without granting control to a single meta-instance.

"but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group."

I couldn't disagree more, and this is one of my main gripes with Mastodon. Over reliance on a flagship instance only serves to shoehorn people into Lemmy without actually understanding how the platform works. Take the top three English-speaking mastodon instances:

1. mastodon.social: 878k
2. mastodon.cloud: 229k
3. mastodon.online: 164k Source

mastodon.online was created by Mastodon as a secondary official instance, next to the original mastodon.social. When the Twitter influx happened, the vast majority of users signed up for mastodon.social because it was the "flagship instance". Not as many user's would have chosen mastodon.social if they actually understood how Federation worked, instead of just blindly signing up for the flagship instance.

Also, about communities about the same topic possible being fragmented across multiple instances is a pro of Lemmy, as long as we foster a culture of combining communities together who agree, while retaining the option to split off to another instance.

TLDR; Understanding how Federation works > Pandering to new users with a flagship instance

We need electric vehicles with the interiors and exteriors copied from consumer cars from the 90s.