The God that helps survive all this evil is called Oneness (cooperation & empathy).
Capitalism, the relentless pursuit of profits, combined with modern fuel and machinery, is undermining that Oneness at unprecedented rates. If it is allowed to destroy the ecosystem, maybe a handful of human survivors can suffer a long period of healing and restoration through Oneness - but billions will die most unpleasantly in the meantime.
The US as a whole can’t really achieve Florida levels of… Floridaness. You need fewer good paying jobs, higher costs of living, lots more old retired people running things, more drugs - all kinds, sunburn and sweat instead of frostbite and snow to shovel.
Transparency is always the answer. Any changes which increase secrecy or decrease accountability are the opposite of progress.
Rather than figuring out how to stop people from wanting to run away to our countries, we prefer to exile these people, separate them from our society and, if at all possible, just make them not come into our countries at all.
Carrot and stick. Some people only understand hoarding their carrots and beating anyone within reach with their sticks.
The US has been the most powerful country in the world
For roughly 75 years.
France was strongly dominant under Napoleon for 15 years and didn’t suffer too badly for 15 more years after that.
The period of the British Empire’s global dominance, often referred to as the Pax Britannica, ran roughly 300 years.
The Roman Empire was dominant in the West for roughly 500 years, much longer in the eastern reaches.
The primary difference of the period of US dominance is that it has been almost entirely sustained by MAD - mutually assured destruction vs every other entity on the globe.
While it’s true that the US survived all of those challenges of the past and had a pretty good run after WWII… was that just the coin toss coming up heads 10x in a row?
I just spun up a HTPC on Debian 12+XFCE. It “wasn’t too bad” but it really was more time to configure it than under Ubuntu. Totally worth it, to me. With XFCE I’m getting the desktop I want, not the desktop Gnome thinks I should have. I have the features I want, and any feature I don’t want is easily banished.
But, I must admit, getting to that final further from perfect Ubuntu/Gnome configuration probably took 1/4 as many “tech flex lifts” in vanilla Ubuntu as the Debian+XFCE install took. For Debian, I had to get sudo working for my default account - which involved a “su root” and otherwise running some programs directly out of /usr/sbin - easy stuff, when you know how. I also had to configure for auto-login with more than a simple checkbox in the installer process. The XFCE launcher panel configuration is “powerful” - meaning: more hands on. Then there’s an annoying XFCE trait that I finally figured out, something about when the EDID connection glitches you get spurious “Monitor Settings” dialogs popping up. I forget if it was that one, or something else, but when I was trying to configure the dialog properly, one of the tabs wasn’t showing until I resized the dialog window bigger - something that seemed like it shouldn’t be necessary but definitely was because I looked all over for that configuration option, didn’t see it due to the “hidden” tab issue, and finally got a clue from a blog post mentioning the need to resize the window to get to it… Canonical does polish off more of those rough edges, in Gnome. Then they make you wait for snap update activity by default - I’ll polish my own rough edges, thanks.
The good thing about distro hopping is refining your setup to the point that “burning down the desktop” becomes a relative non-event, your important personal files are elsewhere - nothing of value gets lost if your desktop SSD goes Ollie North: “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t recall…”
After 15 years, aren’t you questioning: how far out on the bleeding edge do I need to be?
I mean, if the absolute most advanced bleeding edge is “where it was at” five years ago - isn’t a stable system that’s up to speed with where the good things were five years ago even better?
Mint is easy. Easy is good.
Even if you can configure your way through Arch to a killer custom system, is that really what you want to do every time on every computer in your life?
My advice: run a server (any server) or three, and keep your important / personal stuff there. It can be as simple as a Raspberry Pi with a big external SSD. The PC you use as a desktop environment should be easily built / configured from the base distro into whatever customizations you want, and you can either work with your personal files on the server, or mirror copies of them to your desktop system as appropriate (things like “living documents” should be primarily stored and backed up on servers, things like photo collections etc. can be stored on the server, but copied to the desktop for easy access like rotating wallpaper or whatever.)
If (when, really) any one of your systems goes down, it shouldn’t be a big deal. If it’s a server, restore from another server mirror / backups. If it’s your desktop, install a new desktop and get your customizations off a server.
Of course this is an ideal, but keep in mind that SSDs are not “forever” devices, they do wear out and each single copy of your data will be corrupted some day. Spinning rust is even less reliable, in my experience, although I have one 2TB hard drive that has been online for more than 10 years now. It’s mirrored, twice, on SSDs.
How do I dislike Ubuntu, let me count the ways:
I’ve used Ubuntu heavily since 14.04 through 24.04… my new system installs are going Debian 12 with XFCE, and yes - I did evaluate Xubuntu, I’m actually typing this from an Xubuntu machine right now that’s planned to be getting Debian if it ever needs a re-image.
Ubuntu wasn’t a bad choice, still isn’t a terrible choice, but if you’re going to have to strip out snap by hand and deal with security updates by hand after 4-5 years and install a “niche” desktop version to get out from Gnome’s rather inflexible view of things, might as well just go to Debian and be done with whatever “new deals” Canonical comes up with in the future.
I have a collection of about 8 machines around the house (a lot of Raspberry Pi) that I ssh around to from various points.
I have setup scripts named: ssp1 ssp2 ssba ss2p etc. to ssh into the various machines, and of course shared public ssh keys among them to skip the password prompt. So, yes, once you are “in” one machine in my network, if you know this, you are “in” all of them, but… it’s bloody convenient.
Security cameras will do it, and the Pi5 doesn’t have hardware decode for h.264 the way the Pi4 does, so that becomes a big drain, particularly if you don’t drop the frame rates. I run a separate Pi (5, unfortunately) with a HAILO 8 hat (fortunately) for 5 video streams on Frigate - it needs some airflow to stay cool, but is only running about 30% CPU utilization for my streams.
Yeah, I’m running home assistant with 43 Zigbee devices, 20 Wifi connected devices including about 150 channels of medium-high (once a minute) data logging (temperature, humidity, signal strength, sensor positions, radar occupancy info, etc.), and a Music Assistant instance, and while it’s streaming net-radio I’ve only got 98% idle on my Pi’s CPU, feeling the squeeze already /s.
Your Zigbee hub will run out of capacity long before the Pi. Solution: run multiple Zigbee hubs when you get to that point.
Not just ad blocker, but tracking blockers too. Also, if you’ve got a simple little device like a WiFi controlled outlet switch, and through PiHole you notice it “phoning home” frequently even though you’re not using it… that’s a clue that you might not want to be keeping such things inside the same network where you check on your 401(k) account…
PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don’t expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
Nah, the good ol’ days were when websites provided value to their users. The only competitively sustainable business model is the reverse: where users provide value to the website owners.
You know what you didn’t mention? Security. Privacy. Authenticity.
a clean and functional site
But the specs no longer call for a clean, functional site. Today’s “professional” web development specs call for user tracking, customized content per user per platform per locality the page is being served to. Then there’s the backend dashboard services showing the overlords user behavior patterns and how they change based on tweaks made to their ui, I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithms auto-tune presentation to optimize behavior.
Absolutely. And, while there’s always atrocities and tragedies around the world, back in “those days” the height of civilization was still brutal and cruel. We, globally, seem to have improved the “bright spots” somewhat as time goes by - even if we still leave the bulk of global human population in poverty and oppression.
My point about the 75 years? There have been shorter flashes in the pan, and much longer ones, we’re nothing particularly special - what is special about this era is the power that fossil fuels have endowed modern society with. We’ve done some good things with those, and a lot of bad too.