Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.

I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft’s servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft’s web browser now.

And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

• An amusing way people used to wake up early was by drinking extra water before going to sleep. Their full bladder would wake them in the early morning hours (unless they overdid it, in which case they had to use the potty in the middle of the night and then overslept).

• Animal noises. Most people had animals or lived near other people with animals, so the morning hours had a bunch of typical animal noises (animals, like humans, have an inner clock, and some animals are programmed to wake up before dawn).

• Logs near the stove. A seasonal thing, but in winter, if you know you usually refill the stove 3 or 4 times during the night, you can tell how much of the night has passed through your wood stack.

The bi-phasic sleep thing also helped (take a good nap around noon, but also wake up at midnight and drink a beer with the neighbors). The point of midnight may have been rather arbitrary, though.

As far as I’m aware, candles were affordable, but the average person still couldn’t afford to burn down a candle every day to work or measure time, so once it got dark, normal work ceased and, at best, a family would meet in front of the stove and tell stories, knit or carve for a while.

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.

I’m on OpenRC, so I can’t say anything about systemd, but I have several SSHFS mounts (non-auto) listed in my fstab:

sshfs#[email protected]:/random-folder/ /mnt/random-folder fuse noauto,uid=1000,gid=100,allow_other 0 0

Is that similar to what you’ve tried in your fstab? I’d assume replacing noauto with auto should just work, but then again, I haven’t tried it (and rebooting my system right now would be very inconvenient, sorry).

It also might require you to either use password-based login and specify the password or store the SSH keys in the .ssh directory of the user doing the mount (should be root with auto set).

I’m a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).

So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.

Oh my, thank you very much for pointing that out!

I might have to give it another chance, then, perhaps I’ll shift my games partition back to NTFS once I can free up enough space.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve ended up using Paragon’s commercial ext4 drivers ($20) and while they absolutely work, they’re case sensitive and many Windows apps (especially Bethesda games) open their files with random upper/lowercase spellings that don’t match the files.

I’ve done this (shared 3 NTFS partition in a dual boot setup) from 2017 to the end of 2023 without issues.

The trick was to disable “fast startup” and hibernation. Otherwise Windows happily shuts down with the file systems in an inconsistent state. It’s just a question whether one can live with that in their Windows install.

I’ve used the old ‘ntfs’ driver that supposedly can’t write to… write files ranging from 100,000+ small files in folders to individual 200+ GiB files on NTFS partitions. It works pretty well and I have used it for video editing (few huge files), software development (many tiny files), Unreal Engine + Unity, Linux Gaming w/Steam and more. Rock solid.

After hearing that the ‘ntfs’ driver is supposed to be read-only, I switched to ‘ntfs3’ instead of using ‘ntfs3g’ (same code, but compiled into the kernel instead of running outside via ‘fuse’). From that point onwards, I’ve had major file system corruption nearly every day:

• Copying files into folders suddenly made 90% of other files in the folder disappear. Could be fixed by copying about 1000 random files into the folder and deleting them, then the missing files would come back into existence.
• Files that suddenly go bad. Can’t be written to, moved or anything. Often happened in software development when compiling my project, suddenly the intermediate build directory was bust due to undeletable files.
• Folders that suddenly contain themselves or one of their parent folders as sub-folders.
• Folders that contain a specific file infinity times. This way, I found out that even a harmless file manager like KDE’s Dolphin can become a behemoth that eats 100+ GiB of RAM and keeps trying to read the “list” of files in a directory without limit.

Personally, I’ll never use ‘ntfs3’ for serious work again. But ‘ntfs3g’ is generally considered very stable, maybe my issues are specific to ‘ntfs3’ or my RAID setup (weird nested mdraid thanks to Intel) is to blame.

My final ‘fix’ was to move everything to ext4 and buy Paragon’s $20 ext4 drivers for the dual boot Windows install. It’s only seeing any use once every 2 months. Sadly, these drivers are case sensitive even on Windows, rendering Bethesda games unplayable when installed on those partitions, for example.

But if you piss him off, he’ll turn right back into Windows95man and send you into DLL-hell.

Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).

It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola’s “Litterbug” campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting “personal responsibility” over “regulations.”)

It’s “up to the consumer” to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.

As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.

Thanks, good one.

I’m always happy seeing memes that turn the tables and give the connies a dose of their own medicine. This is what we need! :)

I’m not up-to-date with current NAS systems anymore – I’m running an older QNAP NAS (TS-453), and it has their proprietary “Container Station” which can run web applications in Docker + LXD containers. Not FOSS, though the containers very much are and can be moved to other systems.

As an alternative, FreeNAS/TrueNAS sells NAS systems where at least the software side is FOSS. They’re quite expensive, though.

The prices of other brands also quickly breach silly levels, but a basic 2-bay NAS is about ~$250 for QNAP, ~$200 for Synology and ~$1000 for a TrueNAS. Without hard drives.

If you’re not interested in the data storage side, a Mini PC w/Proxmox (popular Docker/LXD container engine w/browser-based management) or even a direct install on a Raspberry PI are possible for under $100.

I’m running a few on my NAS:

• Taiga to manage projects. It’s as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole “agile” thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

• Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the “folder tree of markdown documents” and “my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number” camp before.

• I’m considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I’m not sure they’re the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it’s really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

To add to what others have already answered, if Ukraine accepted such a “deal”, more war would be coming to Europe.

• When Russia still falsely assumed they could destroy Ukraine in just weeks, they were already prepared to march right through into Moldova (there’s ample reporting from mainstream and non-mainstream publications an internet search will reveal)
• Intense propaganda is currently aimed at Europe’s right wingers to seed distrust and destabilize Europe and to form positive opinions on Russia
• Hungary is controlled by a pro-Russian far-right dictator, Poland just barely teetered back from the brink
• Germany’s fascist party wants “Dexit,” (and “Brexit” was a Russian undertaking, too). Yes, pro-Russian far-right parties again, both. Same old.
• Russia is working with Republicans to pull the US out of NATO and destroy America from the inside out (surprise, another pro-Russian far-right party)
• A heavily Russian-influenced billionaire bought Twitter and allowed unchecked government propaganda from Russia under the guise of free speech to aid in the previous undertaking.

I have every reason to believe that Russia will just move on to the next target and that things would be far worse in Europe already if Ukraine wasn’t keeping a large portion of Russian resources aimed at them.

Also consider that any time Russia offered a ceasefire (such agreements were accepted several times), they always used it to safely rush supplies to the front lines and broke the ceasefire immediately after, often just hours after it was instated.

It’s like when YouTube influencers get invited, all expenses covered plus pocket money, to a sweatshop in China, given a guided tour showing all the utterly happy workers and absolutely fantastic work conditions.

And said influencers then return home and gush over said sweatshop, don’t disclose the paid expenses and perhaps even dunk on real journalists that infiltrated the company and collected evidence for months (the real case I’m referring to: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1184974003/shein-influencers-china-factory-trip-backlash).

I’m happy when actual investigative journalists report from Russia, but those tend to live dangerously and won’t get interviews with the regime’s higher-ups or the tyrant himself. Media in Russia are under complete government control, so Tucker even getting that interview is a clear tell.

Not in any KDE release I know, and I’ve been using it since KDE 3.

Tested right this moment: if I press the mouse button down on a video, nothing happens. If I release it keeping the cursor within a ~5 pixel radius, the movie plays. If I move the cursor further than ~5 pixels, it begins a drag-and-drop operation.