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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

    So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

    The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

    Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

    Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs





  • let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time

    I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.

    I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.

    Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.

    Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.


  • I’m no legal expert; I assume support can be either offered or completely avoided depending on the shop owner’s preference. Most Linux distributions come with a “this software is free (as in freedom) and comes with no warranty or guaranteed functionality” disclaimer.

    If I wanted to engage more with my clients and build more trust, I might offer some degree of troubleshooting/support for the Linux machines I sold. But I don’t think I’d be under any legal obligation to offer that service just for selling the laptops.

    Whether or not the computer shop offers support might affect whether or not a customer wants to shop at my store. Maybe I can sell my laptops cheaper if I don’t offer support, or maybe my laptops cost a bit more because I do offer aftermarket support.


  • how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop

    It kinda depends on each individuals’ use case; there’s lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.

    Any given laptop I’m staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I’d default to Mint.

    If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.

    If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.

    Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.

    Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.

    So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they’ve never used Linux before).

    Linux (or is called unix?)

    Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called “Unix”. Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the “POSIX” standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).

    If I’ve gotten any of this information incorrect, please don’t tell Richard Stallman.