I appreciate the positive response, if my tone might have been a bit aggressive, that was not my intention. I understand why people were mislead about Bernie, there was a ton of media reports about how Bernie “isn’t a real socialist” and it’s not like Bernie is god or anything, there are obvious limits to his approach. It forces people to make compromises and water down their believes. But I do believe he is genuine, or at least the most genuine seeming politician I have seen.

Also, AOC seems to be very similar, although she doesn’t have the same knowhow yet about politics and mostly focuses on rethoric. But she is basically a leftist activist who, with a shit ton of luck, managed to get into politics.

As an European, I have never understood why so many American leftists don’t see that, even by simply listening to what he is saying or looking at what he is doing. I mean he literally has a picture of Eugene Debs on his desk and mentions how he is this political role model and hero any chance he gets, that alone should tell you where he stands on an ideological or philosophical level…

And of course, he has been involved in various socialist groups his whole life and literally still calls himself a democratic socialist. Why would he do that if it wasn’t true? To gain a political advantage, in America of all places, where calling yourself a socialist would have generally been political suicide?

And then are his policies, where many will focus on healthcare and say “he just wants healthcare” and ignore anything else. But of course, healthcare is a major issue because it makes the working class even more dependend on their employers because they lose tgeir healthcare if they get fired, so it makes sense for him to focus on tgat first. And of course, he also had other policy in his program, like transfering 20% of ownership over major corporations to their employees and having workers electing half of the board of directors.

You can call him a reformer, you can call his participation ineffective, but why deny his political believes?

He wasn’t even a social democrat. At the time, social democrats were democratic socialists, the shift away from reformist socialism happened around the 80s (some social democratic parties still hang onto reformist socialism, at least in theory).

He was a smart liberal who realized that in order to save capitalism from collapsing again, some regulations are necessary. In Europe, similar policy was often pushed by social democrats, which sometimes leads to confusion. But actual social democrats at the time went (or at least wanted to go) further, like nationalization and socialization of major industry, worker representation at companies, and increasing worker and union power in general.

Social democrats stated endgoal was a socialist society. FDR’s endgoal was to protect and maintain capitalism.

Edit: Also, Bernie is definitely a reformist socialist, I will never understand why people think otherwise. He literally mentions Eugen Debbs, one of the most influencial socialists in American history, as his role model and hero every chance he can… And he praises the nordic model because the nordic model was literally pushed by reformist democratic socialists… Here is Olaf Palme, one of the most important figures when it comes to the nordic model and prime minister of Sweden (until he was murdered), explaining why he is a democratic socialist:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7i2Ws1X5DSA

Just imagine a conservative politican, calling themselves a fascist, keeping a picture of Mussolini on their desk, saying he is their political role model. Would you claim that he isn’t really a fascist? It’s not even as if Bernie Sanders was dog whistling, he couldn’t be any clearer about his believes… Yet somehow, so many American leftists seem to sonehow doubt his intentions? Why? Because he isn’t radical enough? Because he isn’t throwing molotov coctails at the police? What does he have to gain from falsely calling himself a socialist??

The man’s presidental campaign was giving 20% of major corporations to it’s employees and having about half of the board of directors be elected by workers, among other stuff…

if you don’t even want to acknowledge his values and his ideology simply because he is playing the politics game and is a reformist, send him to Europe, we would love a genuine leftist like him with so much charisma. I don’t think you appreciate him…

Imagine dedicating your life to fight for a better life, involve yourself in the civil rights movement, work in various socialist groups, calling yourself a socialist and calling for major industry to be socialised, being constantly attacked by right wingers for your socialist believes, etc, only for fellow leftists denying that you are a “real socialist”…

If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days

No matter how you twist and turn things, this is just flat out wrong…

Yeah, this is what I don’t understand about windows. I get that as an IT professional, I don’t have a much of patience for sluggish system and that average users might not care that much about system responsiveness, but from my anecdotal experience, it has started to bug the average user too.

Even on a high-end device, windows just doesn’t feel smooth at all. And for some reason, it seems to get worse with every major release. How can you be a major industry leader, have users with more and more performative hardware, but your software seems to perform worse and worse?

A normal person should not have to deal with different distros.

Ideally, clients would get shipped with linux of course, but at the moment, that’s hardly an option. There could also be value in having clients shipped with different distros installed.

Apple forbids you to install it on a banana. Fuck apple.

For this reason I would never buy an apple device again. However, I do see the value of having a super stable and controlled environment where it is super hard for users to fuck things up.

The few times a have some minor issue on linux, it is probably audio related or related to working with multiple different screens with different refresh rates, resolutions, etc, so you probably have a point.

However, I did have various issues with audio and multiple screens on windows as well, I would say even more frequently. However, on windows those issues were generally resolved after a restart, on linux I actually had to do some troubleshooting.

it is that they don’t have the time and energy to constantly fight their devices to perform simple tasks.

Nobody wants to constantly fight their devices to perform simple tasks, but that’s exactly the reason why I almost exclusively use linux and get incredibly annoyed when I have to use windows (for business reasons)…

Sure, linux based systems often take up more time until you find the right system for your needs and for your hardware, you will have some effort to find alternatives to some software that you might be used to and depending on what software you need, linux just won’t be an option for you, but once that everything is set up, at least in my personal experience, things run a lot more consistently and expectedly in my personal experience.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just lucky, but I have been using linux exclusively for about 3 years now on a desktop, multiple laptops and obviously servers. Have I experienced any issues? Yes, there were small issues from time to time, but nothing that I would not have with windows. But in terms of day to day operations and performing basic tasks, linux has been the superior user experience for me without a doubt.

I used to believe that linux is great for servers, and sucks for desktops and laptops, but ever since I made the switch, I have completely changed my mind. I still use windows because I have to, but the most annoying part of switching to linux was that windows has become even more annoying to use.

I use Ubuntu as my main operating system in my Desktop, but I always end up feeling very limited.

I used to use Ubuntu for a long time and had a similar experience where there were constantly annoying issues. I have since distrohopped around and ended up with fedora, which even though it is a more cutting edge distro, the experience has been a lot smoother and more stable, even compared to windows.

Maybe Linux is not good for beginners working full time?

I mean any OS takes time until you get fully into it and I would say Linux does take maybe a little more effort simply because there are more options in terms of pretty much everything. First, you need to be familiar with the concept of having different distros and be familiar with the differences between distros. Then you need to actually figure out how to install a new OS, which can be tricky to most people who are not that familiar with IT.

Another thing is that an experience with an OS can depend largely based on what hardware you are using. That’s why apple strictly controls the hardware on which their OS can run on. Microsoft has also started restricting this slightly. Linux goes the complete opposite direction by trying to allow running linux on any possible system.

What’s wrong with your pc

Are you on windows 11 yet? The only place where I still use windows is my company notebook. And it’s not top notch high end, but it has a ssd, it has a 6 core cpu and it has 16 GB of RAM, yet it still runs like absolute ass.

With virtually NOTHING going on, it takes about 3 - 5 seconds for task manager to open. Clicking on “processes” takes 5 seconds, not just the first time, but every-time I switch to processes (or pretty much any tab for that matter). I too believed that there was probably an issue with my device or something, but I just had to use a replacement notebook that has even newer hardware and it runs exactly the same…

Now is that unusable? No, I’m probably a bit nit-picky. But it does absolutely infuriate me that Microsoft seems to struggle more and more with performance with every new windows version, especially when I also work with Linux systems that just are 10 times smoother with half the hardware specs…

Before windows 11, I would more or less agree with you. Task manager would be reliable even when the machine was struggling. But since I use windows 11, I had task manager crash multiple times.

Well it’s not bad in theory, it just runs like ass… This version already runs 10 times faster than the real thing, sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on over at Microsoft.

I mean I couldn’t do that either, not for very long at least. I have the tendency to walk around aimlessly when doing something like that (same when I’m on the phone), which means I have to clean the floor after. So mostly I either brush my theeth in the shower or I sit down/lie down.

Damn, I just noticed that my theeth brushing habits are probably very weird, bit hey, at least that way I do it 2 - 3 times a day.

When it comes to cutting expenses, government institutions are always very interested, so it makes sense to outsource all sorts of things.

On paper, sort of. Government IT projects are often seen as cash machines by private businesses where I’m from because there is often a generous budget and government institutions tend to want to use those budgets completely because if they don’t, some will start wondering if they really need that much budget or if it maybe can be shortened a bit… There have been notorious cases where there were huge projects that ended up being even more expensive than initially planned because the private contractors just milked it. And there is of course a lot of mutual masturbation between government institutions and big tech.

And government institutions tend to follow the private sector. The private sector has been pushing to the cloud for a long time now to the point where virtually nobody is suggesting or providing support for on-premise solutions. When every IT contractors says that moving everything to the google/microsoft cloud is the state of the art (and that there are 0 downsides to it and everything is 100% secure), most will not question it.

some countries have decided that all of mining industry, railways, electricity and water must be kept in government hands, no matter the cost. Same sort of things can happen with IT services once you burn your fingers badly enough.

Recently there has been somewhat of a push for open source solutions and big tech independent solutions for government institutions as they start to notice the downsides and potential security risks. And I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, there are entire IT projects where entire systems and solutions were developed to provide a secure software solution for the military (costing hundreds of millions), but then they want to share those files with sharepoint online…

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…