Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically “piracy” but it’s amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

I would encourage you to look up “user-friendly Linux distros” on your favourite search engine and check the first few results.

PopOS is System76’s distro. It’s quite popular among beginners and frequently recommended to those just starting with Linux. I don’t personally use it.

Yep. Anyone can do that, actually. I can declare you a terrorist. It’s totally my right to do so, but the question is–so what? What am I going to do about it?

The US government has declared the Iranian organisation a terrorist organisation. What have they done about it?

The amount of outrage on this thread is just ignorant people learning how international geopolitics and the concept of absolute state sovereignty work for the first time. Yes, it is the case that big countries get to stick their fingers into the business of little countries. Yes, it is unfair. But that’s how it is and that’s how it’s always gonna be for the foreseeable future. That’s how it always has been for all of human history. From Ur to Rome to Vienna to London to Washington. From Chang’an to Beijing to Nanjing to Tokyo and now back to Beijing. In the next century maybe it will be some other country kicking around everyone else instead of the US. But I can practically guarantee that there will be kicking and there will be people continuing to complain about how unfair it is, because it is and always has been.

I’d like to say we should do better as a species, but in reality, what we have now is really fucking amazing compared to when Genghis Khan would come romping around town destroying your villages and murdering your people, or the Romans coming and demanding fifty talents of silver by sunset or else, or the Belgians planting rubber trees in your backyard.

Not for the shipping company. It’s not their oil. The Iranians can ask the shipping company for compensation, which they could easily refuse and there isn’t much recourse that the Iranians would have. The Chinese could demand compensation but if the company again refuses or claims insolvency or whatever, it’s easier for the Chinese to just stiff the Iranians with payment instead.

I wasn’t aware that you were a sovereign state or that I had any money deposited in your banks or that I do business of any sort with you.

You can sanction me by putting a permanent embargo on conversing with me by blocking me if you want

I hate that “confirmation bias” have become moo words with people nowadays.

The logic is pretty sound:

• A company that does business in the United States must comply with American laws.
• It is forbidden under American law for a company that operates from the United States to do business with Iran.
• The company, through its child, shipped oil from Iran.
• American authorities, enforcing American law, ordered the company to divert the ship and turn over the oil for confiscation because the shipment was illegal.
• Oil is confiscated.

I remark that sanctions do not require the approval of the United Nations. Under customary international law, it is an application of sovereign authority. Any country can apply sanctions and can do so in any way you like. What the USA has said is that “if you want to do business here, we forbid you from doing business with Iran”.

The ship was not intercepted by the Navy. They served a court order on the company and the company turned the ship back and its cargo was seized

The legal grounds: The oil was shipped by a US company in violation of US law. American companies can’t do business with an organisation that the US government has designated as a terrorist organisation. Thus American authorities siezed the ship and its cargo.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.

The Windows Store limits the number of machines that you can install paid software on to 10. If you are managing a lot of computers you’d be better off with some actual management software or at least a package manager like Chocolatey. Then you can push software to your machines, run updates, or uninstall stuff whenever you like.

They can install the same management software that most companies around the globe put on their employee’s phones to track what their minions are doing on company hardware. You don’t need special backdoors for that.

I’m sure the Government can go tell a company to remove the backdoors on Government devices:

Remove all the backdoors and we’ll buy phones for each of our 100,000 employees and award your company a ¥3 gazillion support contract. But if we find out the NSA hacked our phones then there’ll be big trouble, Mao Zedong-style.

This is like the people who repackage and rebrand LibreOffice and then resell it for $10 on the Windows Store to gullible users.

And the worst part about that is that it doesn’t even break the law.

It’s not, but what distros frequently top the list of “user-friendly” distros?

Ubuntu, PopOS, Fedora, and friends.

Maybe it’s not how it should be, but that’s currently how it is.

I think it is unreasonable because a Windows user (i.e. myself) can quickly get up to speed with MacOS within five minutes without the need for external instruction. I can manage a MacOS system perfectly fine even without any prior knowledge of how it works. I can figure out how to configure the settings to do what I need it to do without needing to search for how to do it online.

GNOME took almost a week to get used to and remember where things are located, such as what is located in Settings, how the task flow works, and so forth. I never got used to the “disappearing dock”. I had to use an extension for that. GNOME is just way more different than the others. Meanwhile, my grandpa picked up Cinnamon as a lifelong Windows user within five minutes.

I think most of the time if they have a Github/Gitlab repo open to the public opening issues, they will accept an issue that merely describes a problem that needs to be fixed along with how it might be fixed.

Something like this is generally appreciated:

I’m an HCI expert and ____ should be improved to do ____ because of ____. I’m willing to volunteer to do design work on this to help the project out

…and if the maintainers ask for contact info, provide it and there you go.

I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.

This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.

The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.

We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.

QAnon would have made for an excellent action movie plotline if only people didn’t subscribe to it in real life. Swap in some fake politicians and it’s almost Hollywood-ready.