s/Dirk Gently/roy\ schestowitz/ but thats why i like him. also a great series, i love stephen mangan.

there is so much political shifting around in the free software ecosystem, trying to keep track of the pieces really tells a story or two.

for example, this cancel-culture event comes on the heels of the cancellation of the founder of free software himself, based on a number of complete non-facts loosely (fallaciously) supported by less significant actual facts. is it november? yes. is stallman a pisces? yes. but many of the worst claims presented by forbes were indeed fabricated and not true.

on the series, everything is connected to everything else, but here many of the connections are very loose. many of the strongest connections are to some of the same companies trying to stop the rest of us from maintaining control of our software (thus our computers, thus indeed our personal lives) and one of the people attacking stallman recently was, sadly, one of the few people defending debian from a complete takeover by systemd. (on that matter i largely support what mr. jackson has had to say about systemd, though not the petition he signed to remove stallman from the gnu project.) at any rate there are too many meaningful connections to ignore all of them-- and they certainly arent going to be discussed in detail here.

it can be, but im not sure it always is. the puppy linux guys dont seem like they can do it without losing a lot.

at least a few were interested, but they all seem resolved that theyre going to be with microsoft whether they like it or not. still, if theyre wrong thats great. i hope they figure it out.

are recommends still on by default? didnt debian change that after foisting systemd? (around 2014-2015?)

long term i think such a fork is inevitable, but social problems often require cultural solutions. technical solutions can help, though a lot of people put much more stock in them than is reasonable-- for example, the way that facebook and twitter connect the world "like never before" helps things like the arab spring, but are showing their limitations (censorship) and costs (surveillance) as well. there has to be some cultural shift, people who show apathy wont be rescued by all the technological marvels in the world.

i agree with you on the nature of sjws.

thanks thierry, good to know.

most cosmetic changes dont have much potential for political abuse. devuan on the other hand, largely exists because anybody against a systemd monopoly was treated as a troll and censored.

i dont necessarily think this will be abused, but its potential for abuse makes it worth questioning. mostly though, on a forum that has a secret troll rating its a shame that i cant upvote cynwulfs posts in public. i do on lq and i think a positive reputation system is likely more useful than this one. thats long term-- short term, i doubt it matters. short term, all the stuff debian had in place for managing the community did no real harm at all.