I grew up with Windows and I constantly had to fix shit just for my own casual use, the biggest barrier to moving to Linux is about learning a new OS from scratch, we already go through that learning curve with Windows normally so we forget how much time and effort it took us just to understand the system well.

That aside, I’d argue that for most productive work that doesn’t require proprietary software, you also don’t need to understand Linux that well to be productive. You just need to know how to log in, launch whatever you need, and then turn it off before going home. The biggest reason why we can’t just make people switch overnight is that they’re probably used to proprietary software that just won’t work well on Linux, like Adobe or Microsoft Office. If you train your personal to first switch to FOSS alternative, when you do make the switch to Linux the learning curve for what they need to do is small and they won’t be as intimidated. But now, if you’re talking about how their years of learning Word or Excel or Photoshop doesn’t translate 1:1 because of different UI and behavior, they’ll be very uncomfortable and less productive when they switch.

Things inevitably go wrong no matter what system or software in general you use, we’re just used at tolerating it when it’s something we know and use already, but there’s no reason why we should think Linux or FOSS software has to be strictly much more stable than its counterparts, as long as they’re good enough for the person or the use case, it’s already good enough to switch, with the caveat that you should never switch everything at once, but rather first switch your productive software, retrain to feel confident in it, and then switch to Linux. That way you’ll not even remember you’re running Linux after a few weeks, other than when you see the login screen or something.

That’s amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

Personally I think everyone should be benefitting, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen if the big corpos lobby successfully to ban foss alternatives or if hardware stays perpetually expensive, but for coders as a whole it wouldn’t be the worst if we can simply run a foss model locally for a use case that makes sense, especially stuff like debugging. I do agree with most of your points, for what is worth. I just don’t agree with copyright law or IP law a whole lot even if it sometimes benefits regular workers, these laws were reshaped long ago to protect big owners of capital and we need to move away from them at some point.

Always probing how much we can take, too

If you don’t let them in they just break in and claim they own the place

Regardless of what you or I believe, most workers and even many comrades are still religious and the last thing we want is to be push them away, as long as they accept a materialist framework for organizing society and we work together to progressively reduce religious harm over time they can pray all they want imo. The only reason why reactionary religion is so powerful is because capitalists have overfunded them for decades, and even then you have examples of anti-colonial resistance led by priests and imams. We can and should work together as much as we can, of course without compromising analysis or praxis.

The narrative of Galileo vs the Church is misrepresented to push a specific narrative, the whole thing is obviously very nuanced, but to keep it short he was in disagreement with the Church, but he was a Catholic himself who happened to live in a period where the Church was on edge due to the tension with Protestantism. The fight wasn’t on science vs religion, but on who had the religious authority, individuals or the Church.

Galileo is portrayed as a proto-skeptic later on because it was useful to present the European enlightenment as a rupture with the old world, nevermind that Europeans pushed racism as a science while claiming to be purely rational, you can see this kind of misrepresentation of many early scientists as well such as Newton, who’s obsession with esoterism is rarely discussed, and even when promoting a grand narrative of the West as the cradle of reason people like to ignore that as far as we know Pythagoras was a weird religious dude with a cult, you don’t need to be rational in all spheres to be rational in some, and if we want to highlight the diversity of western thought as a good thing (which I believe it is) we can also find examples of early skeptics way before the enlightenment. Cicero literally wrote a skeptic as one of his characters to express his ideas, and while he’s clearly trying to promote stoicism instead, the fact that he includes a skeptic shows that there were already skeptics in society even back in Rome. And again, in my opinion this is a good thing, we generally need more skepticism, not less, but let’s not reinforce narratives that are just false and used to whitewash the horrendous crimes of colonialism to this day.

While building more is obviously necessary, there’s still more than enough houses in the US to house all the homeless, but it’s less profitable, and in a profit driven system this is just the cost of doing business. Like, sure, people normally want to live in more urban places, but I don’t think many would want to stay homeless if offered an empty house elsewhere. Building more under neoliberal capitalism won’t do anything to fix homelessness, unfortunately.

Read communist leaders rather than accept whatever a school book that whitewashes colonialism and ignores Churchill’s genocide in Bengal tells you. You may disagree with them but you’ll notice most of them were fairly literate and understood dialectical materialism.

there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.

Agreed

people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it

It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).

Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.

In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.

I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.

All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).

So yeah, it’s complicated.

The foot is actually symbolic for the devs stepping all over you with their opinionated design and no choices