Huh. I see the idea of divide and conquer. But I got a bit lost with “killing bazillions of people as some kind of a ‘market reset’ to drive up shareholder value”. I’m thinking of the black plague, which killed millions, but that increased worker power because survivors had less competition and therefore could demand higher wages.

Sure. Please note that I am quite ignorant and unskilled when it comes to Linux. I will seem like someone who’s got shoes on but doesn’t know how to tie them. I’m sorry. I wish I was more skilled and knowledgeable.

ProtonVPN installed via YAST worked on OpenSuse Tumbleweed but didn’t work in OpenSuse Leap.

RStudio in NixOS was hard to update. For example, during the switch to Quarto instead of only Knittr, there was a period where I spent months without updates. I was using an old, old version.

With NixOS, Fedora, or OpenSuse, installing Signal from a program packaged by Signal itself was not possible. There was a Flatpack version run by a contributor, but nothing by an organization.

I totally recognize that I could learn more and become a better user. It’s just a bit frustrating that these weren’t problems for me over at the land of Surveillance Capitalism OSes. I hope these problems are solved with time.

I’ve had loads of problems installing software and making it work.

I bet soon you’ll see massive consequential protests.

It sounds like you really value skill, precision, and usefulness.

Fair enough. Now that I think about it, maybe the developer experience in Apple products are not universally lauded.

For example, I remembered Pirate Software saying that he didn’t develop for Mac because it was a pain, including having to pay Apple $100 yearly to distribute code without issues. Additionally, I remember my brother meeting a Spotify developer, and the Spotify developer said that Apple makes great hardware but lackluster software.

At the same time, it seems like Swift is not a hated language. The 2023 and 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey reports that, even though few people use Swift (~5% of developers), there’s ~60% of admiration for the language.

Oh. I see I was wrong. Amazing. I should look into that! How did you enable it? I did a quick search and found I just need to do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"; is that it?

I’m sorry for having said something untrue. For example, DannyBoy points out that GNOME and whatever Ubuntu uses do have fractional scaling.

However, is my experience untrue? Was I lying when I said that my track-pad two-finger scrolling is frustrating? Furthermore, it’s not unusual for people at work to try my track-pad and it being way too sensitive or too un-sensitive, but no in between.

Was I lying when I said that, for me, it’s hard to get software? Was I lying when I said that maybe this is a skill issue on my part, but even that is indicative of a lack of easy ways of getting reassurance in the way that Apple makes it easy to find software in their App Store?

Was I lying when I said that, to me, GNOME is gorgeous?

Was the creator of the Mojo language lying when he recounted his experience developing Swift?

Was I lying when I said that developers are leaving Linux?

I agree that GNOME and KDE are gorgeous and very polished in many ways. However, I have had some problems in GNOME, Fedora, or Open Suse:

• fractional scaling is not immediately available in Fedora or OpenSuse, at least to users who don’t know how to use the terminal [Edit: Thanks, DannyBoys for pointing out that Ubuntu may have fractional scaling enabled by default and that experimental fractional scaling on GNOME can be activated, at a battery cost]
• the track-pad two-finger scrolling is painful (compared to a Mac) to me and to people who have used my laptop with Fedora or OpenSuse
• sometimes it’s hard for me to get software, especially outside of .debs. For example, in Fedora I had trouble getting Signal Desktop installed from a source that I felt comfortable with (maybe this speaks to my ignorance in how Fedora packages are set up and distributed more than the reality of insecurity, but even this is part of the issue: I couldn’t find any reassurance). To be fair, Open Suse gave me that reassurance, because I understood that YAST was somehow more directly tied to the source (I could be wrong, but that was my impression). However, YAST’s software download software is a far cry from the kind of UX that the GNOME Software app is or the Apple App Store.

Despite these problems, I do have to say that GNOME is absolutely gorgeous. It’s precisely the kind of user-centricity that I want to see in Linux.

However, the end-users aren’t the only users. There are also developers! For example, I remember listening to the developer of the Mojo language talking with Richard Feldman, and the developer said that the development of the Swift language made it clear to him that Apple is aggressively user-centric. I don’t doubt that there are many problems with Swift as with Apple products in general, but I don’t see that kind of discourse in Linux coming from the main maintainers. Instead, there seems to be a vanguard arguing for a better developer experience (such as writing kernel code in Rust), and they find loads of friction. Heck, key developers are leaving Linux!

Edit: Clarified what is strictly my interpretation.

Today, it is practically impossible to survive being a significant Linux maintainer or cross-subsystem contributor if you’re not employed to do it by a corporation. An interviewer to the Linux dev that’s mentioned in the article: “So what did you do next to try to convince the Linux kernel devs of the need for more focus on end-users?”

I appears as if Linux is a nest that is not built with a consistent set of user-centric principles. Instead, it seems that each part of the nest is built with a specific corporation or project in mind.

Assuming I’m right that Linux is built with project-based thinking and not product-based thinking, I do wonder what a user-centric Linux or another user-centric FLOSS OS would be like, an OS that is so smoothly built that users come to think of it not as an OS for tech-savvy people, but an obvious alternative that you install immediately after getting a computer.

If Linux is indeed built with project-based thinking, then I wonder why that is. The uncharitable explanation is that someone doesn’t want Linux to have a MacOS-like smooth and gorgeous experience. If you don’t think MacOS is smooth and gorgeous, I’ll address that.

I know some people have suffered immensely with Apple products not only because Apple builds devices that can’t be repaired, but because of things simply not working. However, there are many people who love Apple. That’s the kind of passionate advocacy that I would love to see in Linux, and not just around freedom and value-based judgements. I want Linux to be thought of as the least-friction tool for professional or recreational use. I want people to think of Linux as gorgeous and usable.

Of course, we can apply Hanlon’s razor to this situation (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [ignorance or lack of skill or practice].”). Managing a product is difficult. Managing a community is difficult. When the nest’s design is not built by a team constantly seeking to care about users, but instead by a bunch of users pecking into the nest until their corner is shaped the way they want, it’s not surprising to see a lack of user-centricity.

I assume you are American and are referring to the American government.

What I will say will be unpopular. I understand if you think I’m naive. I understand if you get frustrated. I suspect the frustration comes from having clear images of how fascism has been born out of suffrage and supposedly democratic institutions. I suspect the frustration comes from assuming that my suggestion is to ‘vote your way out of this situation’. I probably seem like a naive liberal, hugging trees and holding hands with Trump-supporters while watching the sunset. I can’t change your beliefs, but I can at least ask whether you’re really sure I’m that.

Here’s what I believe: the future is democratic.

How can I possibly say that when Trump is in power, destroying democratic institutions, covering with his hand the mouths of Americans?

It is evident that Trump is an authoritarian populist. <details> <summary> Here’s what I mean by that. </summary> Authoritarian because he disregards democratic processes. His supporters don’t care that he may shackle them and put his hand on their mouths to never speak again. They are fine with that, as long as he builds The Swamp of America, a land where people are obsessed with their own bellybuttons, where everyone works like robots that never question the dogma shoved into their throats, and where corporations can bulldoze and burn the planet and still receive a pat in the back from The Orange Swamp Man because ape see number go up.

And populist because he systematically disregards and discredits people who know what they’re talking about (experts), and instead do things out of fear that their fragile ego will be hurt. It’s ironic: populists claim to represent their citizens but they don’t listen to the citizens who actually know what they’re talking about. If the truth is inconvenient for the populists’ ego, it’s a good idea to cover the sun with their thumb. Nobody will notice how ridiculous it looks, right? </details>

It is evident that America is currently experiencing a democratic backlash.

The story of this democratic backlash started a while ago. Over the past decades and even centuries, Americans have slowly come to not only value freedom but also be able to transform their political institutions to be more democratic. Women owning property. Black people gaining the right to drink from the same water-fountain as white people, the right to vote, the right to own property… An educational system that’s incredibly flawed and ridiculously overpriced for what it actually delivers, but one that’s envied by many nations on Earth that do not score nearly as high in tests of basic science, math, and reading comprehension. Americans were able to not only look at the goal, but also take steps towards it. These changes aimed to make every American more capable and therefore more free.

However, democratic institutions mean elites lose their capacity to extract privileges from their underlings. To elites, there is such a thing as too much freedom for people, too much freedom to choose who to be and what to do with their lives. Elites noticed people were questioning why elites extracted so many privileges and didn’t contribute to people or invest in people. People were questioning why they have to slave away their lives paying college debt, medical debt, and mortgages while the ultra-rich are buying their third yacht or jet. The people who most extracted wealth from American people did not want to pay back or invest in its people.

American elites saw this as a great opportunity to finance swindlers. The current swindler, The Orange Swamp Man, sold Americans a beautiful knife. The knife itself wasn’t the problem; it was quite capable in destroying capabilities and freedoms. The problem was that the instructions were hard to follow. Americans have found it difficult to hold the smile on their face while stabbing themselves and twisting. The Orange Swamp Man says Americans will have to suffer through tariffs, but that it’s definitely not going to make them suffer more in the long term. The Orange Swamp Man correctly believes that destroying democratic institutions such as healthcare, education, and the basic guarantee of rights is necessary for American elites to extract as much money and power from American people.

It’s important to note that not everyone bought the knife and stabbed themselves. Trump won by a slim margin and Trump is highly unpopular. Those of you who are still alive and well can do something about it. In fact, I’m willing to bet you will, because undemocratic governments do not survive massive organic protests.

How so? Imagine this scenario: Give a man a book and he may never pick it up. Teach a man to read and he’ll silently look around, noticing a lack of development and freedom. Teach men, women, children—everyone to read and you’ll have a bustling conversation: “Really? Is that fair?” “Why does the richest man on Earth not want to invest in the roads that his products use? Why does he not want to invest in the people that made him rich?” “My wife and I had bad accidents and we can’t work. Is our society so selfish that it doesn’t care about us?” This may seem cartoonish, but this is how people realize there’s a mismatch between (1) the elite’s way of extracting and hoarding privileges and (2) how everyday people see the situation.

Each critical thought, each enlightening conversation makes the pressure grow, like a balloon getting pregnant with air, ready to burst at any moment.

All of this language may seem allegorical, metaphorical, out of touch, and absurd. But it is based on decades of research on how democracies are formed and sustained. Check out this article and its cited literature if you’re interested: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-the-future-is-democratic/ Also, my story about how American elites relate to their people is essentialized, compressed, and probably missing details that authors like Acemoglu, Robinson, Welzel, Piketty, Shaikh, and Mazzucato can fill in.

As to what you can do, I’d recommend learning how to frame discussions. Not that I’m good at it, but people who know how to use can change how the world works. Social movements die or thrive depending on whether people can internalize what you’re saying.

What do you think? Are you willing to keep on stepping forward in tried and true paths? https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12501 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337861541_Moral_reframing_A_technique_for_effective_and_persuasive_communication_across_political_divides (sorry for the paywal; you can usually email academics and they’ll send you the text, or you can find alternative texts or sources).

Does it feel as if they clarify the kind of life you want to live or that they’re forcing you to avoid them?

Hey. I’m so sorry that you’re feeling so spent, so tired, so helpless.

Faced with these feelings, you have tried what many sensible people do: we try to feel better by telling ourselves that it’ll be okay, that tomorrow it’ll stop raining. Sometimes that helps, especially if it indeed stops raining. However, if the rain doesn’t stop, telling ourselves that it’ll be okay feels fake. This is actually backed by research on the topic.

I don’t mean to say that optimism is bad. I mean to say that maybe there’s different paths that we can take, paths that I’ll mention here. Maybe some of these paths are new to you (given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully they get you closer to where you want to be. Maybe you already know the paths (again, given that you mentioned wracking your brain). Hopefully there’s a new way you learn to traverse them (for example by bike instead of walking, or looking up at the canopies and the valleys instead of looking down at the ground). Maybe they don’t resonate at all with you, and at least you can have the certainty that you’re not alone, that we have all struggled finding our path. It’s all okay. Ultimately, it’s up to you what you do.

This is a public forum and many others will hear my words. They may have heard me before and they will know that I tend to recommend a set of paths that lead to psychological flexibility. I do this because, regardless of what we’re faced with in life, we will always be accompanied by our brain and its voice, our thoughts and their recommendations, and our sense of self and its aspirations. Psychological flexibility teaches us how to relate with ourselves, how to approach that machine that sometimes tells us that life is unlivable and we are unlovable.

You mentioned that your brain is telling you that the world is a mess, that you’re lonely, that you’re old. In a weird way, it’s trying to take care of you. It’s predicting where the tiger is hiding and how to avoid it. “Don’t try dating or finding new friend-groups! It’ll be exhausting and you’ll leave there with nothing good”. “The world’s a mess. Don’t even try.” But our mind plays tricks on us. It’s like a friend who is trying to take care of us but is sometimes confused. It’s an advisor who sometimes nails it, sometimes fails miserably, and sometimes gets stuck. It’s usually when our inner advisors get stuck that our lives become full of unnecessary suffering.

That’s psychological rigidity. Our mind becomes a dictator, entirely sure of how the world works and what can and can’t be done. Our thoughts become repetitive and our life shrinks, kind of like how you described the suffocating walls, closing in on you.

The good news is that there is a way of pivoting from psychological rigidity to psychological flexibility and that there is solid science behind this. Here’s something I’ve said elsewhere some time ago:

Imagine the longest essay you’ve ever had to write for school. A dozen pages? Two dozen? Now picture it in front of you, printed out, on a desk. Imagine there’s ten copies of your essay spread around the desk. Add another layer of essays on top. And another. And another. A hundred times. If you organized the documents into a single stack of paper, it would be 1.2 meters tall. That is how many randomly controlled trials there are on the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Here are two places where you can look at the evidence: one and two.

ACT has changed my life and that of hundreds of thousands of people. While I would suggest to get an ACT therapist (and a good one!), there is evidence that you can learn the skills of psychological flexibility if you engage in the appropriate mental processes, regardless of how. You can learn about how to do ACT exercises in A Liberated Mind, which you can find here https://stevenchayes.com/.

I hope you can see how those same words apply to this context.

Now, you mentioned crying daily with a stiff upper lip. But you also mentioned that you can feel your innards wanting to live, to truly live. These two are related. We hurt where we care and we care where we hurt. The crying and the yearning are two sides of the same coin. You have a yearning inside of you for life-affirming experiences. It hurts to see yourself not having them.

I just wanted to point out that this pain that you feel is tied to the passion for living a well-lived-life that you have inside of you. That energy that you have spent trying to tell yourself that things will get better, crying, putting up a facade— that energy can be redirected to a life that you find valuable. Hopefully the tools I mentioned earlier help you do exactly that.

Two things before I let you on your way.

First, you may consider the program “Healthy Minds”. It’s an app/program developed by a non-profit that has been tied to the research of meditation and human flourishing. I donate to them because their research is well grounded, their app is well designed, and they’re life-changing. If you cannot do the investment of time or money or effort for ACT, Healthy Minds is the single easiest thing that you can do daily that will have the biggest impact in your life.

It’s important to note that, while Healthy Minds is the easiest thing with the biggest impact, it’s not a replacement for ACT or otherwise therapy. Here’s a very cartoonish way of thinking about it, but it exhibits my point. Let’s say you have been crawling on the floor. Healthy Minds helps you to walk. ACT is like the high-speed train. Walking is not a replacement for the high-speed train.

Second, as to feeling like a rusty and corroded car, it’s worthwhile to point out that there are ways of removing rust and reinforcing existing structures. Heck, there’s even recycling! A phoenix can arise from the ashes in the same way that people can grow from trauma (it’s a thing; look up “post-traumatic growth”).

I hope this helps.

Adding to what others in thread have said, there are languages that are more usable and are more user-centric.

SFW edit: There are automatic transmission cars and manual transmission cars, both made for humans, one easier than the other. There are calculators that can compute lots of values and mental math classes, both for humans, one easier than the other. Ergonomics matter.

Although I do concede that, depending on the context, knowing more about something is better than not. I wonder what happened to the original meme’s author for them to create the meme.

I’m sorry about the soul-sucking coworkers and the outright rejection. It sounds painful and frustrating. Anyone in your position would be frustrated; it only makes sense!

We can look at your situation from two points of views, and each point of view will reveal things that can help you better deal with this situation.

The first point of view is the external one, the observable behavior, the one you’d notice if someone followed you and your coworkers/managers around with cameras. Looking at your situation from this point of view, it sounds like there could be a broad problem with your company’s management. If so, there might be very little that you can do directly. Depending on whether you want to take upon you a massive, perhaps Sisyphean task (pushing a massive boulder up an infinite mountain, with no end in sight), you could check out the management or Agile literature.

By learning what good management looks like, you could be in a better position to accept rough situations, in the same way that understanding how a cold develops could help us accept feeling drained of energy, coughing constantly, and having to self-isolate to avoid spreading the virus. It’s not a solution, but it gives perspective. Beyond acceptance, in the unlikely scenario that your company empowers you, you could propose effective changes or implement them. However, I would not count on this.

If you cannot change your company’s management, there are alternatives. Let’s go from the external point of view to the internal one, your point of view, the point of view that notices emotions, feelings, memories, action impulses, bodily sensations, interpretations, predictions, etc. From this point of view, we can see your frustration, your fear of being thin-skinned, your interpretation of potential rumination. In this other, internal, world of thoughts and emotions, we can’t do the same things that we do in the external world. We can’t get rid of thoughts. We can’t magically transform them.

Others have recommended simply brushing these experiences off, as if they don’t affect you. However, humans hurt where they care. Things that hurt you reveal where your values lie. If you hurt when you see injustice, then justice is a value you hold. If you hurt when you see brutal rejection, then inclusion and kindness are values you hold. It’s inevitable to feel pain when you value something. It’s human. And it explains why you’re hurt; something in you that you value was violated by this experience. A good question to discover what you value is “What would I have to not care about for this not to hurt?” Finding out your values helps you get motivated and gives you purpose, even when the going gets tough.

Still others have talked about changing the way you interpret the situation, including doing it by exposure therapy. This can be effective, as it fundamentally is changing the way that you relate to your thoughts and sensations. However, it’s important to do it with the right motivation. Otherwise, the exposure itself can backfire and reinforce the wrong schemas. What is the right motivation? Well, why would you find it valuable to continue in this job, despite its painful experiences? Maybe it brings stability to your life. Maybe it finances other projects of yours that you find valuable. It’s up to you to decide. If you do find it valuable, then you will be better equipped to push forward even when the going gets tough. I’m not saying this is the only path; again, it’s up to you.

Now, as to pragmatic things that you can do in this internal world, I’d argue that the single easiest, low-risk thing that you can do with the most positive impact is doing the Healthy Minds program or something like it. It will teach you to relate to your thoughts in a healthy way, as well as develop better ways of relating with other people and with your everyday actions, including your work. This will help you regardless of the path that you choose. If you’re willing to invest more to reap more rewards, you could consider therapy such as Acceptance or Commitment Therapy or Process-Based Therapy.

That’s it!

There’s a Know How or How To (I don’t remember the name of the YouTube channel; EDIT: @executivechimp@discuss.tchncs.de found it. The video is linked in their comment) that explains why we used to believe moderate alcohol consumption is healthy.

Turns out, those surveys only ask “How many drinks do you have a week?” Notice they tacitly ask about the present, how many drinks now and not in the past. If you were a very heavy drinker in the past and got sick from it, you likely stopped drinking altogether.

Not only that, but people with chronic illness many times choose to not drink at all.

These two populations (sick ex-drinkers and chronically sick non-drinkers) make it seem as if not drinking is not that healthy. But remove those groups from the data analysis or control for past alcohol usage and pre-existing conditions and you end up with a clear pattern: drinking alcohol in any quantity is unhealthy. The more, the worse.

Sorry for the lack of sources; I’m on mobile. I think there’s a WHO report titled “There’s no safe amount of alcohol” or something like that.

I love this. It aligns with the previous literature we had on teams. If a team needs heroes to solve problems, it may well be that their management (or whoever) is placing too many absurd expectations on the team. The other side of this coin is that, if a team is not an attractive place for ‘great individuals’, it may well be that there are improvements that the team needs to do, especially in relation to the team’s autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Indeed, he could. It sounds like it’s an expectation from you, and that if he doesn’t then he is entirely a Trump or Republican supporter.

I’m so sorry. You’ll think I’m annoying and stupid, but would it be absurd to ask for clarification regarding what you mean? I couldn’t really understand your point and it sounds like you have a passion for this topic and a clear point of view.