By the way, this week of June 9th to 15th is national forest week and June 7th was national trails day. I meant to send out that reminder for fellow nature-lovers a while back but I forgot since I've been busy working on a project. Anyway though:

I've always found that nature is the most reliable source of peace and comfort. Get out there and enjoy it! A walk in nature really helps to clear one's head and put things in perspective and reminds oneself of what really matters. Being out in #nature also helps one's mind to wander and hence often helps to generate new ideas and/or process existing thoughts productively. 🏞️🥳

Hello everyone! It's been a fair while since I last posted anything and I hope you are all well!

Anyway, last night I finished writing an ~10 page article which is a mix of (1) my broad personal and philosophical thoughts on the state of modern (too often increasingly user-hostile) user interface design and (2) my recommendations for what Linux distros and desktop environments seem best for those who want to migrate away from less ethical platforms such as Windows towards a more freedom respecting and customizable computing environment.

In those regards, I've been testing out dozens of Linux distros and desktop enironment combinations over the course of the past 2-3 months in order to determine which one(s) would be the best overall fit for these goals of *both* freedom and ease of use (rather than just one or the other). As such, I narrowed it down to seven of the best distros for these parameters and discussed the nuanced pros and cons of each some. I also mentioned which setup I'm currently using, though it may change in the future to one of the other seven.

My focus in selecting such Linux distros was on reconstructing the kind of experience that used to be the norm back in the golden era of personal computers (mostly the 1990s and 2000s). So, those of you who want that back again would benefit from reading it.

It is posted on my site under "My Creations" as a plain PDF and directly viewable and savable. May it help you find more freedom and joy in your digital life!

@FrenzyBiscuit Thanks for another suggestion, I will look into it more later. :blob_sign_thx:

@ErikJonker For me personally, I only use the word "anti-political" to mean exactly its literal meaning, with little/no intended specific reference to current events.

I have seen politics hollow out countless people in recent years, making them less and less capable of nuanced and logically coherent discussion of anything that triggers any political association whatsover (regardless of "side").

Likewise, most "anti-political" and "apolitical" people I meet (like myself) feel similarly and there is seldom any more specific intent behind declaring a dislike of politics than opposing its tendency to spread hate, irrationality, and censorship of nuance regardless of which side is doing the talking.

It is thus alarming and disheartening to see that apparently even neutral terms are now being associated with a specific political group. I don't support Musk nor any unethical person!

Words have meanings and "apolitical" and "anti-politics" should only be assumed to have exactly their literal meaning unless a greatly sufficient amount of additional context is available indicating otherwise.

Most people who've come to dislike politics do so because they want to focus on more good-natured and wholesome avenues of life, especially in a rigged system.

The irony is that it is only such an apolitical or anti-political attitude that can save us from this "post-truth" mess we've been contrived into!

We are all human.

Empathy, nuance, logic, context: *that* is anti-politics! 🏞️

@FrenzyBiscuit Thanks for responding and for giving a recommendation. I think I encountered spacebattles a long while back but it seems a bit outside my writing focus (I'm not at all interested in fanfic or meta talk about popular media and such) and not general enough in audience and scope for what I want.

By social media I meant simply exactly what the phrase means (*all* social media), whether "federated" (nominally decentralized) or not.

I've been struck in recent years by the feeling that most online platforms have increasingly felt like wastelands and things in general haven't felt like they add up right for a long time. For supposedly connecting billions of people, the prospects of simply even having a viable platform for sharing one's thoughts and creativity in a way that actually makes a difference have seemed bleak in recent years.

The giant popular platforms like Reddit often have rampant censorship and groupthink and manipulation of what is or isn't given any visbility and are often incredibly toxic and irrational (though it varies of course).

I am trying to find some viable means of community, but no matter where I go it feels like the real thing isn't to be found anywhere, and I wonder increasingly if that is by design (to disempower the public from ever changing the status quo). Who knows though really?

I don't feel like I can rely in any way at all on any of the information I'm given either, such as view counts or votes. It could be 95%+ bots, etc.

Perhaps instead of referring to our modern devices as "Personal Computers", we should start referring to them as "Devices for Installing Spyware and Controlling Others" (DISCO). That would seem to more accurately reflect what they have become. Done much computing with "your" "computer" lately? 🕺🔮

I have a question for everyone: Does it matter if I use #underscore_tags versus if I use #CamelCaseTags?

Personally, I find underscore-based tags to be vastly easier to read honestly, and more flexible too.

If I had my say then the two tag formats would be treated as semantically equivalent, such that the posts tagged with either are pooled together! 💡

Thus, for example, if one post was tagged "c_programming" and another was tagged "CProgramming" then they'd both show up in each other's results.

Does this already happen? If not, then consider it to be a good #feature_request (or #FeatureRequest) for the #Matodon platform.

PS: I also am asking this question on Bluesky tonight to see if I can get an answer there too perhaps.

What are your thoughts?

Who else here misses traditional #forums such as #phpBB based ones and such? I certainly do. I feel like the environment of forums is more conducive to in-depth and nuanced discussion and builds stronger communities. Coincidentally, I also wrote an old PDF article about this same thing a while back.

Social media formats seem to have too much churn by contrast. I like that old discussions can be revived years later on traditional forums and can still have life even years later. That's kind of like the opposite of the drive to always "stay relevant" and "keep posting" that characterizes #social_media in contrast.

Forums also tend to be more #decentralized, or at least they would be if there were more active ones again like there used to be years ago. There are still a bunch of good ones though.

I actually joined a new one today in fact, a writing forum. Hopefully that'll be fun and will connect me to a steadier sense of community.

People on social media platforms barely reply compared to the rate at which people reply on forums, in terms of the ratio of the number of replies each post you make gets compared to the total number of current active users.

I wrote an interesting #article a few days ago about the ways that #minimalism and #censorship overlap in #society in ways that harm #diversity and #freedom. The article is called "Oneself as Intended, Not as Packaged" and is under "My Creations" on my site. I love how it turned out! 🦉

If you've been frustrated with the suffocating feeling of "tech" and society recently then you may find it cathartic and worthwhile to read!

The following are a few excerpts (in no particular order) to get a bit of a sense of it:

Excerpt 1:

"I’m not convinced that the PhD is worth more than the bumpkin, nor that the person who likes gardening is in any substantive sense a different kind of person than the gamer or the jock or the socialite. I’m not convinced that the character is the actor."

Excerpt 2:

"Of course, complexity naturally arises from the interaction and entanglement of simpler things, but that does not make complexity itself simple. A complex world devised by simple rules is still complex. The rules of Go are simple; the game is not."

Excerpt 3:

"Good is a journey where every step is treated as an end of itself, whereas evil is a journey where only the final end is treated as mattering. [...] Others are not our stepping stones.

Like candles in the dark, only a river of light can mirror the tapestry of the stars. Isn’t such a world, a world bejeweled by wholesomeness, worth fighting for? Thus: I am here, as are we all — to be another candle in your dark, and likewise." 🌃🌌

It's been "interesting" how my #trust in #technology platforms in recent years has plummeted and is now ~0 (or negative, arguably). There's been this uncanny pervasive sense of #censorship and #narrative_control. I didn't used to remotely feel that way. Good outcomes for humanity require #freedom.

The metaphorical sensation is one of suffocation, as if the walls of society's digital infrastructure at gradually closing in and all the oxygen for even the most basic of necessities of digital life and of even basic #freedom_of_thought are getting thinner and thinner with every passing year.

I've spent my whole life aspiring to the notion of eventually making my own living independently via my own digital creations, but it seems like the people in control of most platforms are just straight up only going to direct as much of humanity's attention as possible to a narrow and myopic subset of heavily propagandized and disingenuously framed and/or engineered topics that have come to pervade "public discourse" to such a great extent that it no longer even feels statistically plausible that most of it is even natural.

I honestly don't even know how those of us who want to work as #independent_creators are even going to be able to survive in the coming years. The people controlling most of the internet seem to think they are doing some kind of great good but it feels more like real intellectual and cultural diversity are being gradually snuffed out and we are all the worse for it.

One square mile of forest contains more true wealth than any person’s wallet ever could. All of time — eons of life’s resilience — is etched on every fiber of every rustling leaf.

Life itself is the only real thing we have.

So, remind yourself what real wealth is.

#EarthDay #EarthMonth #nature

Here's a brief follow-up tangent related to my post yesterday (the one about discovering the awesome retro UI of the Q4OS Linux distro when its theme is set to KDE_Classic):

The one big potential downside of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) that Q4OS Trinity Edition uses is that it uses old versions of Qt and KDE software. That means they are at higher risk of getting out of date, though they are awesome as long as they continue to work.

Thus, today I spent some time searching for even more distros along these lines, and found another combo that seems good, which I'm adding to my mental running list of good retro-style candidate Linux distros so far:

Debian LXQt (Live CD/DVD/USB) with the following changes made looks really good:

LXQt Appearance Configuration:
Qt Style > Windows
Icons Theme > Oxygen
LXQt Theme > System

Window Manager:
Theme > Moheli

...and optionally to save time:

Keyboard and Mouse Settings >
Mouse > Single click to activate items

The advantage of Debian over Q4OS is Debian is one of the largest distros and hence very dependable, whereas one doesn't know the future of Q4OS and Trinity Desktop Environment.

Thus, the new running list of distros I especially like:

1. Q4OS - Trinity edition
2. Debian - LXQt edition
3. Puppy Linux - Debian edition
4. Linux Mint - Xfce edition
6. Trisquel (uses Mate)
5. Trisquel Mini (uses LXQt)
7. Zorin OS (perhaps easiest Windows compatibility)

Give 'em a try if you like retro user interfaces!

@q4os Love the retro feel of Q4OS's implementation of Trinity Desktop Environment, especially with the theme set to "KDE_Classic" or "Redmond"!

I've been wanting that old school Windows 95 and/or XP look back for a long time. Your Linux distro is truly a hidden gem and deserves more attention! As such, I just submitted recurring small donation on Liberapay for you (currently pending). 😎🌠

Other close contenders I've liked for retro feel (trying dozens of distros) are Trisquel (both the main edition and the Mini one), Puppy Linux (Debian edition), Linux Mint (Xfce edition), and Zorin.

The look and feel of your distro was the best for my personal tastes, although I do envy some of Puppy's functional capabilities (though definitely not its UI, heh).

A suggestion: If you looked at Puppy Linux (Debian) and extended your own distro with more functionality and software like some of what they have then it would be a best of both worlds I think. Compare and contrast.

I also think you should do some proofreading on the English version of your website. It has a fair number of typos and oddities. The use of lowercase on your home page especially is probably turning some English speakers off, because it doesn't look right/professional. You should change that I think, and proofread all your docs some more, and you'd git a bit more attention probably.

Awesome retro-style distro!

Keep up the great work!

I really hope this distro survives and thrives! 🏗📈

Merry Large Gathering of People Named Chris everyone! 🎄🎅🎁

I'm wishing you all the best for your holidays and the upcoming New Year too!

🎆🎇📅😎

@Vyothric Nice, I love retro music.

The old #Windows95 interface is fun to see too. Windows 9x (Windows 95 and 98) were the days of computing that I am most fond of, approximately. Computers felt more like they truly belonged to you back then, whereas now I expect every new computer update to make the system ever more systematically exploitive (e.g. spyware-riddled, automatically data-scrapped by AI, etc) than the last. It's been many years since I ever actually looked forward to a computer "upgrade".

Anyway though, putting my that tangent aside, and more relevantly:

#TrackerMusic also often has good retro energy, although it can also sound modern too.

Google's search #monopoly endangers humanity's #freedom.

Thus, here's some #AlternativeSearchEngines I've been trying lately: Mojeek, Stract, Greppr, Marginalia, SearchMySite, Teclis, OldaVista, Wiby, The Old Net, IndieSeek, Alexandria, Right Dao, DDG, FrogFinder, Ecosia, and Kagi.

The most practical ones from the above list of alternatives are perhaps Mojeek, Stract, Marginalia, Ecosia, DDG, and Kagi.

However, some here I've barely used so far and each has pros and cons and some are specialized.

We really as a society need to rapidly reduce centralized control of information.

One of the most key steps in that is being willing to temporarily accept "less" and to creatively work within those limitations. That will help break up the power of monopolies like #Google and others.

The results of the more obscure search engines also often have a lot more #serendipity and hence the fun of discovery, reminiscent of the old days of genuinely "surfing the web" and stumbling upon things you'd have have thought to search for yourself.

Give them a try and thus help make the world an at least slightly more free place!

🔎💾🌎

@randomwizard Thanks for the supportive sentiments, especially given how tangential I ended up being.

I don't mind being monitored by an employer. I also graduated near the top of my class so its not like I don't/didn't know what I was doing performance-wise either. It was more the office politics and some very questionable employer ethics and the aftermath of me being so willing to call them out on it. It was me who decided to leave though. I resigned. It was complicated honestly and I don't want to get into it, and doubly so since this was just all tangential venting. Somehow it wrecked my creative game dev output though.

I'm just tired of things not making sense in terms of outcomes for so many years. I need to find a way to actually live sustainably, but outcomes never seem to have any real correspondence to the essence of anything I do. Plus, with things like AI plagiarism and ever increasing control of web traffic by a tiny minority in power things feel even harder now. Outcomes haven't made any sense for years now it seems like.

Here's hoping things will turn around somehow though. I don't need much, but I need some way to live somehow. It feels like merit is literally the very last thing influencing outcomes lately. That makes life feel hellish, frankly, and I'm tired of spending a whole decade feeling like that while all the best years of my life pass by largely fruitlessly (at least personally and economically).

Anyway, thanks for the sympathy etc. 🤝

@randomwizard That's some cool retro nostalgia. I do love me some roguelikes! 💾😁

I've been meaning to make one of my own for over a decade, but then shortly after graduating college I got a AAA game dev job. I thought it was my lucky break but in reality in hindsight it became the worst thing that ever happened to me.

After I quit that job and wrote and published a book (Unified Logic) I found to my dismay that every time I tried to open a compiler I was so filled with anxiety from my past experiences in AAA that I couldn't bring myself to work on any coding, though I could still do tutorials and mess around but I've never been able to finish anything substantive since then. I just keep panicking every time.

Yet, due to quitting that job and having spent years writing a book I have now found it impossible to even get interviews for programming jobs and indeed not just those jobs but pretty much any kind of jobs, though I worked online as a rater for years though I stopped that recently. Now I'm trying to do online business but haven't been able to get anywhere with that either yet.

I don't even know what I'm going to do in the long term. Not even sure I'll survive. Wish I never took that AAA job that wrecked my game dev mojo.

Still love roguelikes though and wish I could make bring myself to make one, but the game dev anxiety keeps stopping me over and over. 😅

Anyway sorry for venting / blathering. I'm verbose. Always have been. Sorry. Cool post @randomwizard! 😎

@evelynefoerster Good to hear. To answer your question: Most things on the document are done. Just the finishing touches and more fun/creative parts (art design) remain. It's good to be nearly done with it. 🙂