As an American, if an outcome of the Trump administration is even a slight deterioration of the US military industrial complex, I don’t think I’ll mind that. I’d rather spend that money on the poor and the young.
That money isn’t going to hang around for us to spend on other things though, we are just going to be poorer for it because our economic influence and reach are deteriorating at the same rate as our overall leadership clout.
I agree 100%. I find it odd how many people will claim to be against the MIC and promote a drop in military spending, yet they act how Europeans spending money with European defense companies rather than American ones is a terrible thing. I suppose they think that we'll just spend less money and nothing will happen otherwise?
The military is a huge jobs program though, it does provide a way out if you are low income. Some of my good friends had bad childhoods and 4 years in the military (navy, marines) did work out a lot of their issues, pay for their college and get them on some kind of path.
It would be way better if we had jobs programs that built infrastructure and improved public works, but I don't know if converting from `military` -> `direct handouts` would be an improvement.
It just goes to show how totally corporations have captured western aligned governments. Our governments are powerless to do anything (aside from some baby steps from the EU).
China is now the only solution to fix broken western controlled markets.
Cynicism in unhelpful, and it's not correct. This has nothing to do with governments and everything to do with market economics. This sort of thing happens every few years in computing.
Then what's your solution? It's a capital intensive business to get into, without some regulatory changes either on the supply side or the demand side, there's no way for it to be naturally prevented without consumers bearing the brunt of the downside. Yes, the market will eventually correct itself but until then consumers suffer.
The only legal check for monopoly corporations is regulation/taxation. That doesn’t work cross border. Especially when the other side has nationalised and artificially props the monopoly.
The solution then is removing the product from market till local competition takes its place.
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
What are you talking about? The WiiU sold like crap! It was a disaster! And a big reason it was a disaster was because the Wii itself was not selling anymore. It was over and out, people were fed up with it. Nintendo is a very very very bad economic indicator, they're on their own planet, and they're far from selling nostalgia. They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
I've had issues with Wayland, even in 2025, but never with X11. X11 may be old, but it's stable. Mint is for normal people, not us. I do have it on my travel laptop though, because well, it never has any issues.
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
(Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.
Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.
Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.
The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.
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