Trantarius

Book burnings are bad when they are used to prevent the free sharing of information or ideas. It is a form of censorship. Burning the Quran is not censorship, because this is not an attempt to ban the Quran or prevent anyone from reading it. Its an entirely symbolic gesture. Its comparable to burning the American flag, which I’m guessing you’re not so against.

I used to consider myself republican, and I think I’m still closer to republican than democrat. I prefer small government, which is at least sometimes a republican ideal. I am also against identity politics of any kind, so I am against affirmative action. I am in favor of gun rights, with regulations that allow for appropriate tracking of who has guns where, how they are stored, how they are transported etc. However, regulations that prevent particular people from owning guns or ban any particular weapons should be very conservative. Even felons should regain gun rights after an appropriate period of time. Only ridiculously dangerous weapons, like nukes, should be outright banned. Stuff like full auto weapons should be legal, but restricted to only be stored at a gun range or something. As far as LGBT goes, I don’t think the government should have anything to do with them. Let them do what they want, let people react how they want (as long as it isn’t violent of course, which is already illegal under other laws). I’ve never been really sure about abortion. My gut reaction is to just let people do what they want, but I struggle to logically justify it as anything but murder. Not to mention the impracticality of banning it.

I wouldn’t really call myself a republican anymore though. This is largely because of the religious aspects. I don’t know if republicans have actually become more authoritarian or if my perception has just changed, but either way they don’t seem to prioritize the same things as me anymore. Things like right to repair, net neutrality, and E2EE are important to me, but they don’t align with that at all. The party also keeps embracing identity politics, just with different identities than their opposition. Religion should be a non-factor from a governmental perspective. It doesn’t need any special protections, just to be ignored.

If I had to call myself something, I guess I would be a ‘libertarian socialist’, however much of an oxymoron that seems to be. For instance, I like the idea of UBI, largely because it would allow almost all welfare/social programs to be eliminated (including social security). Doing so would reduce government control, because they no longer have an ability to tweak who gets what, since everyone gets the same amount.

I love that they keep saying stuff like “introducing Ubuntu to the Christian community”, as if they couldn’t already use it.

When you hit the windows key (aka meta-key or super-key) it brings up the app launcher. You get a dock at the bottom with pinned or running apps (like a taskbar), and all of your open windows are presented in a sort of mini-version that lets you switch between them or move them between workspaces. There is a search bar that you can immediately type into to open any app with a .desktop file. There is also a button to bring up the app grid which shows your apps kind of like a mobile device’s home screen.

Not having a dock is one of my favorite things about gnome. I actually use an extension to hide the top bar too. There’s just something so satisfying about having 100% usable space on screen. I get all the info back in the win-key overlay, so I don’t really need that stuff on screen at all times.

What? Nautilus (ubuntu default file browser) finds drives wherever they are mounted and lists as their own location, as if it was windows. That includes the default mount point. Even if it wasn’t detected, it can still get to the mount point by browsing through the file system normally.

Installing software can be done via a software manager (included in ubuntu and most other distros). Software not in the manager is usually distributed as a portable binary (also common on windows) or an app image (even easier to use than an installer). Once installed, that software is the same as on windows.

Besides basic file manipulation, installing/running software, and web browsing, what else does the average user even do? All of it can be done on linux, with or without CLI.

I use gnome 4 because it is the most “out of the way” DE. I disable the dock and use an extension to hide the top bar, so there is literally nothing on my screen but the program(s) I’m using. I haven’t found another DE that let’s me do that (hiding the dock/taskbar doesnt count, cause it still comes up when you get the mouse too close which is super annoying).

I also like the window presenter thing, which I first started using with KDE. I prefer gnome’s implementation though, since it is the same key to bring up the window selector and the app launcher. I often want to switch to a window only to find it isn’t open, or I want to open a program that already is open but hidden behind other windows, so it makes sense to put them together. I also can’t be bothered to learn more than one hotkey. I’ve tried to obtain this overall behavior in KDE, but I found it was a whole lot of configuration just to get what gnome already does, so I might as well just use gnome.

I found the “touchscreen-y” interface bothersome at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. The biggest issue is not showing a large number of app entries efficiently, but it’s pretty trivial to remove the entries you don’t actually need with alacarte.

Gnome’s default apps (like the newish gnome text editor) are getting too simplistic for my preference, but again it’s super easy to swap them out.