Correct me there, but wasn’t the “select source” thing intended to be about different deb sources?
The issue is that what you expect to be a deb package manager ends up redirecting to snap anyway. It’s not a different source, it’s a different system. If I have to manually take steps to avoid using the distro vendor’s default sources because they just redirect to a system I don’t want to use, I might as well look for a different vendor.
And so I did
IIRC, the issue was that - unless you take steps to explicitly prevent it - Ubuntu would occasionally reinstall the snap version. I don’t remember the details, been a while since I had to dance that dance, but I recall it being one of the things that put me off snap in particular, Ubuntu in general and sparked my search for a different distro.
I’m now on Nobara, a Fedora-based gaming-oriented distro maintained by GloriousEgroll (who also maintains the popular Proton-GE)
I see more atheistmemes on All than I do religious stuff.
This is a joke, most likely, given the community and context.
Most foot soldiers would wear chain armor with pieces of plate here and there, and thats only the extremely rich who could afford things like that.
Mail was much too expensive to produce to outfit “Most foot soldiers” with. For much of the middle ages, most foot soldiers wore some kind of Gambeson and a helmet. A mail hauberk was the next step up, as it was still cheaper than a full mail shirt.
Plate cuirasses became common among the more wealthy in the late middle ages. By the early modern period, when the Almain Rivet (half-armour) became cheap enough, you’d see smaller professional armies be outfitted with them. But the common peasantry generally couldn’t afford either for the longest time.
Its funny when people talk about full plate being ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’ when it was mostly a sign of status, ornamental and incredibly impractical.
As a rule, if something didn’t work in war, people wisened up and stopped doing it. They weren’t stupid, just because they didn’t have the same wealth of knowledge thay we do.
Knights didn’t want to impress and get killed, they wanted to win and live. No amount of status will help you if your opponents dance on your grave. If plate was as much of a liability as you claim, it wouldn’t have become more popular, comprehensive and accordingly expensive over time, until Gunpowder started accelerating weapons development far beyond anything protection could keep up with.
You’re right that full plate was often worn by heavy cavalry, both as a matter of wealth and as a matter of utility. Heavy Cavalry were shock troops, morale breakers, designed to make your (often not professionally trained) soldiers falter, break order, open gaps in their ranks to get out of the way of the thundering beast charging at them. The appearance added to the indimidation, but it also helped protect on the way to and through the infantry lines.
There were mounted heavy infantry too that would ride to battle, then dismount and advance with the soldiery, and there too did plate help protect. It’s easier to confidently walk into a line of levied peasants pointing spears at you if you’re hard to actually wound.
In either case they were made of much thinner plate than some pop culture depictions would make them out to be - about 20-30kg. A modern soldier’s kit isn’t lighter than that.
many battles by extremely well geared soldiers were lost because they couldnt out maneuver barely armored militia, or even just rain.
Most battles that saw heavy cavalry lose were because of miscalculations, not because the armour made them immobile. If infantry in good order maintained cohesion, but the cavalry kept charging instead of turning to feint, they likely got stuck in a melee where numbers would be against them. If they rode into heavy missile fire, no amount of mobility will magically let them dodge the arrows, but a good plate would increase your chances of survival. If they got stuck in the mud as sitting ducks, that was because horses don’t always deal well with running across uneven ground, particularly with sudden pitfalls where the ground is softer, and even more if heavy rain and blinders impeded their vision.
Yes, bodkin arrows from a sufficiently powerful warbow at sufficiently short ranges and steep angles of impact may well penetrate plate, particularly the less solid visors, and arrows in general bear a risk of felling your horse, but some armour is better than no armour.
Like I said, if it didn’t help in battle, they wouldn’t go to such lengths and expenses to produce it and wear it to battle. They’d wear it to ceremonies, to parades and to tourneys, but not to war.
I’ll leave you with this demonstration of mobility
Most mounted knights don’t really need crotch protection. Their saddles had a kind of shields projecting up for that purpose. If they get dismounted in a melee, that might be a different situation, but even then, the codpiece will probably not be the weakest part of that armour.
And their runtime uses pressure-vessel to put games into controlled containers
I mean, there may also be plenty of non-citizens there at any given time.
There’s a bunch of staff there too. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 764 people.
only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it
The first step to improvement is to acknowledge flaws. We can still admit “This is outside our current capacity to fix.”
pretending “linux is easy now”
This might not always be pretense so much as cognitive bias and a bubble effect: If I look at it from my point of view, it has gotten a lot eas_ier_. I underestimate just how advanced even those things I consider basic are for someone not as versed as I am. I’m nowhere near an expert, but I know enough to have lost sight of the floor.
There are plenty of “fire and forget” distros - If I want to, say, install Ubuntu, I create a bootable flash drive with the base image, reboot, follow the installation prompts, easy.
The layperson will ask “What’s Ubuntu? I thought we’re talkink about Linux?” “What does bootable mean? How do I do that?”
Most crucially, from my own experience trying to sell a family member on Linux, “What do these prompts all mean?” They’re scared of selecting something wrong, because they’re not confident that they understand them correctly.
That may be a public image issue: If you’re predisposed to think it’s complex, the brain may lock itself into not trusting its own understanding of semantics. And the elitists certainly aren’t helping with that: If a hundred people reassure you it’s fine and one person says it’s complex, it’s hard to avoid that seed of doubt. Once it is planted, confirmation bias will do the rest.
I don’t know what the solution is
One part of the solution might be a “transition” package, consisting of first a tool to try cross-platform alternatives to tools people already use, second a ready-made VM to try Linux without installing it, using a transition distro, styled to look and feel “like Windows” and built-in links to the host filesystem, and finally a fully automated installer that includes backing up files, settings etc. and putting them in the equivalent Linux soot after installation so you have as little transitory friction as possible.
Which leads us back to the topic of leftist politics and the split between moderates and progressives: Of course I don’t want to compromise on my principles, but we’re not gonna win people over by demanding drastic change with scary words that make it easy to lump in the “Capitalism fucks us over” progressives with the McCarthyist “They want to install a Russian dictatorship!” rhetorics about the radicals and tankies. Radical change is likely to invite radical backlash.
Our best shot at non-violent and lasting change is to make the transition as low-friction as possible, inching people over policy by policy, shifting the Overton Window the way the regressives have been doing for decades, instead of trying to aggressively shunting it over.
Focus less on identity, ideology and terminology, more on individual issues and solutions. Some movements obviously warrant aggressive countering, but we have to pick our battles, or we’ll be spread out on too many fronts. Ideology alone doesn’t win wars; Strategy does.
We should also project unity of vision and determination instead of public infighting and sabotaging what we all want over the things we disagree on.
Presentation matters.
Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is.
I find that to be an issue with many well-meaning people.
For example, I see it occasionally in the FOSS-bubble: It’s great if a given software is ideologically “pure”, independent from capitalist incentives, open source and freely available. It’s great that there are volunteers doing work for the benefit of others.
Occasionally, when someone lists specific tools running on Windows only as reason for not switching to Linux, they get told to use FOSS alternatives instead that just can’t match the proprietary in terms of features or usability. When you point that out, there will often be the customary vocal minority of twats chastising you “It’s volunteer work, you don’t get to demand anything, go implement it yourself” etc.
I hate to admit it, but I’m generally more comfortable around MS Excel than LO Calc. I’ve used LO Writer and Impress for personal and university stuff, because I rarely need more advanced features (and if I do, I’ll probably use TeX anyway), but when it comes to more complex work with spreadsheets, I just find Excel to be smoother in usage. I don’t have enough experience in the field of UX to put a finger on why, nor would I likely have the skills or time to contribute fixes to LO Calc. I can settle for less out of ideology, but is that what you expect from people at large?
The same applies with the transition to Linux in general: I’m technically versed enough that I’m confident I can probably fix any error I encounter. But until the public perception and tooling of Linux gets to the point that even non-techies can easily do the switch, it’s not going to see widespread adoption.
I love FOSS. I love Linux. I want to see them replace proprietary monopolies as much as possible.
But the presentation matters.
Fuck, I missed that typo
deleted by creator
I never understood why people get their panties in a twist when I use 24h times. I get that it’s confusing if I drop the colon and just write 1854, but 18:54 isn’t that hard to figure out, is it?
Edit: Corrected 25h to 24h, thanks to MindTraveller for mocking pointing out my error
25? You must be freezing!
(25°F is below freezing point, -3.9°C, but 25°C is a comfortable room temperature, 77°F)
Actually, the right looks like a Kallax, which are probably the sturdiest item in their catalogue given the walls are like 3cm (1.2 in) thick. I’ve taken them apart and reassembled them before, and unlike every other piece of Ikea furniture I’ve done that to, they’re actually just as stable and reliable as before.
Bubble phenomenon: We, who are familiar with it, know the limitations and can deal with the differences, think it’s the superior platform. But that isn’t an objective and universally understood fact when you factor in the UI/UX benefits of a single, largely uniform platform like Windows that people are already used to.
Particularly given the fact that “Linux” isn’t any single OS and switching is liable to confuse, intimidate and paralyse people with the sheer wealth of choices, the pre-experience of even considering to use Linux is horrible. How many different “which distro should I choose?” guides and discussions have you seen?
Linux is great in many things, but for the average user, the first problem starts even before the actual platform. Until the community at large agrees on and promotes one or two easy starter / transition distros that “just work” for all the essentials, that hurdle alone will disqualify it from being the universally superior platform. Its great strength - the plethora of choices - is its biggest weakness in the one regard that matters most for encouraging people to switch.
By and large, Linux advocates are technically-minded people. We approach systems and platforms differently. We underestimate the value of UX and particularly the pre-experience before deciding to use something for most people.
Burst layoffs to polish up earnings reports are “fine” (in terms of stocks), but hemorrhaging workers when your company is already in hot water for product quality complaints smells of “We’re really desperate to make our reports not look devastating”. From a stupid monkey brain point of view, it sounds like they’re throwing sailors overboard to avoid sinking and I wouldn’t want to be a passenger and risk being next, so I’d try to sell what shares I have before they’re worthless.
I don’t know what heuristics professional traders go with, but I imagine they would follow a more complex and nuanced logic along those same lines. Either way, if enough people do that, it compounds.
I appreciate the effort you put into writing this. Not the result, but at least the effort.
If you’re having an easy time with it, I love that for you
Thanks for that correction then. I wasn’t conscious of that detail.
In any case, the issue remains that, if the vendor’s default repositories push for a type of package I don’t want, I either have to manually find and vet third party repositories I trust or find someone else to rely on for defaults I’m fine with.
The difference between “I want a different source for a single package, so I’ll manually select a different source for that one” and “I don’t trust Canonical to select sources I agree with anymore” is one of scale. I’m fine with manually pinning the transitional package, uninstalling it and the snap (hopefully remembering to back up my profile before realising that it also deletes user data) adding a ppa, reinstalling it and reimporting my profiles just for firefox.
But if I feel like I have to fight my distro vendor over not using their preferred package distribution system, it’s probably better to jump ship - other vendors have beautiful distros too.
(Also, “you can just use a different source” is part of the reason people prefer not to use snap, where you can’t do that)