You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding my point, as I didn’t mention the average person’s intelligence in any way. All I’m saying is that minimizing the effort required to really try multiple distributions is a terrible way of introducing people to Linux. It will only lead to frustration and rejection. Choosing your bread doesn’t require investing dozens of hours.

No, it absolutely is hard, and those are bad comparisons. Growing up you interact with bread and cars, and you build a preference based on what you’re taught and what you experience. If I go into a new store and see a dozen types of bread I’ve never eaten, I can still make inferences about their taste, texture etc. This is not the case with Linux distributions - if I’ve never used Linux before, I literally don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

And it’s absolutely unrealistic to expect your average person to try a few out. They won’t be able to decide on technical grounds, and they’ll have to use the distribution for some time to build enough experience for a preference. Going back to your car example, it’s like suggesting people buy a few cars and decide which one they like (since they don’t have the experience to make judgements based on short test drives) - you’re asking them to invest a lot of time for something they don’t really need or want.

People learn how to do that while growing up. The same doesn’t apply to software, people usually choose what they know.

It’s 2024 and this guy still can’t read.

Okay, but why do you tell me that I’m wrong and keep going on about unrelated points? I don’t care if the user-facing name is different from the binary name. I have no position on the topic.

I corrected a wrong statement (who is responsible for the .desktop file of an application). You tried to counter-correct me, but did so on an unrelated point (who displays the application name? I’m still not sure). Positions on whether .desktop files defining separate names is good aren’t relevant.

Your Mint/Xed example doesn’t show what you think it does. Mint doesn’t just ship with .desktop entries for a bunch of applications, they are still managed by the respective developers and part of the packages themselves. Mint is also the developer of Xed, so the repository is in their organization, but the .desktop file is still part of the package. If you install Xed on any other distribution, you’ll still get the same .desktop entry, because it’s part of the package.

That is all I’ve been talking about. I’m not sure how your reply relates to that, but it would help me if you tell me what you’re arguing against.

No, your Desktop Environment doesn’t have a huge list of package names to app names. It has a list for all your installed packages, but the list entries are part of the packages.

If your system doesn’t have gnome-system-monitor installed, you won’t have the corresponding .desktop file, because it’s part of the package. It would be incredibly wasteful and unnecessarily complex for your system to get shipped out with .desktop files for all possible applications.

Thanks! Sorry for coming on so aggressively.

Do you think DEs just have a huge list of package names to app names, or how do you imagine this would work?

In reality, it’s of course fully on Gnome, as it’s part of their code. Nobody except for Gnome has anything to do with the name that’s being shown.

As my blood type always says: be positive!

I mean, I’m not B+, but I like the sentiment.

No, it can’t copy infinite bits, because it has to store the current address somewhere. If they implement unbounded integers for this, they are still limited by your RAM, as that number can’t infinitely grow without infinite memory.

Prices should have been decreasing, like they should have been with housing. But due to a lack of funding and manufacturing, modern nuclear power plants have very little R&D investment, and the entire labor pool surrounding nuclear plant fabrication doesn’t really exist anymore.

Exactly. This means that pumping money into this sector is ineffective if the goal is to combat climate change - the optimal build times will most likely not be met for any of the initial reactors that could be built, which pushes the first day of power generation back further and further. Renewables start to give some power immediately while you’re building up more and more capacities.

The primary reason for the prices of renewables falling is more than likely china and chinese subsidies gunning for a market dominance, followed by technological advancement, Unfortunately these advances don’t solve the problem of solar panels needing silicon, […]

Given the technological advancements and the current prices, it’s a good idea to start investing massively. If this should affect pricing negatively instead of positively (it was the latter before), investments could ensure local production. Every country will want access to silicon anyway for chip production, so this is not a new problem, just a difference of scale.

and batteries being expensive, […]

The price of batteries keeps falling and falling. Recently, the price of renewables + grid-scale storage has fallen below the equivalent price of nuclear energy. Given the current pricing trends, investing in nuclear means hoping that the trend reverses. With renewables and grid-scale storage, you’re simply betting on the same trends of the last decade continuing.

and wind turbines being a maintenance nightmare, as well as a disposal nightmare (most wind turbine blades are made out of fiber glass, good luck have fun)

Just like with nuclear energy, these are problems of investments and scale. Because of the supply of used turbine blades increasing, there has been a lot of development and investment into recycling them, and the situation has already improved a lot. You’re, again, hoping that the same will happen for nuclear energy on a short-enough timescale.

Yes the grid is centralized. What next, going to the grocery store is centralized? Wait until you figure out what walmart did.

And that somehow means it should stay centralized? A decentralized grid has a bunch of advantages: lower costs for the individual participants, higher resilience during catastrophes, lower impact of maintenance/disruptions/attacks, and a much shorter time to first production.

Well, if reality disagrees with you, it’s usually not reality that’s wrong. You can say that prices should have been decreasing, but I can show you that prices did not decrease, they increased, whereas prices for renewables have been decreasing.

Also, nuclear energy is the dream of the current fossil fuel industry - it’s centralized (no individuals can produce their own energy), it’s heavily subsidized (otherwise it would be way too expensive), and negative effects are socialized (cleanup is oftentimes not fully covered by the operator, and they also won’t be held accountable in the case of accidents). They are terrified of renewables, as they’d lose control and gain more competition.

Can you… can you literally not read? That comment doesn’t say anything about nuclear reactors taking 30 years to build. Or do you think a single nuclear reactor is enough to replace all fossil fuels? I wasn’t talking about a single nuclear reactor in that comment.

I don’t know how to better explain it to you. Re-read the comment a couple of times, maybe you’ll notice?

Why don’t you share your sources for 10-20% increased costs then? Let me see what you’re working with.

I didn’t claim 30 years of construction time, what are you talking about? You’ll also surely know that you can’t just randomly start building a nuclear reactor anywhere - there’s a lot of steps beforehand you have to take care of (if you don’t want to damage the local ecosystem). These steps take way longer for nuclear than for renewables, pushing your 7.5 years to double or even more. This, in combination with the increased cost as well as the long time until power production starts, makes it a non-starter to solve the climate crisis.

It’s the anti nuclear thats astounding, the figures you’re presenting are a best misleading when sourced to outright fabrications and lies.

I can see how you might think that when you’re inventing things I’ve said.

Nuclear is literally 3-4 times as expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

The levelized cost of electricity is exactly the metric you were talking about, over the whole lifetime of the power plant. Nuclear costs are also increasing, not decreasing as you claimed. Building reactors also takes way longer - you can deploy solar and wind in a couple of months to years, whereas all existing nuclear reactors took at least 10-20 years to build. While you’re continuously building up renewable capacity , it already starts producing energy, whereas a nuclear reactor will only start producing once it’s fully built, meaning that it simply doesn’t help us reduce carbon emissions until then, whereas renewables can. How can you be so wrong on a topic you talk so confidently about?

The propaganda of the nuclear industry is truly incredible.

The only place where Nuclear doesn’t have a cutting edge advantage is cost per kwh, and frankly if you’re putting profits over sustainability then welcome to being part of the problem that lead to us burning coal cause it was cheap.

This is incredibly naive. We have a limited amount of money for the energy transition (because otherwise the problem would already be solved), and the more efficiently you spend that money, the faster we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air.

Nuclear is by far the most expensive form of energy. If it takes you 30 years instead of 10 to replace all other forms of energy production, you haven’t won anything.

Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody is fucking in a UFO

• Rob Zombie

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