What are the implications of this?

Questionable news plus four paragraphs of highly partisan commentary

Even Reddit news is superior, and that place is a shit hole

You’re probably right. At the same time, stability and the right environment for business can do wonders for a country’s economy. Just compare the dirt-poor China that Deng Xiaoping opened to global investment and the now-dominant regional superpower of today.

However, birth rates are more correlated to wealth, not to religion. Poorer people have more kids than wealthier people. Palestine is much poorer than Israel, partly because of the constant war and unrest there, as well as the lack of a strong state apparatus. This means nobody wants to invest money to start businesses and create good jobs Meanwhile, Israeli companies and people exploit this by hiring Palestinian workers at very low wages.

Palestine is also beholden to the monetary policy of Israel as they are forbidden by treaty from establishing a national currency. Thus, the currency of Palestine is largely the Israeli new shekel.

Once there is peace, there can be work to fix these problems and increase the living standards of Palestinians. Once that happens, history tells us that their birth rate will naturally decline.

Wow. Shocking.

Not going to lie, I thought it was fake news.

Hang on a minute—the population of Israel is some ten million but the population of Palestine is only some five and a half million. Israel is 74% Jewish and 18% Muslim. Palestine is 93% Muslim. The rest follow other religions or no religion (they are mostly Christians).

This seems to mean that there are 7 million Muslims and 7.5 million Jews. And these figures predate the Gaza war; no doubt the number of Muslims in Palestine has gone down, due to obvious reasons.

Well, we’ll see. The thing is that if the Palestinian Authority wants to be recognised as a state, it needs to act like a state and not like an ephemeral government-in-exile. Democratic governments can change through elections, but the state as an organisation is still there. The PA uses the name “State of Palestine” in its formal communications, so it needs to live up to that instead of acting like a ragtag band of desperados begging for whatever scraps of power Israel tosses to them.

Does the current government of the Palestinian Authority have the confidence of the people? Maybe. We don’t know. But I assume the answer is “no” until I am proven wrong. Fatah controls the PA but technically lost to Hamas in the 2006 election. Again, that was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then! Hamas has turned Gaza into a shit hole. The pockets of the West Bank run by the PA at least are serviceable.

I’ve never heard of that. Do you have any further reading?

Do you think before you post?

Netanyahu has not come up with any end plan for his Gaza war (because the whole thing is a ruse to keep him in office and out of jail at this point). It seems the Palestinians have so generously done so for him.

The logical end plan is probably a tenuous peace with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is smart they’ll either make peace with Hamas or betray them all and turn them over to the Hague. The former will stabilise the Palestinian state at the expense of risking another Israeli invasion. The latter will stabilise relations with Israel in exchange for potentially weakening the unity of Palestine. But the PA cannot keep their heads in the sand and ignore Hamas.

Elections must be held. The Palestinian Authority has no claim to any mandate from the Palestinian people. Their latest election was over 18 years ago. If they want international legitimacy then they will need to demonstrate they have the confidence of the Palestinian people.

With a strong PA, there are two logical endpoints—a two-state solution with strong cooperation between Palestine and Israel, perhaps even to the point where there can be freedom of movement between the two or even united citizenship; or a one-state solution with the entirety of Palestine being absorbed under the state apparatus of what is now Israel, forming a bi-religious or secular successor state (due to the new voting power of Palestinian citizens).

Nobody will be entirely happy and get everything they wanted in the end, nor will everyone think that the result was totally fair, but I think at some people, people get tired of endless war and become willing to compromise. This may not happen in our generation, but it eventually must.

SystemD will consume the entirety of Linux, bit by bit.

• In 2032, SystemD announces they’re going to be introducing a new way to manage software on Linux
• In 2035, SystemD will announce they’re making a display system to replace the ageing Wayland
• In 2038, the SystemD team announces they’re making their own desktop environment
• In 2039 SystemD’s codebase has grown to sixteen times its size in the 2020s. SystemD’s announces they’re going to release replacements for most other packages and ship their own vanilla distro.
• In 2045 SystemD’s distro has become the standard Linux distribution. Most other distros have quietly faded away.
• In 2047, SystemD announces they’re going to incorporate most of GNU into SystemD. Outrage ensues from the Free Software Foundation, which vehemently opposes this move.
• In 2048, Richard Stallman dies of a heart attack after attempting to clone SystemD’s git repo. SystemD engages in a hostile takeover and all resistance within the FSF crumbles
• In 2050, SystemD buys the struggling RedHat from IBM for $61 million.
• In 2053, most world governments have been pressured into using SystemD.
• In 2054, Linus Torvalds, fearing for his life, begins negotiations to merge kernel development into SystemD
• In 2056, the final message on the Linux kernel development mailing list is sent.
• In 2060, SystemD agents assassinate the CEO of Microsoft.
• In 2063, after immense pressure from SystemD-controlled human rights organisations, Arch developers discontinue development.
• In 2064, the remaining living Debian developers release the next stable version of their clandestine and highly illegal distro.

Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it?

Ubuntu is built on Debian’s skeleton. RHEL is built on Fedora. Many more examples.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but in a much deeper and more connected way than Ubuntu is based on Debian. It even shares many of the same software repositories.

The next closer level is how Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Kubuntu are just slight variations of Ubuntu. People like to call these “flavours”.

Finally, you get to the closest layer—the thousands of people who have taken a stock Ubuntu installation and swapped out one or two components to meet their requirements. We don’t even think of these as distros in their own right.

It’s a continuous spectrum, and any labels we try to apply will be pretty much guaranteed to have fuzzy edges.

Whatever happened to “We’re firing people because we realised we can do the job with fewer workers so we want to save money”?

At least then it’s honest.

I took the time to educate myself and read more about the government situation in Palestine before forming an opinion on this. The last Palestinian election was in 2006, so I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that the current government of the Palestinian Authority holds no mandate from the people of Palestine. I think a good starting point would be to hold immediate elections, then hopefully there will be a change in government and negotiations can begin for peace in Palestine after Netanyahu goes to jail

Just as a matter of curiosity, what other organisation would you say would be a better choice to run the Palestinian state?

Are any of these accounts legitimate?

I will happily use any desktop environment that allows me to bring up a summary of all active windows by pressing the super key. That’s just too ingrained in me now. I even find myself mindlessly doing it on Windows.

To be fair, 40% of Lemmy is cross posts from Reddit, 20% is spam posts by one user across multiple communities, and the remaining 40% is divided evenly between actual content and posts complaining about Reddit

All social media is trash, just different in what aspects they are trash in

This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—

• because it is proprietary software
• because it has poor accessibility
• because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.

I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.

Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it’s used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.

Although I’m a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight, as much as you’d like to.

If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.

With respect to chat logs and administration tools… for the most part, nobody cares. Discord’s tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.

Ubuntu 22.04 is not “very old”. It’s the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I do not, at all, fault an IT professional for picking the LTS release instead of the absolute latest latest release.

I think it is a communication failure for Linux to not communicate that the jump between Linux distro versions (e.g. from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39) is not the same as a jump from Windows 8 to Windows 10. It is similar to the jump between the different Windows subversions, like from 21H2 to 22H2. Most people don’t even know what those numbers mean, and for most people, it doesn’t matter. A distro upgrade is nothing more than a big update, and that’s how I think it ought to be presented. People should be encouraged to use the non-LTS version as a default, and gently nudged to upgrade once a new one comes out. It shouldn’t be presented as a conplete change in operating system versions, but rather as a feature update. That’s what Windows does, and Windows versions are practically invisible!