guitars are real

Libraries are (generally) not for profit. There’s not really the revenue stream to strike deals like that. Publishers are likely only getting a pittance from licensing to libraries, hell for most publishers they likely only do it as a PR move, and if they start charging per read… well, libraries may as well not bother with ebook licensing at that point and just put a book scanner in the library.

It kills me that these days going to a library is treated as an interesting alternative to giving Amazon all your money. When I was younger, the library was the place you started looking for something to read.

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Boosters are public servants doing God’s work and I won’t hear a word said against them

Don’t overthink it. You’re not likely to pick the best first distro for you out of the gate, because the best distro for you depends on a whole pile of factors. Like – what hardware do you have? Did you win the hardware lottery and you just by chance have a fully working setup with libre drivers out of the box? In that case, you could use most anything and be up and running without much difficulty. Have some device that needs proprietary firmware or just a third-party, closed source driver? Might want to start on one of the more beginner-friendly distros, like Mint or PopOS. These won’t give you a great view of the possibilities of Linux, but they will get you up and running fast.

Best approach is to take a guess, install it, try it for like a week, and if you’re more angry at the end of the week than you were at the beginning, try a different distro.

Popular first choices are Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS or Elementary, I’d recommend trying Kubuntu as the UI is the most similar to Windows and it has a different development team than mainline Ubuntu. There are annoying things about Ubuntu that are less awful on Kubuntu.

Red Hat was bought by IBM a few years ago and they’re quickly moving to kill off everything that made the Red Hat ecosystem cool and useful for end users, so tbh I’d avoid Fedora or anything Fedora based. There’s a risk you’ll get comfy and then have the rug pulled out from under you.

Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent corporation, is drawing closer and closer to Microsoft and I honestly don’t trust that, especially with some of the decisions they’ve been making around software management, but using Ubuntu will get you ready to try Debian, which is the cool and community-oriented distro Ubuntu based itself off of.

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Depends on the software you’re using and how it’s being packaged by the vendor. Flatpak works pretty well. Snap sucks. AppImages are easy when done right, but with lots of downsides/no security mechanisms.

If the vendor recommends using their repo, I’ll use it. If they recommand using my distro’s packages, I’ll do that. Generally, I get the best experience when I install software the way the developer wants me to. It makes for a “lumpier” distro (flatpaks, appimages, downloaded binaries, actual packages… jesus, it’s a mess) but honestly all the software works without a hiccup.

If you buck the developers, weird stuff can happen. If they want you to install their packages, but you install your distro’s packages instead, be ready for a rough time.

Decentralized architecture is a pretty good middle-ground between centralized and distributed, though (see). Moving to a fully distributed social media – which would look something like everyone running their own servers – would carry costs and problems of its own, one of which is very few people have the time and inclination to learn how to do that and massive duplication of effort (everyone becomes responsible for creating and storing their own archives for posterity’s sake, which means lots and lots of data will just go to the bit bucket to die)

The data being shared across federated servers allows people to set up 3rd-party archives, which is beneficial, without needlessly burdening instance operators with archival work (sort of a problem for sites like MySpace, there’s nothing in it for them except maybe good PR, except digital archiving for posterity is such a niche interest there would likely be little PR benefit to doing so)