Not the person you originally asked, but the main reason is probably that referring to it as gnu/Linux is 1) already deeply associated with the Richard Stallman meme, to the point that referring to it in that way automatically comes across as either a joke or just a person being intentionally contrarian, and 2) just really weird sounding. In the minds of most people, there is no real reason to refer to it as GNU/Linux, because the actual operating system that does the things the operating system is expected to do - as in provide an API for syscalls, memory management, etc - is just “Linux.” That it’s routinely built alongside a set of core utilities designed and maintained by GNU is largely pointless. It’d be like referring to a hamburger as Buns/Hamburger or Buns+Hamburger. It’s just…weird.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.

Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.

Yep, that would be a great system. /s

Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.

If he wants to name it after something he loves, he could name it ApartheidOS, EmeraldMineOS, ApartheidEmeraldMineOS, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Realistically, he would call it ElonOS, hire a bunch of shitty systems programmers to cobble together a bullshit operating system mostly comprised of code stolen from other open source projects, insist that it be written in python because “python is critical to AI,” talk about how the OS integrates with AI seamlessly while having no actual AI in it at all, sell it with a tiered subscription that locked basic functionality, like being able to use the file system, behind a paywall, and then quickly abandon the project and fire everyone involved, having made no real money from the venture but still referring to it as a “triumph of engineering.”

A lot of people forget how overwhelmingly, insanely popular Musk was with way too online nerds. He was reddit’s golden child for years. Part of this is that whenever Disney started releasing the Marvel movies, beginning with Iron Man, Musk was front and center as the core inspiration for Tony Stark (yes, I’m serious, the director and Robert Downey Jr. basically went on record as saying as much) and he fucking milked that shit. It’s also important to understand that for a time he was seen as a forward looking entrepreneur whose business was “going to help save the planet by making electric cars so popular that every car manufacturer would switch to electric vehicle production to keep up.” If Musk was a genius at one thing, it was manipulating public perception of himself and his enterprises. It took years of him being a thin-skinned weirdo and massive corporate tool to undo the amount of positive sentiment he’d built for himself and Tesla.

It’s also how we got snap packages and apartheid, and I’m not even sure which of those is worse. (yes, I’m joking)

This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn’t seen in a while and it’s wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don’t use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like…how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They’re so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.

And that, I think, is the core difference. It’s not that the phones took over, it’s that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.

And that’s the entirety of the modern internet. It’s why tiktok is so popular. It’s why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It’s why Twitter took off. It’s also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn’t that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website’s leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.

I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it’s different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you’re a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it’s building and building and it seems like it’ll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you’d appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it’s just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.

things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.

We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”

I read that as “should be trivial,” not “shouldn’t.” In my defense, I don’t have my glasses on right now. 🤓

In Linux you have to do sudo systemctl disable snapd, which produces a warning about snapd.socket. New users sometimes get a little freaked out about disabling stuff in systemd, especially after they find out what systemd is and does and how important it is. They’re afraid of bricking their installation and you have to be like “no, that won’t happen. Yes, I’m sure it won’t happen. No, you don’t need to reboot. Just replace disable with stop in those commands again and it won’t run anymore. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” So the commands are trivial, but the psychological toll of doing stuff via the command line that you perceive as dangerous, for truly novice Linux users, isn’t to be underestimated.

Linux is really just the kernel the OS runs on. What people dislike are some of the stupid choices a distribution’s maintainers make. Like, Ubuntu used to be a great entry-level operating system for people who wanted to get into Linux but didn’t want to ditch all the things they understood from Windows or MacOS. It provided a level of comfort and ease of use. Which is great, and something the Linux community needs. But then Canonical started injecting snap package bloatware with everything and it’s just a mess. You have as little control over snap updates as you do Windows updates unless you completely disable the service, which is hardly trivial for a new user.

So your assertions here are the following:

• religion functions by 1) lying to people about the fundamental nature of reality in order to 2) manipulate them into doing bad things and that central to this is the idea that doing point 1 actively enables or facilitates point 2.
• religion constitutes a “static model of reality” to which people are emotionally attached, which is fundamentally dangerous.
• religion does not “determine” good or bad.
• Religious violence is a thing that exists.
• You’re queer and religion bothers you.

So, point by point:

• many religions make complex assertions about the metaphysical nature of the universe, often including the existence of supernatural phenomena, individuals, locations, etc. I’m not going to try to argue for the existence of any mystical element of any particular faith, but I will challenge the innately reductive analysis of religion you’ve provided. Most religions, particularly the very old ones, incorporate historical, philosophical, artistic, communal, and ethical traditions. You seem to center your understanding of religious faith around the metaphysical or supernatural components and have asserted that these components warp the underlying perception of reality of its participants for the express purpose of making people behave in such a way as to “do awful shit” and act against your “conscience and general interest.” In making a causal assertion of this kind, however, you really need to be able to support that assertion with something that proves a causal link between what you describe as a belief in “blatantly magical bullshit” and a specific pattern of behavior. Why is it the belief in the supernatural and not, for example, hierarchical organizations of power, something that has existed as a component of organized religion for millennia, but also in virtually all political and dominant social institutions for just as long? Perhaps people are more inclined towards mob mentality or to fall behind powerful and charismatic leaders, regardless of the institution from which they’re working. For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin was a brutally repressive society that actively criminalized both organized religion and LGBT persons. The absence of religion did not magically produce a society devoid of people unwilling to brutally oppress their fellow countrymen.
• you seem to be working with terms that don’t really carry a lot of significance or meaning for anyone other than yourself. What, exactly, do you think constitutes a “static model of reality?” And what, exactly, is problematic about that? Because in my mind, most people operate with a fairly static understanding of reality. Not to say it’s the same understanding of reality. Ideologies are as complex and different as the people that internalize them, and they inform our personal understanding of the world we inhabit. For most people, altering these beliefs about the world is non-trivial. As a staunch leftist, someone would have a hard time selling me on the merits of laissez-faire capitalism as an effective mechanism of distributing wealth in a society. My understanding of the fundamental nature of economics, human nature, and reality itself precludes this. Am I working from an overly static and inflexible model of reality?
• religion is deeply concerned with the nature of good and evil. Admittedly, these are things you might not actually believe in. Perhaps you’re a moral relativist. Perhaps not. If you are, I don’t have much to say to you about this. You believe good and evil are culturally determined moral concepts and nothing else, from a personal perspective, beyond socially conditioned behavior.
• religious violence, or “Holy Wars” as you’ve put it, are virtually all fought for the same purpose as any other war: the primitive acquisition of wealth and the expansion of a nation or nations hegemony. If you think what’s going on in Palestine is not driven by Israel’s desire for Palestinian land, then I have a bridge to sell you.
• your experiences are both tragic and common. I’ve personally been physically and emotionally abused by members of specific religious organizations, for reasons and in ways I don’t feel comfortable sharing with strangers on the internet, and by people who were sociopaths that used religion as a cudgel to bully and control others. But I’ve also been comforted and treated kindly by other people for whom their religious faith was an important part of their lives - people who were sick and in pain their entire lives, but who found serenity and comfort through their beliefs and shared that with people around them who were also suffering. History is full of people who used religion as an excuse to do terrible things, but history also has a tendency to amplify monsters and forget the decent people whose faith may have driven them to have a more positive impact on the world.

If you want to hate religion because you’re bitter, that’s fine. You can feel about religion any way that you want. But don’t be offended when you bring it up out of nowhere and someone tells you that your comments are irrelevant to the current discussion.

The world doesn’t revolve around your personal bitterness.

A lot of it probably comes from deeply negative personal experiences, combined with a general propensity for people to apply a categorical belief to particular experiences. People who were treated badly by a particular group of Christians, or people who see and hear about certain Christians advocating for some terrible politician or political goal, are applying a generalized belief to how all Christians act, and potentially to all religion in general. It’s much harder to accept that the world is a deeply complicated and messy place and that religion and religious belief is a much more complex element of human civilization, culture, and personal identity than what many people would care to acknowledge.

I already mentioned that shoehorning criticism of religion into conversations that were unrelated came across as bitter and myopic. Your point was, essentially, that a lot of people are bitter towards Christianity, which is implied by my own observation. If you have nothing to add beyond restating what was already said by the person to whom you are replying, then I would suggest saving yourself the time in the future and just clicking the up arrow. Or doing literally nothing. Either of those are fine options.