Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "DistroTube"
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Just forget the semantics war man... you'll never win. xD Particularly if it's composed of common English words.
I mean, I do agree with everything said, but still.
Same story of other common language words and expressions being taken with second or commercial intent to mislead people or give an erroneous impression.
Gives me headaches thinking about hoverboards, drones and whatnot. xD
In the end, companies will have to start using "free and open source as defined by the free software foundation criteria and x licensing agreement" yadda yadda... or stuff like that (see CreativeCommons with all it's CC somethings).
But you know, even if you state that free and open source is a specific thing that cannot be used to define others, you see splattered all around the term open source and free used to define licenses that are, in effect, a midway between the definition given by the open source foundation, and commercial proprietary code. And really, in the end, you just can't deny those definitions just because it violates the free software foundation definition of it... no foundation, organization, or authoritative power has the position to strictly define common language words as they see fit, language is always in flow. Heck, not even dictionaries and encyclopedias definitions stick, they are constantly changing and updating it.
The confusion about Chrome, Chrome OS and Android often comes from the fact that these draw from "open source" projects such as Chromium, Chromium OS and AOSP. The three of them have a licensing salad that involves BSD licenses, Apache, GPL and GPL-like, plus all sorts of other stuff. They are indeed open source, but not the free and open source license and definition according to free software foundation, they indeed are somewhere in between.
And then there is of course the entire separate discussion that if you have code that is free and open source licensed, but majority controlled by a tech giant, is it really conceptually free? Reason why we really don't want Firefox to die and we end up with a scenario that the only browser engines available are Chromium and WebKit (Safari). Good to note that WebKit is also LGPL and BSD licensed, but you know, mostly Safari and other browsers running on iOS, so mostly controlled by Apple in current scenario.
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It's not only bots too... you go look for reviews on gadgets, particularly tech stuff but I think it applies to everything these days, inevitably you will have to swift through all the videos that are basically the products own promotion photos and a robotic voice behind reading the ad brochure or something.
But on the bit about AI, I have to disagree somewhat. YouTube doesn't go after these things, neither the spam video generators nor the comment spam bots, not because they don't have the tech or resources to do so, not because they can't create an AI or algorithm that is plenty capable of detecting and banning those - it's because they don't have an incentive to it.
YouTube, like Google, has only two major costumers to attend to at this point - investors and advertisers.
Not only investors and advertisers don't care much about those things, just like many other social networks, it's sometimes the opposite - YouTube uses the statistics inflated by bots to brag about numbers to them.
We are a platform that have single users generating millions of video content, millions of videos are submitted every second, we have a level of engagement on comments like no other social network, yadda yadda.
I gotta say that these days it's also becoming kind of a myth that super intelligent and creative people are working in these companies... you do have some genius people there for sure, but I'm willing to bet there are far more morons without any vision working with some extremely boring stuff that not only have no creativity to solve problems, they also have no liberty to do it, and a whole ton of them live so much inside a thick Silicon Valley bubble that they have absolutely no clue how common users see their service, what problems are out there, etc. Personal opinion.
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Honestly? I couldn't give two sh*ts about offending or damaging the ego of someone who is so insecure about him or herself enough to count using a "hard" Linux distro as some sort of trophy. It's like really? Grow the f*ck up, no one cares how "hard" the Linux distro you are using is. Or rather, no one worth the time. You use what works for you, period.
The preoccupation with hurting someone else's ego matters less than pointing out to beginners that this or that distro might be easier to start with if you are coming from other OSs, at least to me. The childish competition on who is using the most advanced distro, who knows more about the Linux kernel, who uses command line... none of that crap should matter to others. Not broadly speaking I mean, of course it matters if it's a requirement for a job or something.
But there really is a problem with using those terms - they are too broad, which can cause confusion. Then again, even using a terms like beginner, moderate and advanced, despite being a bit more specific, also is still broad.
Now, I have to disagree with something there. Semantics aside, people will use terms like easy and hard to describe how much time it takes to do something, not so much how much knowledge, brainpower or whatever... so if it's an easy process but requires 10 steps, it's hard... the same way a hard process that takes time to figure out with only one step can be. Know what I'm getting at? Easy and hard is used interchangeably with "how long it takes so I can do what I need to do". And even then, it's all subjective.
I'd also say that if it involves multiple steps, it'll always be harder. It's kinda funny that you say that compiling from source is easy... that's very relative. In fact, that would be too hard for the vast majority of people... compiling code from source is only easy for developers, and not even that. So is installing replacement software, configuring network, properly formatting and preparing drives, configuring audio, wireless networks, installing drivers, etc etc etc.... all of that stuff is hard for the majority of people.
This is why distros that you install with a graphical interface and you get everything you need working after a reboot is considered an easy distro, or combination of distro and hardware. If you don't need to learn any of what I mentioned in the past sentence, then it's easier than otherwise. And every new thing you need to know or learn to use the OS makes it harder, by definition. So... and "easy" distro is one that takes you faster to what you want to do with it.
The way I personally see it, what really matters when it comes to saying a distro is easy or hard is - as compared to what? If you are coming from Windows, it's one thing. If you are coming from MacOS, it's another. If you are an Android tinkerer, it's something else. If you are learning from scratch, never touched a computer before, then it might be another thing.
In here, then the classification of beginner, moderate and advanced may come in as a separate thing - but it still depends on where you are coming from and what are your needs. How much time you are expected to spend to know your way around. How much previous knowledge on Linux you are supposed to have. How familiar with how a computer works you need to be. This sort of stuff.
And then comes the other key element in all of this - what do you intend to do with it? As previously mentioned, what are your needs? Browsing the Internet and checking e-mails will be one thing, setting up a home server will be another, editing videos and photos will be yet another, playing games is yet another. As said, all distros have multiple weak and strong points, it's not just one thing. You won't recommend Qubes for someone who is just starting on Linux and trying to just edit some charts and text, right?
The answer to questions like "is this distro easy", as so many things in life, is - it depends. This sometimes angers some people because they want a fast and direct answer... but if you or they don't wanna bother getting into details, my answer would be to just use whatever they heard about, doesn't matter what it is.
Stop asking questions and try it for yourself that you'll reach your answer faster. See how things go, change to something else if it didn't work, you jump into the next option - it'll still be faster and you'll learn more than spending all your time asking around, wondering what the perfect choice is. This is part of the beauty of Linux distros - you're not paying multiple times to try things out, you can just go at it.
What they have in mind will probably be one of the more popular distros anyways, so plenty of material to help on the way.
My two cents. :)
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