Alternative utopia: do online banking in a desktop web browser while seated comfortably at home, rather than on a street corner in the sun squinting at a tiny screen.

Farmers have become like religious figures in the developed world. Nobody dares to criticize them, out of some kind of misplaced guilt for living in cities and shopping in supermarkets. Well, we need to get over this cultural cringe towards farmers because it's killing us. The subsidies they receive should be going to their poor compatriots. The tariffs that protect them should be abolished so that their competitors from Africa and elsewhere can get a leg up at last. And their disastrous industrial techniques need to be regulated to oblivion: pesticides, nitrate pollution, over-irrigation, and obviously the moral catastrophe that is factory farming. Farmers have too much power just about everywhere, partly because they're over-represented in politics yes, but we only tolerate that because so many people still think that agriculture is special in some mythological way. Well it's not. It's a sector like any other and farmers are just ordinary citizens with too much power. They need to be brought down to size.

Quick politics primer. The EU Parliament is not all-powerful. It cannot even propose legislation (yet). The EU is still mostly a confederation so it's the governments that hold the reins. But the EP has to say yes for anything to pass. And since it is essentially a consultative body, the EP also tends to contain at least a handful of earnest idealists and specialists (usually Germans) who know when to say no, and how to amend legislation. They are often from the Greens-EFA parliamentary group and sometimes from the liberal Renew group. That is likely what happened here, yet again. It is very important for EU citizens to vote for these parties and candidates in EU elections. The next election is coming up in 6 months.

Ubuntu-hate is an example of FOSS sh**ing its own bed.

If there's one distro that, after 20 years, most normies might have heard of, it's Ubuntu. Name recognition is like gold dust and, like it or not, Ubuntu is still de-facto the way a ton of ordinary non-techies are getting introduced to FOSS.

But no, we just cannot help but put it down and say what junk it is and how so-and-so random distro is better.

If we really cared about getting normies into FOSS, then instead of slagging off Ubuntu we would be supporting it with both hands.

Addendum. To counter your personal experience, mine is that Ubuntu is mostly just fine and has been for years.

The problem with Google is that it has its fingers in too many pies.

The same company runs:

• the OS of the computer in half the world's pockets
• the quasi-monopolistic client (Chrome) for the world's only open-standards app platform (the web)
• the crushingly dominant video platform

And so on. This is obviously a big problem in a world where information is power.

Google needs to be broken up at least as much as the oil and railroad companies did a century ago.

Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.

Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.

So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.

UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.

UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.

Ublock Origin and Vimium C. That's it.

I used Dark Reader until last week, when I discovered a native Firefox setting that does the job better: Settings > Language and appearance > Colors > Manage > set background to Black and override to Always.

No more white flashes, EVER (yes, I tried absolutely everything but on some sites there was nothing to be done, even with every possible CSS hack). And no more add-on speed penalty (to be fair it was small, and Dark Reader is still an amazing tool).

Now the web looks pretty ugly but it is fast and always dark. White flashes banished FOREVER.

It certainly feels depressing but let's try to look on the bright side.

What we can do with FOSS is orders of magnitude more than what was possible a decade or two ago. Even geeks used Windows in the 1990s. Android is a privacy nightmare, but its forkable FOSS version is not so far upstream. For the hardware and low-level software, the open options are getting better: CoreBoot, Pinebooks, RISC-V etc. As are the services: E2E messaging, Fediverse, OSM, Wikipedia.

It's just that we're asking so much more of of these tools than we did before, because the internet has taken over everything. And the corporate spyware always looks slicker, and its UX is better, and it stays one step ahead, and most people don't care and take what they're given.

But the reality is that things have never been better, if we can accept that we will not have the cutting-edge convenience of Big Tech's options.

And of course we have to stay on our guard over certain red lines. I'd say the most urgent red line is the web, which is the world's de-facto open software platform. We need to defeat Google's evil plans for it, at all costs. That one is existential, but for the rest I'm fairly optimistic.

This looks like a glimpse of how Mastodon (specifically: ActivityPub protocol) can really detrone Twitter. The world is full of governments and agencies and other Very Serious Organizations. They must hate having to depend on a single private company to get their message out. They must be itching for an alternative that gives them the kind of control that they have with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. Surely this is Mastodon's golden opportunity.

I’m really beginning to see how the Fediverse can be complicated for new users

The fediverse is just the internet as it was designed to be. A network, not a broadcasting medium. A place for connecting people, not just consumers and corporations.

Choice means responsibility. It's a feature, not a bug. But sure, it's also paradoxical.

In answer to your question, I'd say just slow down a bit. Forget about self-hosting. Just pick a mainstream instance like this one and jump in. That's what I did. You can make changes later as appropriate. That was impossible where you were before.

Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don't want to "own" data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we've been taken in by consumer capitalism.

Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

This attitude makes my blood boil. Firefox is the last FOSS web-rendering engine standing against your privacy-destroying FAANG oligopoly. If we lose Firefox, the web becomes de-facto privatized.

Some trust-busting is in order. Hopefully Brussels is on the case.

NB: this vituperation is obviously directed to your company, not you personally.