segfault's ramblings

Views expressed here are my own and are not expected to be taken seriously. Seriously, if you take offence at a few kilobytes of text on a random website, there's nothing I can do to help you.

On software

A lot of software sucks. The art of finding good software is similar to finding good 4chan posts during the late 2000s and early 2010s, namely, sifting through mountains of shit and oceans of piss to find diamonds.
There are many ways to judge what is "good" software, but I have a few criteria:
  1. Does it work? (does it crash repeatedly, have bugs, or slow down often?)
  2. Is it free? (as in beer and in freedom)
  3. Is it useful? (as in, could you have saved time by just using pen and paper or manual work?)
  4. Can you make it work while drunk? Can you feasibly use it after getting a lobotomy?
These points can be rationalized as follows:
  1. Software is a tool, and any tool that doesn't work is no good.
  2. If I have to pay for software, I won't.
  3. Software ought to be a time saver - if I can get something done with a piece of paper faster than I can install a piece of software and learn how to use it, then why install that software?
  4. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a 100+ IQ or a decent education, even though we would like to pretend so. Also, we all make mistakes and have our goofy moments.
Lets apply these criteria to desktop enviroments and window managers on bsd/linux. Most WMs such as herbstluft, ratpoison, or i3 require heavy configuration and keybinding memorization to use. Because of this, WMs fail point 4. Furthermore, if you need to split terminal output, you should be using tmux on a tty or virtual terminal instead of installing and configuring an entire WM for that purpose.
Of the two competing heavy DEs, there are GNOME and KDE. KDE looks gorgeous and has endless configuration possibilities, but unfortunaly it crashes often, is buggy, and is sluggish, so it fails criteria 1. GNOME, on the other hand, has evolved for tablets and phones, while still being sluggish and buggy, making it doubly useless.
MATE a little better than GNOME, but largely because it didn't go full mobile dev. It's still a bit buggy, and the flagship distro that it's shipped on (Ubuntu) has a plethora of stability issues.
XFCE is the only DE I can recommend with a good conscience. Sure, it lacks features, sure, it's a little old, but it just fucking works. You can run it out of the box or use the built in configuration tools. The screen tearing issue isn't that bad if you change compositor settings. Also, the default dock can be removed easily if it bugs you. My only complaints are a lack of variety in the base GTK settings as well as poor integration with screen brightness settings (which is an issue for most DEs and WMs anyway). Plus, XFCE is so simple that I can comfortably use it regardless of how drunk I am. I don't need to memorize anything, and I don't need to worry about the DE crashing or hogging ram.

Information asymmetry

Not being able to share information with other people sucks. It'd be nice if we could all get along and share knowledge, speak out our opinions freely and benefit from it all, but there's always the chance that some neoreactionary dweeb or antifa dirtbag will take offence with your views or lifestyle and advocate violence against you and your family for shits and giggles (or "for the cause", whatever that means).
Then there's corrupt states and vested interests that try to invade privacy and censor.
But worst of all, we censor ourselves. Our amygdala is hard wired to avoid conflict - with others and ourselves. Nature doesn't even give us the courtesy of allowing us to be honest to ourselves.