No, I left it a couple of times before. But every time I left Reddit for one of the new sites, I came back, because it only took a couple of months for those sites to be taken over by Christian conspiracy theorists. I ended up back on Reddit because it was the least bad discussion site, but there were still huge moderation problems and a lot of bots/shilling.

At one point, I posted something positive about a large country with an enormous population which is adjacent to my home country, and how they pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and suddenly found that everything I posted anywhere was automatically downvoted.

There was a lot of paranoia in some specific subs because it seemed the articles posted were curated by people with an agenda, who may not have even shared our heritage. So it was no longer a safe space for us to discuss our community’s issues. I got downvoted for bringing up inconvenient facts, like how bombs dropped by the US still kill and maim people in Laos every year.

In the end, outside of some NBA, Star Trek (again, dancing around/ignoring certain issues i.e. Why didn’t Star Trek fans like Avery Brooks or what he said with Far Beyond the Stars?), and tech discussion, Reddit was circling the drain.

I found more community, and culture sharing, on TikTok of all places. The community I found there changed my world view.

Nice video.

I don’t get how the installer was a show stopper, or how it looks dated. It’s clean and simple and uses Clearlooks.

It’s not as customizable as YaST, but gives you a bit more flexibility than the Pop!_OS installer. A nice middle ground.

Also, there’s been the unofficial nonfree-firmware installer since years now.

The beauty is, once you install it, you can go years before you need to install clean again.

Flatpak will close the gap for current user-facing applications. It’s a nice option to have.

Flatpak is kind of bringing the BSD mindset of base system versus end-user apps to Linux.

Back in the glory days of FreeBSD, one would have system libraries managed by the FreeBSD team, and then whatever libraries the ports system used in /usr/local/lib which were used for end-user applications. Everything not provided by FreeBSD came from ports and was installed in /usr/local (/usr/local/bin; /usr/local/etc; /usr/local/lib; etc) so you would have two versions of gcc, for example.

With Flatpak, you have your stable, or rolling base, whatever you are comfortable with. In my case, Debian. And it is fully separate from the end-user applications. This is something that I’ve really missed since coming to Linux from BSD. I can keep Firefox bleeding edge without having to worry that the package manager is also going to update the base system, giving me a broken next boot if I run rolling releases.

Conversely, I don’t have to wait for backports from my underfunded, understaffed distro’s security team, or ride Firefox ESR.

End-user applications are in containers. So what ffmpeg in the VLC flatpak has an exploit, VLC can only access your ~/Videos directory anyway. It’s not going to read your PKI certs or send your ssh keys off somewhere.

Use flatseal to manage permissions of each app.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.

FWIW, OpenBSD has done this for years with Chrome and Firefox, which only have ~/Downloads access.