In my case: There was some learning curve in the beginning end sometimes a little bit from time to time. But in general: I need less time (and much less stress) compared to some other OS where every update breaks something or results in data-loss and restoration.

I mean: I heard that Arch should required a lot of time to understand everything. With Mint and Debian I'm running fine 😀

It's free as used in freedom not as used in terms of costs.

If you really want to see it in terms of costs: I help (mostly elderly) people using tech, and I can't say that Windows is any better than Linux.
Windows Update -> Performance drops. New major release -> costly new hardware.
Clicked the wrong button/file -> Viruses (and man, this is time consuming).
Kaspersky, Avira etc. plays with the fears of Viruses. -> Confusion and Uncertainty

Installed two of my participants Linux (60 and 80 years old) all the above is gone. They tell me every month they've done updates, they love to update their system (don't know why, guest because it just works and feels good).
They saved a lot of money cause they can use their "old" hardware and so on and so on.

I think this is a common statement from people who were taught to use Windows in their childhood. In fact, as others have said here, people forget that it was also necessary to learn Windows.

In my opinion, each operating system has its own purpose (with a lot of overlap with the other operating systems, of course). I use MacOS, GNU/Linux, Windows. Each OS has required me to learn something and I don't regret the time spent learning.

I would say: not true. Installing Linux mint take 20 minutes. Installing windows 11 on the same computer about 2 hours.

Not mentioned the data security.

the point is, it's kinda true.

I run the same distro on my notebook since years now and don't have any troubles. Everything just works. So it would be free for me. (Unlike as with my other notebook from work that is running windows...)

However I don't actively work on the Kernel or any distro. Those people are paying. We should give something back to them.

anything takes time to learn but once a point is reached, Linux is just simpler to manage as it keeps it simple.

Nothing beats working with text files to configure stuff and then there is the excellent #ansible to do things en masse.

I have done admin for other systems as well and I find Linux the least time intensive, by a large margin.

And then come Telegram groups that scream weekly to update Windows, because otherwise it won't function or there is yet another critical vulnerability that stems from the ugly mishmash of an operating system. Absoluuuutely missing that time I had to update the garbage into more garbage.

I'm better off doing my normie video editing and graphic design on systems that actually value my time as a user. Fedora, Mint, PopOS, Elementary, there are quite respectable choices to make in distro world!

Completely untrue. Installing Linux Mint* takes about 20 minutes and updating all software happens with a single click (nothing done without approval). Windows takes far longer to install and there's no one click update of software from various sources.

Yes, there are distros that require more active maintenance, just as there vehicles. Frankly, Linux to Windows is like an EV compared to manual transmission ICE car.

*good alternative to Windows

Okay! So you know how you love decentralized social media? I mean presumably you do otherwise why would you ever read anything I write

Well the first two engineers on Spritely are also the two editors at the top of the ActivityPub spec (myself and Jessica Tallon) and this is no coincidence!

ActivityPub is great! It's the most popular decentralized social networking web based protocol in the world!

(Sorry, no, ATProto still isn't decentralized yet so we still have that claim to fame)

Tens of thousands of servers! Many, many federating implementations! Millions of users!

Are we done?!

No! There's a lot more work to do! The present day federated social web is not enough! Today's ActivityPub is not enough! ATProto is not enough!

None of this stuff is enough!

Spritely started from one question: What *can't* the present-day fediverse do? What's next?

Some *obvious* things the fediverse needs to do:

- Content and accounts surviving when nodes go down (ATProto tries to address this, but I don't think quite does so right)!
- Self-hosting is a pain! More peer-to-peer!
- More secure! More private!
- Healthier communities!
- Less spam and abuse!

But really, the BIGGEST thing missing to me about the present-day fediverse: it's *incredibly* short sighted in its ambitions.

Why have we carved out "social media" as this particular kind of facebook/youtube/web 2.0 company defined thing?

Why shouldn't ALL software be social?!

All software should be able to be social, peer-to-peer, secure over the network. This becomes clearer when you see that it's hard to convince people to use Libreoffice once Google Docs exists.

Secure collaboration is important.

It shouldn't be that writing secure, peer-to-peer applications is an exceptional thing.

Secure, peer-to-peer tech should be the DEFAULT THING you get when you write software, not the domain of experts.

Too ambitious? No! This requires some rethinking about how we write software!

If you remember when Django and Rails hit the scene, they were *revolutionary*. Not only did they make writing Web 2.0 applications *easy*, they made it so that you *learned how to think* like a Web 2.0 developer.

Spritely's work is akin to that, but for secure, collaborative, decentralized tech!

There's a lot more I could say, there's a lot more I have said in other places. I believe Spritely is the future. I know it's a lot to take in. ActivityPub was a lot to take in, once upon a time.

If you want to dive in, it's all there. All out there to read. We've got tons of information these days. Yes, I know it's a lot to absorb.

If you don't want to dive in, it's a leap of faith. Let me help you make it.

The future becomes the present when it hits peoples' hands. They start to assume of course, it was an inevitability.

Once Mastodon became a success, the popular response to ActivityPub switched from "I don't believe that could work" to "ActivityPub is obvious, anyone could have done it".

HN reply-guys always gonna armchair philosophize, act like they know everything once it's in front of their faces.

Well let me tell YOU what I think.

ActivityPub has been a big success. The fediverse as it exists has been a big success. I'm proud of that work.

But personally, I think retrospectively, it'll be a footnote in history compared to what we're doing now.

Yes, I really do believe the jump is that large.

The world is becoming far, far more dangerous of a place to be.

If human rights are going to survive, we're going to need better ways to not only communicate, but to collaborate. To do. To act.

We need stronger foundations than we have today. Stronger by a *long shot*.

I worry about the future of activism if it needs to happen on ATProto, on the fediverse, as they exist today.

*Especially* on ATProto, a system whose primary design point is "publicly index all content"; hardly safe for the current political environment. But the fediverse isn't much better.

But this also misses the point.

"Social", as perceived in "social networks", misses a lot of what "social" means to me. A lot of what I thought and assumed "social" meant when we were standardizing ActivityPub, anyway.

A society doesn't just send postcards to each other. It *does things* together.

All this research, all the work the Spritely Institute, it may seem like it's been low level, a bunch of computer science nerdery, the kinda stuff you'd expect out of a bunch of SICP-hugging catgirls.

Well, okay, it is. But it's not ONLY that.

And it's that way for a purpose.

This next year, you're going to start to see the first pieces that start to hit users' hands.

Very technical users for the most part mind you, but more users' hands.

We're breaking out of "core foundations" mode. 2025 is the year you'll start to see people turn heads about Spritely, I think.

Here is where I pivot to the ask.

I am asking YOU to support the Spritely Institute.

If you want to read up, do it! The information on what we're doing is laid out for everyone to see. There are papers on our homepage. Find out for yourself.

But I am asking YOU to support us.

We are a nonprofit research institute building open source tech and open protocols for the commons that CHANGE THE GAME on how the internet works.

An internet for you, for your friends and community, controlled by you and friends, without large corporate gatekeepers.

But we need your help.

"Spritely, brought to you by the people who brought you the fediverse!" We've done the research. Not to be smug but we ARE the experts.

We are telling you, decentralized social networks as they exist today are not enough.

And we are building the future.

Please help us! spritely.institute/donate/