Russia. MS-13 is nothing in comparison. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Russia supports MS-13 as part of their hybrid warfare. That’s how they work.

Understand that Russia has largely been able to put US to its knees through hybrid methods that utilize and enhance the negative effects of american arrogance, neoliberal dogmatism and the war on drugs. Trump is the final stage before the empire comes down. It’s probably too late to turn the ship around by now. China + EU is already the facto world leaders and the US is doing everything to destroy itself and there is no real political and economical self-awareness among people with power.

The US should have started to decrease inequality, stop the war on drugs and enforced (sane) tariffs and migration policies 15 years ago. The EU has the same problems, but there isn’t the same level of inequality and political extremism and fundamentalism, which makes me believe that the EU will survive as a western democracy and relevant world player, but the US will not.

Maybe give Doom Emacs a try? Anyway, I thing we can put IDE/Editor in the subjective quality bucket.

Ok, I agree about music apps and Google Maps.

Isn’t Intellij largely open source? What does premium offer over the community edition? More content and support? Anyway, I find this one subjective. I would argue that Emacs, VS Code and Neovim are at least as good (much better if you work with many different programming languages and/or require extra control).

Actually, what we probably want is something like openSUSE MicroOS with containers based on Nix or Guix.

Best would be if openSUSE simply adopted Nix/Guix for container configuration.

Don’t forget about Nix and Guix.

I think it makes great sense to use Nix (or better Guix). The users are not expected to do any configurations. They basically need a browser and maybe a text editor if it’s the public sector.

Also, you can run Nix or Guix on basically any other dist. Which is very helpful for reproducible deployments.

Ubuntu doesn’t make any sense. Better use Debian in that case. We don’t need to give yet another eccentric South African billionaire more power.

SUSE is owned by the Swedish venture capital firm EQT. For better or worse. All software has “ties” to the US. Remember there are lots of good people in the US as well. Everything isn’t MAGA or tech feudalism.

I agree. Most Linux distributions have their base within the EU. Just dumb to bring a new Fedora based dist to the table. Debian is also very connected to the EU and France, even though the SPI is registered within the US.

One could push for The Linux Foundation to to move their HQ to the EU. If that changes anything. I guess it depends on if Linus resigns or wants to move back to Finland.

Seems you don’t know how to configure your editor/IDE. There is nothing in a “Jetbrains IDE” which you cannot also get in Neovim, Emacs or VS Code. Using only FOSS plugins. Or what functionality are you thinking of?

The facto standard is not an objective quality.

I mean the best big tech “products” are FOSS as well. But I guess it depends on which definition of FOSS that you use.

Usually, nowadays, proprietary software is built on 95% FOSS and then you maybe have a thin layer with your own stuff (which will become FOSS in a year or two when there’s someting better that can replace your own hack). The rest is content and marketing.

Proprietary software which doesn’t have an objectively better FOSS counterpart (that I can come up with right now):

1. Nvidia GPU stack. But ROCm and IPEX-LLM will probably catch up in a year or two (both are mainly FOSS).
2. Some videogames that still use their proprietary engines. Though they are certainly not good because of their in-house engine, rather the opposite. I.e. they are good because of content, not software.

Many people bring up proprietary CAD and graphics software. Though I suspect that’s a more subjective opinion. My experience is that proprietary CAD apps and the Adobe suite are buggy as hell. My experience is also that the people who use these softwares have learned how to cope with the legacy crap and they refuse to learn new and better ways.

I had to integrate Photoshop into a project a few years ago. The whole software just smelled huge legacy bad quality code base. Buggy as hell. But good marketing and/or user lockin I guess.

I don’t consider anything from Apple to be good in an objective way. Unless you count social status symbols as an objective quality. I do consider price to be an objective quality though.

The only good things that has come out of Microsoft are open source. VS Code, dotnet core and Lean. Same goes for Google.

A more relevant question: What proprietary software is better than its FOSS counterpart?

Because I can’t come up with any.

Because the political right doesn’t actually like functional markets.

I don’t drive a BMW, so yes.

Yes.

I believe in meds and I believe in science. Especially the science of complex systems. I don’t believe in political philosophy branded as science. The reproducability metric of social sciences and political economy is so bad that the complete field should move into humanities and philosophy (which isn’t bad, but it isn’t science). Aspiring sciences.

I mean it isn’t a secret that huge amounts of resources has been poured into neoliberal think tanks since the 70s. It’s an ideology which justifies the rich getting richer. Such stuff always get at lot of funding. It’s inherent.

I don’t think I’m the one who’s in lack of critical thinking here Mr 420.

Tariffs will be super hard on american economy. There is no universe where current tariffs and migration policy wont mean stagflation from hell. But that’s a price that might be worth/necessary paying. However, if american blue collar are able to organize, there is a possibility that blue collar salaries will keep up with inflation and that implies economic power is transferred to the working clas (supply and demand will be on the side of blue collar at least). Transfer of economic (and political) power is very much needed if the US democracy shall survive (or return from the dead).

But it’s all a big gamble for sure. Chaos and feudalism/fascism is probably the most likely outcome. Everything is so complex that it’s impossible to know for sure. Hopefully evolution has empowered us with enough accurate intuitions.

Take them meds bro.

I believe the tarrifs are good. Though for other reasons than Trump. The current (previous) situation is super unstable and unsustainable. It basically require a global US monopoly of violence (which was the case for about 30 years). Trade imbalance implies war (as stated by Keynes).

However, the arguments of the Trump administration are completely false and uneducated.

We’ve all been drenched in neoliberal propaganda for about 50 years (disguised as science), so it’s not weird people are unable to think outside of the box on this matter.

Also, super valid question. Don’t get the down votes.

What languages and patterns will be considered woke?

For sure memory safety and dependent types. C++ will probably be shoved down our throats.