The “political” aspect of communism stems directly from the desire to radically alter the economic system. It is not tied, however, to the particular political order.

Coming from the same very Wikipedia article you cite on communism:

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers’ self-management, and an authoritarian socialist, vanguardist, or party-driven approach to establish a socialist state, which is expected to wither away.

So, communism, just as capitalism and socialism, can be combined with all sorts of governance types. It can be authoritarian (and so can be capitalism - look at fascism to see an example), and it can be democratic (early Soviets) or even libertarian (anarcho-communism). You can build a totalitarian communist hellhole, and a totalitarian capitalist one; same in reverse.

Now, an argument can actually be made that capitalism is inherently undemocratic. As your ability to exercise rights is heavily tied to your wealth (think of regular worker suing a billionaire, or all the lobbying, or corruption scandals involving the wealthiest and the way they slip out of them like nothing ever happened), people can be and commonly are silenced. Moreover, if you have money, nothing stops you from financing the media to translate your message. This way, important political messages are drowned in favor of what the rich want to translate, and certain (rather corrupt) voices are heavily amplified over others.

By extension, liberalism, even in the most ideal of its forms, is deeply flawed when it comes to a true democracy.

Finally, most communists (including Marx, since you mention him) realize that the communist society is at least very far off from the current state of affairs. This is why socialism exists as a transitory state, an economic system that grants a lot of benefits of communism (worker’s rights, a social state, socially owned industry) while keeping the monetary incentives in the economy. The absolute majority of communists support this transition and welcome a socialist state.

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It is! But the extent to which it is used is limited by the efficiency losses that come with electrolysis, logistics, and reverse conversion.

I assume it could still be useful in applications that require long hauls, as dragging a heavy and expensive battery around can negate efficiency benefits over the long runs.

The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

• Bigger drives
• Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
• Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
• Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
• Etc.

Now, for the streaming alternative:

• Netflix Standard: $18/mo
• Spotify: $12/mo
• Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.

Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.

If you don’t need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.

People don’t crave the system, they rather come to places that are advertised to them.

What they crave is:

• Easy onboarding without figuring out what is an “instance” (a concept entirely unknown to them), and which instances are good vs bad for them;
• A trusted place that won’t become unavailable or buggy because an admin is performing an update or screwed something up or decided they don’t want to do this anymore;
• Some sort of algorithm to filter out crap out of their feed (not having any algorithm is often not good);
• Having their favorite creators and friends on the platform (which, again, boils out to advertising for a large part);

etc.

Fediverse as a whole and Mastodon in particular is yet to answer to a lot of these challenges.

It already happens

On the other hand, maybe it will prop up PeerTube for once…

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It essentially is multiple OSes, one host and plethora of separate virtual machines that only communicate what they were designed to communicate.

This way pretty much nothing can get access to userspace.

When I first tried it out in a VM, it was just a pinch of curiosity. Some people argue for Linux, so, maybe there’s some merit to that? And, unlike MacOS, you can install it anywhere without all the hackery.

When I actually tried it (my first one was Manjaro KDE, and that’s what I stuck with for my first 1,5 years later when I decided to go for a real install), I was amazed at how smooth and frictionless everything is.

The system is blazing fast, even on a limited VM, there’s no bloat anywhere, no ads, no design choices to trick you into doing something you don’t want to. The interface is way more ergonomic and out of the way at the same time. Seriously, Microsoft, do learn from KDE, pretty please.

So, when I moved to a new home, I decided that my virtual home needs an upgrade as well. I installed Linux alongside Windows (on two different physical drives), and ran it as dual-boot ever since. Not that I address Windows that much (normally about once in two to three months), but it’s handy to keep around.

Later, I went into some distro-hopping and also got a laptop, which has become my testing grounds. After trying various options, namely Mint, Arch/EndeavourOS, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, I gravitated towards the latter, and I use it as my regular daily driver on both my desktop (Tumbleweed) and laptop (Slowroll). I love how it manages to keep the system both up-to-date and extremely stable, and has everything set up just right (except KDE defaults, what the hell is wrong with SUSE folks on that end? Luckily, it takes 5 minutes to change). So, there it is!

Got hacked?

You okay?

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Pop!_OS is quite an unorthodox choice for a server OS, ain’t it? I’m genuinely interested in why you chose it specifically over, say, Debian or Ubuntu.

I ran Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint), Arch and derivatives (EndeavourOS, Manjaro), Fedora and OpenSUSE, although each one on a very “user” level; I’m no IT guy, I just value what Linux gives me and am forced to learn to use it well.

Each has their merits. Currently, I go with OpenSUSE because it gives reasonable stability while not going ancient. When set up right, you can rely on it to keep doing things the same way, without needing to intervene manually. It also features correctly set snapper by default, which ensures I, as a generally non-technical user, won’t shoot myself in the foot.

Ideally, I would go with OpenSUSE Slowroll, as I love the concept, but it is still experimental and I don’t want both my machines to rely on beta builds. Still, my laptop has it installed and it works like a charm. The idea of “nearly bleeding-edge, but behind the most adventurous users” is why I chose Manjaro as my first distribution back in the day. Sadly, it is poorly managed, and issues arising with AUR only make things worse. OpenSUSE Slowroll feels to me like Manjaro done right.

As per other distributions I tried:

• Debian gets very ancient very quickly (and even if you rely on flatpaks, system packages are, like, OLD)
• Ubuntu is poorly managed and filled with controversies, I don’t feel like I own my computer
• Mint is nearly a single distribution that doesn’t officially ship with KDE (likely because most of its userbase would ditch Cinnamon immediately, huh) and has caused issues on my machines specifically
• Arch/EndeavourOS is “move fast and break things”, and things DO break unless you manually intervene on numerous occasions based on whatever forums tell you. Also, on all Arch-based systems, I face insane lags and RAM hogging when moving large files. I don’t know why.
• Manjaro, as I said, is well-intentioned, but poorly executed. It breaks from so many things, which makes it lose its novice appeal. Still, it’s cozy and not scary to enter, so this is where I started, and then learning to fight the bugs taught me a lot about Linux
• Fedora needs some work out of the box, but is generally stable and nice. However, the community is too fast to make breaking decisions (like when they ditched X11, which broke my gf’s work because her tools don’t work with Wayland, and she went with Fedora). Also, I’m not thrilled by its association with Red Hat, which turns increasingly…Canonical.

So, OpenSUSE it is. I never knew I would end up here, but here I am. Slowroll on my laptop for the last half a year or so convinced me to ditch EndeavourOS on my desktop and go OpenSUSE as well. Up to a rough start, but hoping it will go well after that.

Nah, YaST is still a piece of crap imo, both antique and impractical for most purposes. They should either make it modern and user-friendly, or phase it out.

That said, it kinda helped me to locate the correct system package this time.

In any case, OpenSUSE Slowroll is already my daily driver on laptop, which doesn’t have an NVidia GPU, and it’s part of the reason why I decided to give it a spin on desktop. At the end of the day, the issue got resolved, and now I can keep it, hopefully, in here too.

It worked!

Thank you a lot. Now it works properly, and inxi outputs nvidia driver.

Marking as solved.

With many distributions, it’s plug&play now, but some still make trouble out of it.

In the case of SUSE, this seems to stem from heavy open-source advocacy and EU laws coming on top of it, which is respectable, but adds to the complexity of solving issues here and there.

I had some Arch derivatives (Endeavour, Manjaro) on this very computer and everything was smooth. Had some pains with Fedora, but it worked as well.

sudo modprobe nvidia gives the following output: modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'nvidia': No such device

dmesg gives the following:

[ 56.697148] [   T2989] NVRM: The NVIDIA GPU 0000:27:00.0 (PCI ID: 10de:1c03)
                          NVRM: installed in this system is not supported by open
                          NVRM: nvidia.ko because it does not include the required GPU
                          NVRM: System Processor (GSP).
                          NVRM: Please see the 'Open Linux Kernel Modules' and 'GSP
                          NVRM: Firmware' sections in the driver README, available on
                          NVRM: the Linux graphics driver download page at
                          NVRM: www.nvidia.com.
[   56.702043] [   T2989] nvidia 0000:27:00.0: probe with driver nvidia failed with error -1
[   56.702102] [   T2989] NVRM: The NVIDIA probe routine failed for 1 device(s).
[   56.702104] [   T2989] NVRM: None of the NVIDIA devices were initialized.
[   56.702837] [   T2989] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 238

Guess it won’t work with my card? Gonna read through that (quite massive) readme, it seems…

P.S. Looks like everything pre-Turing does not support open drivers, and OpenSUSE did not communicate it well. Looking into ways to install proprietary driver.

P.P.S. Wait, it gets worse! The main way to install the proprietary driver is through install-new-recommends, BUT this installs open drivers on unsupported cards! This may be a good reason for a bug report once I figure the rest out.