which isn't a bad thing either if you want to encourage people to have more kids (which of course is debatable whether that should be a goal, but many people think it should)

When is "a good while"? People were excited for Obama and look what that guy ended up doing

The reality is that in the grand scheme of things, the world does get better over time. Most of human history consists of wars, plagues, famines, power struggles, authoritarian rule.

But occasionally some aspects of the world get worse, too. For example, the widespread introduction of cars was "human progress" in the sense of enabling everyone to be mobile; it led to environmental problems and degradation of quality of life for many people.

ahhh i remember being a bored teenager spending his life customizing his desktop too...

Nowadays I just want a working system where I can get things done, haven't touched my desktop environment settings in a while and certainly don't use things like cubes or wobbly windows anymore.

How do you want to do that "through some third world country" if the registration documents are in the US and only anonymously published anymore? Not following your logic there.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

That too yes

Free software doesn't have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the "benevolent dictator" of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.

Internet before mid-2010s: The Internet is breaking down barriers of nations, enabling everyone to freely communicate with each other, even outright plan uprisings against authorities (Arab Spring)! There are hardly any limits to what we can discuss, if you have an idea, you can publish it right now and maybe change the world with it!

Internet now: Social media companies make sure, through their algorithms and moderation decisions, that the Overton window is exactly where they decide, nowhere else. They are under constant and evolving pressure to censor more of this, censor less of that, with no end in sight to not getting it "right" in someone's opinion.

I hope the fediverse succeeds in maybe restoring the old vision of the Internet.

The unpaid volunteers make the good product. It used to be that their decisions actually meant something on Wikimedia, in the last ten years more and more decisions have been made by paid staff through office actions. That is what you are funding if you donate to the WMF.

Wikimedia used to be a force for good. Not anymore.

Which Adobe product doesn't have a good FOSS replacement?

Debian is the most stable and usable distro I have ever used on a desktop. I have tried many distros in my life, Debian is the one that's been satisfying me the most so far.