It's really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).

But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it's very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It's not impossible, but it's hard to view it as an engine for vast change.

Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn't seem like there's a huge upside to going full atomic if you're already comfortable.

Tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. Same with toads being frogs.

GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don't really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.

Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.

I have a couple of very minor commits in Linux and, in the 3.0 era, had my name at the top of a source file for a platform that never saw the light of day and was later removed wholesale.

Still feel that invisible feather in my cap.

That salary number is all ~700 employees, not just "executives". That averages to about 150k apiece, not unreasonable for what is probably mostly tech workers.

As the old saying goes: soap box, ballot box, ammo box in that order.

Reason number one million capitalism sucks. We should be happy to turn over dangerous or menial jobs to machines but we can't do that because without jobs our society views us as worthless.

Holy shit, please let this happen.

I love how surreal this is.

One Take Frakes returns, you love to see it

Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)... It's really not that big a deal.