Very much so. We aren't winning until the taps are turned off

This is a consistent misunderstanding problem I wish people understood.

Manufacturing things creates emissions. It costs energy and materials. Something could have absolutely no emissions in usage and still be problematic when done on growing scales because the manufacture costs energy emissions and resources. Hard drives wear out and die and need replacing. Researchers know how to account for this its a life cycle assessment calculation they aren't perfect but this is robust work.

IT is up to 4% of global emissions and the sector is growing. People consistently act as if there is no footprint to digital media and there is. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389921001884

Yes the headline is a little silly but we actually do need think strategically about the sector and that starts by actually realising it has an impact and asking ourselves what are the priorities that we went to save whilst we decarbonise the industry that supports it.

There's no wiggle room left - no sector or set of behaviours that can afford to be given slack. We are in the biggest race of our life's and the stake are incomprehensibly huge.

I see this misconception a lot and it's really unfortunate. We aren't at what climate scientists call 1.5°C. Being at 1.5°C in the means the average anonomly being over 1.5 for a period of decades. It isn't just a case of scientists being cautious it a completely different impact in the climate. It implies different amounts of impacts and different levels of heat energy in the whole system.

Yes we have hit 1.5°C over the last 12months partly down to el nino which is expected to subside shortly. Though there is some discussion about whether this year was an expected randomly anonomly or whether it suggests some feedback loop that's been underestimated but we can't know until enough time has passed (maybe a year).

All that just means both that the impacts we are already saying are less worse than you'd expect at long term 1.5°C and therefore we should be extremely worried but also that we have factored that in in our estimates of what outcomes are possible (though the 1.5°C window is increasingly narrow because as you say we still have our foot on the gas). So there is still time to make an impact and every fraction of a degree and kg of CO2 matters.

What subsidies do they get?

It's not about "satisfying the minorities". It's about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have "proper" mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it's well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that's been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.

It's really not that hard! If you don't feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don't see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren't motivated by the plight of people you are happy to "other" than do so because one day you might be the other.

You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can't get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn't work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don't get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that's what's they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don't have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.

You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren't in a minority and don't care about those that are then just say so!

If done right it feels a bit like living with your environment rather than against it. What I was trying to think about is what purposes other than car parking could you use the underspace for. Something that doesn't matter too much if it gets flooded.

Maybe we could say we just shouldn't be living on flood plains but given the other benefits and future with climate change this seems untenable as a position.

I haven't seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)

Sadly, we don't have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I'm not sure I'd be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a "natural experiment". Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size "normal" road network.

Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).

I suspect this will generate a lot of discussion and opinions on both sides but what I think we lack is a culture of longitudinal data and study. Maybe you are right or maybe dropping new users in the deep end puts them off forever. It would be nice to see some quantative study on the Linux user experience. Does it shift wider tech beliefs or political beleifs?

Different actions aren't separable in that way. Adopting one "green" behaviour will shift peoples attitudes to others and make wide top-level change easier to implement. "What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming" has a good discussion of this and there may be some more recent resources. This is especially true when both (all) changes are necessary. I can't easily stop private jets but I can quite easily not choose the worst option for my diet (and also other things like avoiding discretionary flights). Seems really clear cut to me that we should be doing the bare minimum in our personal lives whilst we organise to make the worst offenders accountable.

I agree with you that regulation (of meat production) is vital to all this as well but that will mean costs going up which needs to have enough people on board and aware of the harms to facilitate. We need enough change in attitudes to facilitate the necessary changes in regulation and law (whilst also tackling the inequality, the powerful and structural economic system that promotes harmful behaviours for their benefit). .

Who knew recommending Distros could be so controversial 😛?

Seriously though I think this is a great flowchart and you took on board the more reasonable suggestions from the intial post. This flowchart now quickly eliminates some of the distro choice anxiety. Worst case a newbie might end up on a distro like mint and then end up migrating to a different one.

One comment I had is that I actually didn't know what opinionated DE meant without googling despite being a long time Linux user (maybe thats just my ignorance) and I wonder if a newbie might be confused maybe there's another way of saying it (flexible versus simple?).

Anyway, I really think early me would have appreciated this when I first started even if that would been ultimately "use Ubuntu" back then.

It is possible and necessary to care about both.

The original comment is entirely valid. Deserts are not empty and those ecosystems have a complex relationship with other parts of the web of life.

The most important thing we can realize is the earth is a series of complex interconnected systems. We evolved under conditions where we were small compared the systems regeneration abilities. This is no longer true and we do have to consider how any project will affect and shift the earth's systems.

Its worth noting that CO2 emissions are not the only vector by which we are pushing the earth systems to collapse and they are interlinked. We can't push ahead on solutions that only tackle one aspect of the problem or we likely will be as unstuck as we are now.

The answer to some people using real issues to push for climate delay is not to pretend those issues don't exist (that will make the backlash worse!) but to get on top of them and study the whole positive and negative aspects and make an informed decision about the best options to tackle all the systemic challenges we face.