Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    17 hours ago

    I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:

    • weirdly extremely into everything red hat
    • outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
    • very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
    • accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
    • when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
    • just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes
    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      7·
      8 hours ago

      as in, distro for normal people? (for arbitrary value of normal, that is) distrowatch ranks mint #1, and i also use it because i’m lazy and while i could use something else, It Just Works™

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        that’s the one I ended up grabbing, and from the setup-only usage I’ve been giving it, it’s surprisingly good

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3·
          2 hours ago

          i’ve installed it for my 70+ grandparents, they had no problems with it at all for a couple of years. (granted they just read news on it) i’ve used it on a two laptops for a 10y+ now and outside of typical linux problems that require minor configuring (bluetooth and wifi driver related mostly) it all works since day one, batteries included. for a couple of years timeshift is bundled in ootb so even if you fuck up there are backups

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      17 hours ago

      there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        13 hours ago

        They’re really fond of copypasta:

        The issue with Arch isn’t the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
        The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means you’ll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help—you’ll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          2 hours ago

          it’s beautiful how you can pick out any sentence in that quote and chase down an entire fractal of wrongness

          • “Users are expected to handle system upgrades” nope, pacman does that automatically (though sometimes it’ll fuck your initramfs because arch is a joy)
          • “manage the underlying software stack” ??? that’s all pacman does
          • “configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it” AppArmor clearly isn’t good enough cause red hat (sploosh) uses selinux
          • “set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.” maybe I’m showing my ass on this one but I don’t think I’ve ever blacklisted a kernel module for security. usually it’s a hacky way to select which driver you want for your device (hello nvidia), stop a buggy device from taking down the system (hello again nvidia! and also like a hundred vendors making shit hardware that barely works on windows, much less linux), and passthru devices that are precious about their init order to qemu (nvidia again? what the fuck)

          and bonus wrongness:

          For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability.

          i fucking love when a distro upgrade breaks audio in all my applications cause red hat suddenly, after over a decade of being utterly nasty about it, got anxious about how much pulseaudio fucking sucks

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            7 minutes ago

            My favorite bit:

            When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help

            What base OS? The base metapackage that pulls in a small core of system software packages that are then treated and updated like any other package? What the hell is an EOL? You mean the thing that happens to non-rolling release distros such as Not Fucking Arch?

            When GNU Scrotum 5.x series becomes unsupported after release 5.56, people running Arch Linux will be happy to know they already have gnu-scrotum-7.62.69-rc1 installed from their repositories. It’s the people on LTS Enterprise distros who have to start whining at their maintainers to backport a major version of GNU Scrotum released since the Obama administration.