And that’s exactly why it will never be the year of the Linux desktop… you know, the claim of this entire post.

Unless Linux appeals to the lowest common denominator, like Windows, it will never become a major replacement.

This is exactly the kind of issue that the average person might deal with, or it will be a deal breaker and they’ll never try again. Even if you can customize something via a config file, the average user will never do that. If there is no easy GUI in a normal location (like system settings) for something they want to adjust, it might as well not exist.

Average users either will accept all the inconveniences, or none. If it is more inconvenient than what they are used to right off the bat, they will go back and never try again.

Until something breaks, or doesn’t have a GUI. The average user seeing a terminal means they will abandon it. And even if they are willing to handle a terminal to fix an issue, the toxic community members that flock to be the first to respond condescendingly to new users will turn them away permanently.

Linux communities have some of the most helpful users, but they also have people worse than a League of Legends game. And all it takes is one of them to turn the average person away forever.

Truth Social is already literally a Mastodon instance. They just don’t federate with anything else.

Trump could open up federation, but that would ruin their safe space, I mean echo chamber.

For Octopus… Octopi is just plain incorrect, it assumes an incorrect loanword origin, even if it is the most common pluralization used.

Octopus does not come from Latin which would result in octopi. It comes from Greek, so the correct plural should be octopodes.

The English standard pluralization would still be Octopuses though, and most comprehensible all around without having to explain the whole thing to a new person. In the end it’s all about being understood over anything else.