The article’s “valuing your time” argument is problematic in certain contexts. My brother has had so much trouble with his dual-boot (Windows and Linux). Yes, he could learn how to solve something in Linux every time a problem arises, but he also has to deliver his projects on time. Because of that, he mostly spends time on his Windows dual boot. Yeah, it sucks ethically and has its own pragmatic issues, but he has never had issues resolving dependencies or hunting down the most recent version that can actually be run in NixOS.

I don’t doubt these will become issues that will not be as problematic in the future, but right now my brother cannot use Linux reliably for his assignments.

Edit: My brother has tried what I use: Fedora and NixOS. He has also tried PopOS.

In Fedora, he found some of his software didn’t exist as .deb, and struggled to make .tar files work smoothly for him.

He tried NixOS afterward. He really liked the whole immutability thing, as well as the idea that apps would have their own dependencies.

His dependency problem happened in PopOS. If I remember correctly, it was a code editor that required a version of something that was different to what a package he used in his software was.

I think the order he tried was Fedora -> NixOS -> PopOS -> NixOS -> ? (Haven’t talked to him about it recently)

I don’t really understand what you’re saying. Could you rephrase it or elaborate, please?

Ah. This makes sense! Thanks!

I’m not sure adblockers change the OS they report. Other tools I know for a fact do it.

Edit: However, as @aebletrae@hexbear.net mentions, adblockers don’t have to change what OS is reported to change the overall statistics. They explain how in a comment below.

Just in case OP doesn’t know, this whole text comes from someone else. Some people prefer using words other than GNU/Linux.

I see how majority judgement could be seen as a subset of range or score voting.

A crucial difference between range/score voting and majority judgement is that one uses numbers and the others judgements. A majority judgement ballot could list all the possible candidates or options, and for each of them, there’d be a list of possible judgements. You can say that you consider a candidate “terrible”, “bad”, “meh”, “good”, “amazing”.

The idea is that humans tend to think in terms of judgements more readily than with numbers. A good ballot would find what words evoke useful judgements for candidates, as each group of voters has its own social language.

For example, with my partner we have a list of movies that we vote on. We have judgements that include “I’ll leave the house if you play that sh*t”, or “Omg yes!”. It’s great to add a movie to the list and find that one of the judgements in our made up ballot matches our personal judgements so well!

This is something I think majority judgement can do better than range/score voting: it can reflect human judgements better than with scores. In that way, it is more intuitive than range/score voting.

One benefit of majority judgement is that leaders chosen through it would know the judgement that they came into power with. If someone is elected into a powerful role knowing that half of the voters think they’re “ideal” for the job, that’s quite different than knowing that they were elected with half the voters thinking they were “inadequate”. This means, ideally, that the legitimacy of incompetent leaders can be reduced.

Note that the amount of possible judgements in a ballot can vary. To make things quick and easy, I’ve had silly elections with three judgements, such as “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes”. I’ve also had elections with nine judgements.

If you want to reduce the probability of having multiple winners, more judgements are a good idea. In general, the amount of judgements should depend on what the stakes are (higher stakes should go beyond just a couple of judgements), how many options there are (few options require few judgements), and the amount of voters there are (few voters require many judgements).

I think the reason for using the median is so that a judgement can be chosen as representative of each candidate. In the “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes” example above, if the median of the winning candidate is 3, you can tell the candidate that the score that they were chosen with was “omg yes”. If the average of the winning candidate is 2.4, you can’t really translate that as succintly, given that 2.4 is between “ok” and “omg yes”.

I hope it’s clearer why I love this voting method!

Do you know about majority judgement? If you know about it or check it out, what do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? Do you want to challenge something about it? What would you want to explore about it?

I’ve been daily driving it for six months now. I wish I would’ve know the Nix language well enough before jumping in to attempt declarative configurations. Not that it’s hard.

I have had issues that have had me temporarily try Pop or Debian, but dependency hell is real and the Nix community is wonderful. I have been able to solve every single one of my handful of problems in less than a day or two (sometimes in minutes) with the community.

Edit: oh yeah, and documentation is not great… Again, the community has been my source of answers to many questions.

As many others have said, it’s hard to imagine life without NixOS once you get the hang of it.

Can you explain how category theorists must be the least frustrated people alive? 😅