aebletrae [she/her]

For someone seemingly so eager to try out new distros, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned virtual machines. If the vibes are off, it’s a whole lot less disruptive to find out that way.

Your experience with drivers won’t be quite the same as a bare-metal installation, but checking out software shouldn’t be a problem.

I don’t see them in the app, so not yet, I guess.

Uh, the XiBucks, obviously.

Look, I get it. Hexbear is a demanding place to be. It expects you to not be a complete asshole almost all the time. You’re regularly tested on knowledge of an emoji system so complex, it’s been known to make London cab drivers cry. If you unthinkingly parrot talking points, you’ll be pounced on with annoying facts and aggressive reasonable concern for the value of other people. And if you emit the slightest Hitler particle, you’ll be outright banned. How authoritarian! Honesty, sometimes I wonder why I signed up, never mind stay around.

But then I remember that the folks there are a deeply caring lot, who see the problems in the world and actually want to do something about it—even though the goal often seems barely possible—and, in spite of everything, retain a sense of humour and try to make improvements for each other, even if, for now at least, it can only be a :meow-hug:.

Oh, and the XiBucks, of course. Some of us even get roubles, too!

We don’t allow slave labor like communism does.

You might want to recheck that constitution.

Oh, no, what am I saying? You don’t want to do that, because that would once more point out that you’re clueless in your assertions. Now I don’t want to read any more of them. And I’m free to turn you down, right?

Bad faith it is, then. Got it.

I know you deleted your earlier nonsense, but I saw some of it first, so I know how out of touch you are. You were wrong about how much wealth people have, but even after having that corrected, here you are with “It’s just how the world works”, another incorrect assertion that might describe your experience of the world, but is unrepresentative for humanity as a whole.

Most people don’t have the luxuries you so clearly take for granted. Turning down exploitative employment is only an option for those with money in reserve. Most people do not have that. Going somewhere else means separation from family and friends—easy enough for the thoroughly unlikable, but community is important to most members of a social species. And, anyway, that’s assuming there aren’t legal restrictions like immigration controls. As I said before, most lives are more constrained than yours, and that isn’t because those people are any less deserving. That is how the world works.

I’m going to suggest you read the article “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future” by Edward Luttwak. Don’t worry, it’s just a warning, and it starts:—

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth

so it’s not commie propaganda. But it might relieve you of some of your misconceptions, since you clearly aren’t listening to us here. Of course, you could just carry on regardless, but then it’ll be just far too clear that you’re not acting in good faith.

This is the reasoning that leads to “if you think medicines are too expensive, stop buying them” with much the same problem of it not being quite that simple for the majority of humanity, whose “choices” are not as unconstrained as the ones you’re familiar with.

The problem with notable examples is that they’re pretty much never representative examples.

If wealth were actually distributed in the US equally that might be true, but as it is it’s more than double what most Americans have, even ignoring inflation.

The average net worth of all American families was $746,820, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, while the median figure was $121,760.

— The Average Net Worth Of Americans—By Age, Education And Ethnicity

But those kinds of initialisations belong in .profile (or, if you’re using a weird desktop environment, its own configuration file), particularly if you want .desktop files to work. (In .bashrc, PATH will grow longer in each subshell, which shouldn’t cause problems but is wasteful.)

So, what desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, etc.) are you using?

.profile is executed by login shells for the benefit of it and its subshells, and by DEs like Cinnamon for the benefit of .desktop launchers at login.

So, have you logged out and back in again since adding these lines to .profile?

And of course, the .profile has to be executed properly for its configuration to take effect, so it`s useful to know if the problem is with those specific lines, or the file as a whole.

Add:—

date >> ~/profile-execution-log-top.txt
echo $PATH >> ~/profile-execution-log-top.txt

to the top of .profile, and:—

date >> ~/profile-execution-log-end.txt
echo $PATH >> ~/profile-execution-log-end.txt

to the bottom of .profile (use alternative paths as you see fit) to monitor that activity. You can test this by sourcing .profile but the real test is logging out and in again. Look at the time when you do this so you can correlate each action with each timestamp in the log files. If .profile is executed to completion, you should have two files with matching timestamps but different PATHs. If you don’t have a matching timestamp in the “end” log file, there’s a problem mid-execution. If neither file is being updated, .profile isn’t being executed at all.

Since .bashrc is executed for all non-login shells, it shouldn’t really source .profile, which is only meant for login shells, and might trigger expensive activity. (.profile might source .bashrc, but that`s fine.)

Are other lines in .profile being executed, or is the whole file ignored? Have you logged out and in again since adding these lines?

Ah, Enhanced, the folks that brought us interrogation.