I’ve cycled to work regularly in a couple of countries in Europe (including The Netherlands, which are pretty much Europe’s Gold Standard on cycling infrastructure) and do and did paid attention to that kind of thing were I didn’t.

In my experience there are ALWAYS assholes who for their own convenience will block the bike lane if they can get away with it. There might be more in some places and fewer in others, but they always exist - assholes fucking things up for the rest are a fact of life.

As I see it, the only solution for it is protected bike lanes were possible so that it’s simply impossible for a car to go there and where that’s not possible, speedy and stern enforcement (the “there’s a tow truck there in 5 minutes top and the fines are painful” kind).

That’s entirelly the mindset of the average car driver everywhere.

Were I am now, Portugal, when the police starts properly enforcing some rule of the road that’s regularly not obbeyed (like, say the no parking on sidewalks one or the no running red lights in the next 30s after it has turned from yellow one) those types start bitching and moaning about how the police are “hunting for fines” - in other words, admitting that they’re breaking the rules and claiming that the real problem is actually enforcing of the rules.

(By the way, unsurprisingly, Portugal is has one of the highest rates of road deaths in the whole of Europe).

The manufacturer matters for the option to be at all available, but it’s the seller that matters when it comes to how many people go for it if there is one.

Non-experts tend to chose from what’s right there in front of them in the store front they’re buying from, not a manufacturer option that they’ll only hear about if they care enough and understand enough to actually go look for it.

In my experience most PC sellers don’t put their Linux options right there in front of you side by side with the Windows options and with equal proeminence, and this is as much true for online stores as it is for physical stores.

Lenovo offering it as an option is a pre-condition for people to actually get it but non-techies are still not going to get it if sellers don’t make it as visible and available as the Windows option, which personally I almost never see happen outside smaller techie-friendly PC stores.

Whilst that would be a great idea, top EU politicians tend to be in the pockets of Big Tech and the EU Parliament is currently majority Rightwing, so it’s doubtful such a thing will happen.

Well, the absured prices of some PC parts might actually drive some Linux adoption purelly because replacing an aging Windows install with Linux is a guaranteed way to extend the usability of the hardware, even for really old stuff (for most people, less so for gamers).

That said, the vast majority of people use whatever OS that comes pre-installed in their PC when they buy it.

As I see it, if there’s a fast pivot point to Linux it will be when the larger PC makers offer, side by side with a Windows option, a “with Linux pre-installed” option, especially if the final price reflects the cost of the OS license.

Even then, the shift would take years as people slowly replace old machines, a process which itself takes significativelly longer nowadays due to the current insane prices for some PC parts.

Sure, there is a drip-drip effect from people getting things like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine as well as tech types replacing whatever is in the machines of their family members with Linux as a way to avoid having to replace that hardware with newer (and at the moment far more expensive) machines, but I don’t think that adds up to much more that 1-2 per year.

Mind you, this is a point of view based on how things work in Europe and the US - it’s quite possible that things are very different in places like China and developing nations and there are very different pathways and reasons for Linux adoption.

Not “Western countries”, rather the “United States”.

If for example Europe was doing this, US Tech companies would have almost no market presence over here.

Militaristic “national security” arguments have very little traction in Europe, which is actually part of the reason why there was such tight coupling with Russia at the start of their invasion of Ukraine that it was a lot harder for Europe to decouple from Russia than the rest and even then Russia still kept running Propaganda Ops and financing political parties in Europe with ease.

The individual people leading those companies will be much better afterwards than when they started this shit, no matter how hard the whole thing blows up.

Who wouldn’t be willing to go through the years of founding and building, say, OpenAI, if after a decade or so you’ll at worst “just” end up a multi-millionaire, and if the Tech actually works or even if you just manage to swindle enough suckers before it all collapse, you’ll end up a billionaire.

If you consider those people as sociopath “what’s in it for me” grifters, the entire thing is totally logic because even the “market cataclysm” scenario still leaves them personally far better off than if they hadn’t done any of this and as for everybody else, well, “fuck them”.

It’s literally less than a cent (euro or dollar) for a whole bottle of tap water.

Out of curiosity I checked the price I pay for tap water in Portugal and 1 m³ (1000 l) costs around €0.5, so a 2l bottle of tap water contains all of 0.01 euro cents worth of it.

Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.

You seem to be running around with some serioulsy lack of life experience and understanding of people plus are probably subconsciously influenced by exposure to American-style hyperreductive politics (i.e. namelly the Red Scare bollocks) so let me tell you a story:

I’m a member a small leftwing party in my country. Now, this country used to be under a Fascist dictatorship and had a Revolution which overthrew it about 50 years ago. The result of this is that some older people who fought against Fascism and were deeply involved in Politics during the Revolution are pretty hard-core leftwingers in older more traditional ways.

Now this party I’m in isn’t the Communist Party (yeah, my country has one), differing mainly because it’s against autoritarian approaches to improving people’s lives. That said, a number of members there are from the old generation, who grew up under Fascism with one or other variant of Communism as the lighthouse signalling their way to a better world.

Back when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was having a conversation with some “comrades” from the party (yeah, even though not being the Communist Party, the party I’m in has inherited a lot of elements from the anti-Fascism revolutionary origins of its founding members, and that includes that other party members are “comrades”) and one of the older ones immediatelly sided with Russia.

Now, I happen to understand were he’s coming from (and YOU CLEARLY WOULD NOT AND JUDGING BY YOUR SIMPLETON JUDGEMENTAL TAKE, WOULD NOT EVEN TRY) - his political birth was under a Fascist dictatorship, were the by far loudest political messaging for change and the main light illuminating the path out was the Soviet Union’s variant of Communism (most people rotting in the Fascist political prisons were Communists) so of course his instinctive reaction was to think “Russia must be doing this for a good reason” and side with them: that’s just tribalist fanboyism talking (and in my experience the one thing Soviet and Mao’s styles of Communism do well is turning people into unthinking tribalist fanboys, something which people like the OP with their blunt adversarial approach actually help because they reinforce the “fortress mentality” side of that propaganda).

Guess what: I actually talked with him about it, pointed out this was a very big nation invading the territory of a smaller nation, one which they couldn’t possibly fear because it was so much smaller - thus a clear big aggressor and small victim situation - and that I was on the side of the victim - Ukraine - and against the aggressor - Russia - just like when the US invaded Iraq I was against the US and on the side of Iraq due to exactly the same Principle. I also pointed out that the claims of Russia of their actions being to “free” Ukraine were exactly like America’s claims when invading Iraq and that Freedom comes from self-determination, not violent invasion by a foreign nation (a take which ressonates with how my own country overthrew BY ITSELF Fascism and brought Democracy)

THAT got him thinking and him thinking got him to change his mind about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and side with Ukraine instead of Russia - ultimatelly brains and principles overrode the knee-jerk pro-Russia from the indoctrination in his younger years.

(Granted, this would be a lot harder with members of the actual Communist Party - this guy wasn’t in the Communist Party exactly because he had tried it and disliked it mainly because of their spirit of wanting to impose things on others - i.e. the authoritarianism - so he left and ended up in an anti-autoritarian small leftwing party)

So, you see, not all tankies are alike and IN THE WHOLE WORLD (most of which is not the US) there are a whole lot of reasons and life paths for people ending up with those beliefs, and doing like the OP did and just poking them like a little child that afterwards runs back to their friends boasting about having poked them and how angry they got, ain’t gonna change the ones who can change, it’s just going to keep them there or even push them further in.

It all feels kinda performative…

Well, yeah, that’s like going into a German sub and saying how you detest the way of doing things of both Germans and French.

You’re criticizing their way of doing things and just because you’re criticizing somebody else, doesn’t make it any better (in fact, mentioning them like side by side makes it sound you think they’re equivalent, which will piss of a few more people).

Not that think the point you made in that post you listed here is incorrect, rather I’m criticizing your “surprise” at the reaction to what you did in the context you did it: I mean if you walked into a Nazi bar and called Hitler a cunt it would be both be true that “You’re correct” and “You set yourself up to be assaulted by Nazis”.

Maybe his standard of Fairness for the plebes isn’t the same as for their betters, and thus he was being totally honest in his desired for a “fair” deal for the working people.

Oh, in my personal experience living in several countries in Europe including the UK, the British elites are pretty much the best in Europe at manipulating the local plebes.

Probably helps that culturally the English (and less so for other nations) have this strain of “know your place” and “look up to your betters” that’s not there or at least nowhere as strong in countries which had actual bottom-up revolutions were they overthrew their installed elites.

Just look at the reaction to the Snowden Revelations in the US and UK - in the former there was an outrage and at least some of it was walked back, in the latter the government just made a law that retroactivelly made the whole thing legal and the press quickly shut up about it and never mentioned it again.

And don’t get me started at the insane levels of Royal Arse Kissing of even supposedly liberal newspapers like The Guardian.

Britain is definitelly “world class” at both sheep herding and being sheep.

“Normal” SUVs are something like 70% more likely to kill the pedestrian in a collision with one that cars like sedans.

SUVs are anti-social cars.

IMHO, it’s a great example that The Law isn’t really done to protect common people that those things are allowed on the road when they’re actually unecessary (unlike, say, delivery vans) and almost twice as deadly for other people than normal cars.

Clearly a Penis Compensation Device.

The pretty much got the biggest idiot possible and gave it the keys of whole damned castle of cards.

Framework computers aren’t really targeted at the average consumer.

It makes sense that the kind of people who value hardware which they can easily and freely maintain and upgrade also value software which they can easily and freely maintain and upgrade.

For sure Linux being a free option vs Windows being a paid for one also helps.

Also there’s the alternative way which Iran offered: kick out the American and Israeli embassadors.

Iran is playing 5D chess whilst Trump’s America is playing Tic-tac-toe.