Without taking into account the environmental impact and viability: Sicilian dwarf elephants. Come on, 1m short elephants, hairier (i.e. fluffier) than their African and Asian counterparts? I want it!

Bonus points: capybaras are native where I live, and a common occurrence in parks. Now imagine those small elephants, plus some capybaras: chilling under the grey sky, taking a bath in the lake in warmer days, gathering together in colder days... come on, it's cuteness overload!

Why don't you go back to rdrama, GazaMarseyBomber?

(For others: criticism against a government does not automatically imply hate towards the individuals loosely associated with said government. Specially not when some of those individuals don't even pay taxes to that gov, and a few of them are criticising it too.

In fact, the very discourse of conflating a government with a population has a name - nationalism. OP is a nationalist and should be treated as such.)

Why Isn't Linux Mainstream? 5 Flaws That Need Fixing

With that, the author implies that it's of utmost importance to make Linux mainstream. Is it? I don't know and I'm not assuming.

1. The Landscape Evolves Too Quickly

Not a flaw.

For example, look at the biggest name in desktop Linux: Ubuntu. They release a new version every six months where each version is named after the year and month of release (e.g. 14.10, 15.04, 15.10, etc). Contrast that with Windows (every 3-5 years) and OS X (every 1-2 years).

LTS. Debian Stable.

Stopped reading here because the author is clearly ignorant on what he's talking about.

They already exist. AdNauseam is a good example of that - it clicks advertisement links for you so it's harder to know what you're into.

TL;DR: no. Definitively no.

NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.

Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit

For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.

For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:

• pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
• purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
• concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
• contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
• "ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.

I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.

I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.

Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.

Also Lemmy has backend issues

I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:

• papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
• a lack of mod tools
• rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
• In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays. ~~And it never showed a downtime banana.~~
• can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way

So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.

Bad actors

Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.

lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.

I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:

• subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
• mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
• mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
• the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
• Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
• the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.

and sees an influx of kinder people

Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.

And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.

Like if I wanted to get the inside facts of “what’s the best mayonaise” I could find it on r/mayo posted 4 years ago.

The best mayo is the one that you whisk at home, using one raw yolk and one cooked yolk (yup). Mash them well together, add a bit of veg oil (just a bit! 1tbsp each time), whisk furiously, repeat until you have the desired amount (~~2 girls for 1 cup~~ 2 yolks for 1 cup of oil seems sensible for me). Then finish off with some salt and a healthy amount of vinegar (it's important to avoid bacteria).

Done. Now you can find "what's the best mayonnaise" in Lemmy too!

I'm half-joking with the above (you mentioned mayo as an example, not the point). I agree with your point - Lemmy will miss that sort of knowledge for some time, while Reddit is drowning itself in a sea of noise.

I spent a lot more time fixing my mom’s Windows install than her Ubuntu.

Small anecdote, roughly in the same line as yours:

As W7 was close to end of life, I asked my mum about it, as her laptop used W7. And after highlighting the privacy nightmare that W10 became, she decided to try Linux out. So I installed Mint in her machine. At the start she asked for help often, but the amount of "pls help" decreased over time. The last time that she asked for help was because she wanted to access "her computer" from her phone, just like I do with mine. (i.e. local network.)

My neighbours though? I often get some spare change from them, by helping them out with their Windows machines. And they're in the same level of tech expertise as my mum, you know, those folks who can download and install a program and not much else.

The problem with platforms advertising that they're free speech platforms is that you'll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.

And that backtracks all the way into

1. The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don't). It's quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
2. That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to "ackshyually". In this case "free speech" makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn't, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
3. The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)

Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.

If your house is burning, saying "nooo! my precious home! I'm angry at the fire!" won't stop it from burning. You need to either quench the fire, or move out and rebuild your home in another house.

In other words: I can understand the anger that that mod feels, and I felt something really similar in the past. But ultimately, anger doesn't change anything, what matters are actions. That mod should've realised a long time ago that you can't quench this fire, the only solution here is to move out - like OP did, I did, and most people who'll read this comment did.

I feel like they might actually do this. It wouldn't be the first time that they use a CEO to implement unpopular stuff, then fire him to say "everything is fine now" - cue to Ellen Pao.

It's sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you'll be basically saying "I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being". (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)

Sandwich biscuits (like Oreo and the likes, but there are plenty local brands) are extremely popular among kids where I live. I still eat them, the same way as I did as a kid: split them in halves, eat the filling-less halves, and then join the halves with filling so I get to eat biscuits with 2x more filling.