Wine

Wine is an emulator that uses KVM and VMWARE (at the same time) to run Windows games.
This is not true, at all, of course, but it would be kinda funny if it was, I think.
The real explanation is quite lame, Wine is basically just a glorified pile of DLLs used to run Windows programs and whatnot, the name also stands for 'Wine Is Not a Emulator'. (So funny and meta!)

Installing gentoo wine

If you're like, 1.5 days into Linux, you should probably already have figured out how to install packages on your distribution, if you're confused or which flavor of wine to drink, I personally recommend:

• wine
• wine-stable
• wine-staging

For Arch and Arch-based Distributions

Enable the multilib repo in /etc/pacman.conf and run the following command:

sudo pacman -S --needed giflib lib32-giflib libpng lib32-libpng libldap lib32-libldap gnutls lib32-gnutls \
                mpg123 lib32-mpg123 openal lib32-openal v4l-utils lib32-v4l-utils libpulse lib32-libpulse libgpg-error \
                lib32-libgpg-error alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins alsa-lib lib32-alsa-lib libjpeg-turbo lib32-libjpeg-turbo \
                sqlite lib32-sqlite libxcomposite lib32-libxcomposite libxinerama lib32-libxinerama libgcrypt lib32-libgcrypt \
                ncurses lib32-ncurses ocl-icd lib32-ocl-icd libxslt lib32-libxslt libva lib32-libva gtk3 \
                lib32-gtk3 gst-plugins-base-libs lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader

It might sound like a lot, but trust me, it works. Filtering out the bloat leads to more problems, so save yourself the trouble. Non-Arch users, check out the Lutris documentation for your setup.

Native games

No fuss here. Native games on Linux are straightforward. Just execute the game's file and chmod your way through, like any Linux executable. Package managers also host a plethora of native games, including source ports.

Emulation

Emulation is not my thing, but if it is yours, most popular emulators are just a package manager away. This includes RetroArch, the EMACS of emulation.

Ever since I got interested in Linux and Open Source software I've seen a lot of people claiming Linux as some kind of leftist thing, it never sat right with me.

It just seemed right that free software was a libertarian thing, solely based on the most basic principles of development and everything about it, maybe I'm just being autistic and most people just see that as a meme but based on the kind of people that use linux nowadays you can't really tell...

I've also noted that a lot of misguided takes come from this notion that Open Source software is somehow leftist or should follow left-leaning policies and ethics. Which is really dumb and sucks.

Linux ISN'T and CAN'T be compatible with leftist ideology.

Open Source software basically has nothing to do with leftist ideals or goals, for very good reasons. Notice how every time left-leaning ethics are applied to Free software development, it always results in embarrassing things such as ridiculous codes of conducts, tranny tiranny (look what happened to the hyprland dev), etc, things that have nothing to do with what FOSS stands for and are only causing harm to FOSS and technology in general.

Cultural marxists will unironically be the ones arbitrarily banning software from their repositories (look up nixos polymc) and still claim that YOU'RE the ebil authoritarian Nazi. Holy irony. I guess these people really want to force Linux into becoming an authoritarian communist/liberal regime.

The same soydevs (most of them aren't even developers) that force this kind of stupidity are also mostly the ones behind shit-tier memes such as Rust and Wayland that are only forced because of community psyops and lies, Wayland users claim that Xorg is bad because it has defunct code and screen tearing. Guess what, Wayland also has screen tearing! And in Xorg you at least get to disable that. This isn't a mere coincidence. Leftism has no place on Linux or free software whatsoever.

Linux already operates on libertarian ideology.

Free software makes use of grey and free markets, that being, decentralized legal distribution of goods (in this case software) by third-parties and maintainers, not necessarily intended by the original manufacturers, with little to no regulation from a government, GitHub (and other Git platforms), the AUR, other package repositories, mirrors, etc, can be seen as examples of both grey markets and free markets in the context of software distribution. Sharing is caring. Free software also has reinforcement towards private companies, most notably small organizations such as Mozilla, Docker, SUSE, etc.

Grey markets, free markets, private ownership, private companies, economic freedom, decentralization, personal autonomy, notice how these are all things leftist love to hate, and yet, are essentialities to Linux.

What should/does Linux actually stand for?

As mentioned earlier Linux already vastly operates within right-libertarian ethics and ideals and should continue to do so, reinforcing essential ideas such as decentralized grey and free markets, private property, personal and economic freedom. and HAS to stay this way otherwise it's gonna come trumbling down and come to a very slow, painful and inevitable death.

With the rapid increase of accessibility to personal technologies, the public of personal computers has changed significantly, nowadays the market has moved away from making delicate and elegant functional software for those in the know, such as professionals who want to get stuff done and enthusiasts who want to get the best out of their machines, to the humble average Joe.

Nowadays, mass-produced personal technology isn't made for people who actually know what they're doing, the users are perceived as naive, unskilled, inexperienced and consequently vulnerable to exploitation, so there's a whole new layer of making the software fool-proof and exploitable in order to make the technology profitable.

One might think that because this change only directly affected big companies, it wouldn't affect the market of independent developers, but it does, if you ever had the displeasure of using a proprietary "digital marketplace", such as the Play Store, App Store or the Microsoft Store, you definitely noticed that the developers and small companies there are just as scammy (Programs are filled with Ads, paywalls annd scams) and willing to over-simplify their software as the big companies are. Goodwilled developers might find refuge in alternative free software marketplaces such as Github or F-Droid.

To big tech companies, making fool-proof software requires making the software the most immutable and unhackable as possible. Meaning the days of customizable technology must be made bygones in order of making it fool-proof. It used to be that what everybody has in their offices and bedrooms nowadays was meant for professionals only, meaning only actual good technology would sell, but because of this recent shift in the market, big tech companies aren't really interested in making great usable software anymore, instead, they're actually focused on creating what we'll refer as imposed technology, that is, technology that is unhackable, unreliable (in order to make it exploitable) and forced down the user's throat.

Phones for example, are used by pretty much everyone today, but have you noticed how they're less and less hackable each day? Have you noticed the shift from fully rootable and hackable phones to no headphone jack phones? This happened because big tech companies advertised bluetooth headphones as progress, innitialy, they were optional, now, depending on the device, they're the only kind of headphones you can use. This happens constantly with imposed technologies, they're first advertised as optional innevitable progress, but as time goes on, they become a mandatory chore.

Not to mention how wired headphones increase user freedom, are overall better quality, are more long-lasting, are less invasive with normal human life and ironically, use less technology, as opposed to the vapid nature of bluetooth headphones. This serves as a clear example of the direction that today's mainstream technology is leaning towards, not only it's as immutable as possible but also the technology isn't even the product anymore, it's the consumers.

Fools and Hackers

Imagine if rocket engineers sacrificed the quality of their crafts in order of making rockets user-friendly and intuitive to the average person? That would be sheer insanity right? Well, that's partially the direction modern technology is going for.

Consider this excerpt from the book The Hacker's Diet:

In today's environment of technology, circumventing limitations is prohibited! You cannot hack discord, for example, by making your own client, that goes against the terms of services! You can't even take a look at the source code. This is also why nowadays the word hacker has such notoriety, circumventing limitations in today's technology is a criminal act, because of the way technology has changed over the years the limitations aren't organic anymore, they're there on purpose.

Of course, it's not all user-friendly technology that is bad, for example, older versions of Windows and novice-friendly GNU/Linux distros, such as Linux MInt, do a somewhat great/decent job at incentivizing hackability. In Linux Mint for example, you're not forced to use the terminal, but if you want it, it's right there in the taskbar. Windows seems to have always been trying to be immutable, but in older versions at least you could learn a bit about the system. That's also why zoomers get really confused when trying out Windows 98/XP.

Meanwhile, hacker movements, such as the minimal software movement and the free software movement incentivise the user to hack the software. Free software incentivises hacking purely by making their software the most hackable and customizable as possible. Look at Firefox. You can do all kinds of stuff with the extensive configuration and custom CSS, not quite the case for Chrome or Edge. This is also where the "Free as in Freedom" part of the free software movement comes from.

Minimalistic software basically forces the user to hack the software, Suckless software, for example, partially uses the source code as config files and incentivise users to patch the software. Minimalistic people and GNU FOSS people hate each other because they prefer different licenses (Autism) and because GNU is bloated but in the end of the day, they have a common enemy, today's environment of mediocre corporative technology created by imposed technology.

Tech Illiteracy

Because nowadays technology is built only for product consumption, hacking is getting more and more restricted, most of Gen Z has no idea of how their computers work.

People learn by making mistakes. If people don't make mistakes, they don't learn. When you treat people like fools, they become ones. This is what's happening in today's technology. By over-simplifying menus, making basic customization impossible, hacking being discouraged and cloud computing becoming the norm, tech illiteracy is rising exponentially, because people are losing touch with their computers.

-Terry A. Davis, on the Commodore 64.

On the other hand, if technology is hackable and local, even the most inept, so-called fools, can learn from it. The only hacking Gen Z normies are doing nowadays is pirating or modding video-games and software, sometimes not even that, because then again, they aren't incentivised to do so.

Piracy is frowned upon and illegal in some countries, modding is becoming more and more restricted both for video-games and for software, using Android instead of Apple is looked down upon, too. Even though Android is not perfect and most devices include some sorts of imposed technologies, in average, they are still far more hackable when compared to the IPhones. Same goes for the Windows vs MacOS discussion.

This point is not necessarily to neither endorse or to attack piracy, but because piracy is, well, not liked or controlled by companies, the user has to find his way through stuff, locally, either by internet guides or just trial and error. Same goes for modding. You can learn the basics of computing with these. Meanwhile you learn virtually nothing from doing it the legal vanilla way, which is just clicking buttons on menus.

Social engineering

The more technology becomes mandatory, and the more the users just eat it up, the more the developers of it have the freedom of just doing whatever, people don't have an option anymore!

It's like imposed technologies have cemented a cycle of:

1. People adopt mainstream thing #526 because, well, everybody else was doing so!
2. It either becomes somewhat mandatory to use it or it becomes so mainstream that alternatives are futile
3. Mainstream thing #526 causes damage to society
4. People realize mainstream thing #526 sucks
5. People can't do anything now lol

People have been complaining about the policies of big tech for at least a decade and nothing has changed, why? Well, people don't really do anything about the problem. E-Celebs complain a lot about YouTube being retarded and continue to use daily. Same thing for basically all other social medias and all mainstream tech.

This is also what is making the all geeky meme "Let's make the internet/technology better!" movements, like the free software movement, or the minimal software movement, or the decentralized web (RETVRN TO WEB1) movement, so hard, most people will give up everything (privacy, freedom, quality of software) in exchange for "comfort" (golden cages).

Most people don't want to have their music on their hard-drive, even if that meant increase of freedom, they just want to listen to it on spotify, most people don't want to have their vidya on their hard-drive, even if that made them more self-reliant, they just want to use steam for that! The list goes on and on.

And of course it's hard to blame the users because after so many years of increasing tech illiteracy (caused by imposed technologies) they basically don't know how to do the basic stuff or are far too busy doomscrolling social media to do something, but in the end of the day it's a problem that only users can solve. Don't like XYZ? Don't use it. Simple as. Seek alternatives. And if you do use it, be careful and skeptical about it. Otherwise society is DOOMed.

Social media and the current state of the internet are deplorable. Why and how can we revert this?

The Failure of Social Media

Nowadays, it isn't unusual for the internet as a whole to be solely attributed to social media, as if it's the only thing on the internet. However, we all know that social media is not without its faults. In this article, we'll analyze some of its main problems, so we can effectively avoid repeating its mistakes in our alternative web.

The Naivety of Attempting to Exchange Information

Social media not only disincentivizes posts from being thoughtful or in-depth, but it also prevents them from doing so. The ephemeral and short-form nature of social media reinforces this.

Sure, there are exceptions. Some activism and exchange of information are possible on modern social media, mainly when the information or idea is simple enough to illustrate without much elaboration, or when used for advertising longer-form content or via infographics. However, these are rare occasions and are still subject to other problems of social media.

The Magnifying Glass Effect

Because of how short form modern social media posts are, everything published on social media is, by default, out of context. It distorts the messages of its publishers, as complex ideas have to be oversimplified into few bite-sized sentences, it subtly overemphasis and exaggerates particular parts, losing context. The brevity only leaves room for blanket statements.

Writings, interviews, podcasts, and long form video content are infinitely better forms of conveying and exchanging ideas, they suffer significantly less from this effect as they avoid oversimplification, providing the necessary context for deeper understanding.

Alienation and Overstimulation

Because of how addictive and stimulating social media is by design (constant notifications, endless feeds), it's very easy for social media to alienate people from their own real life communities and place them in an unnatural over-socialized state where their online personas, likes, followers, profiles, etc., are more important than their real lives, actual human interactions, their actual selves, their own understanding of things, health, hygiene, personal growth, and even their surroundings.

Their social media is now the over-socialized "chronically/terminally online" (as they themselves call it) type's ego, they've become one with their internet image. Nothing is real until it's on their internet profile. The need for a journal to express oneself isn't inherently negative, pen and paper personal diaries are often considered therapeutic, but when mixed with social media, this makes the over-socialization run even deeper, as they're constantly being watched and judged by others online. This isn't necessarily the case for blogs or pen-and-paper journals, they don’t impose the same performative pressure or ego attachment if used correctly.

Sites like Letterboxd and Last.fm encourage users to care more about how their profiles and "scrobbles" look than the actual movies/music itself (this is not necessarily true for all logging sites or to all users of said platforms, it depends on the level of over-socializing) in the same way mainstream social media encourage people to care more about their pictures and posts than their actual experiences themselves. This in itself is extremely unnatural, unhealthy, and damaging to people, but it doesn't stop there.

Manipulation

• Social Engineering

This state creates something analogous to both Skinner's Box and Plato's Cave, the algorithm works as operant conditioning, as behaviour desired by the platform operators are actively encouraged and rewarded by others in the Plato's Cave ambiguous community guidelines and censorship create in social media.




The idea that social media like counts may affect the way content is perceived might come off as ludicrous to some, but here's an example of this happening at a very primal state: There are people who judge whether a video is funny or not based on the like count of the video. People have been engineered to a degree that even their most basic reactions have been programmed, one can only imagine how far this can go with people's ideas and worldview.


Social Media as Social Control. (Peertube) - (YouTube)
Social Media: Anything for Upcummies! ⬆🍆💦💦 (Peertube) - (YouTube)


• Surveillance and Exploitation

When you engage in modern social media not only you're being spied on and used but, most importantly, you're also allowing this dystopia to continue to exist by contributing to the network effect of social media. For a long time now social media and the modern web have been using people not only for social control but also for data-harvesting and other forms of exploitations and espionage, the Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM program made this very clear.


Background and Direction of Our Cyberpunk Dystopia (Peertube) - (YouTube)

Reliance on Social Media and Monolithic Services

Most people don't own their own websites. Sometimes, even organizations and projects lack their own websites, relying instead on social media and other platforms. Ordinary people are alienated from creating content on the internet themselves. Instead, they spend their time working as content producers for social media and monolithic services, while social media, mass media, and a few dominant websites shape the internet.

• Examples of reliance on monolithic services:
• YouTube has monopolized video sharing, transforming many potential writers into "YouTubers" and incentivizing low-effort, pretentious, or insincere content rather than fostering informative content or thoughtful videoblogging. Even major corporations rely on YouTube to host their music, music videos, trailers, journalism, TV clips, and more.
• Fandom.com has monopolized media wikis
• Blogspot has monopolized blogging
• Github has monopolized Open-source code hosting
• Spotify has monopolized music. Some artists don't bother mirroring their content to other platforms.
• Social media, platforms like Substack, messaging services (they're often used as newsletters) have monopolized newsletters, articles, and independent media



This way, most people's idea of the internet have been reduced to social media plus Wikipedia, mainstream media, and the monolithic services that sometimes appear on search engine results. Because of this and tech illiteracy, some people are scared of all sites aside the mainstream ones. Not mass media, social media, mainstream service, or Wikipedia? That's a "suspicious link", That's a virus.



• Articles, Mainstream Media Vehicles

Most internet articles and the content outside social media and these monolithic services are written by:

• Mass media journos and their cattle
• Artificial intelligences
• Shills
• Anything but real, regular people

Old Web Romanticism

There's quite a lot of homesickness for the 90's internet today. (i.e., Neocities "retro" sites, TheOldNet, Yesterweb) Sure, there are some positive aspects to this, and many of the participants of these movements already understand some of contemporary web's technical problems (some are just in for the aesthetics or for their own amusement), but without a clear understanding of what made the old web great, and what made the new web not, these movements might end-up replicating the same issues of today's mainstream web.

Main problems of this fed:

• Static hosts (i.e., Neocities, ichi.city, Nekoweb) are still centralized. The actual decentralization would come from self-hosting. See LandChad.net
• Webmasters who still engage in over-socializing are still vulnerable to social engineering and might bring this to the "personal web."
• Even completely self-hosted websites might replicate the fleeting nature of social media or propagate alienation and over-socialization. (both to the public and to the webmaster)
• There isn't anything magically good about the old internet just because it was from the 90's or the early 2000's, it had some of their problems of their own. (i.e., pop-up Ads, scamming, malware)

Virtues the old web had that could inspire a better internet today:

• People actually browsed the internet and didn't just look at the ~5 social media sites or mainstream media all day
• Articles were written by humans
• Lack of monopolies, surveillance, and over-socializing
• Unintentional minimalism and lack of web bloat because of limitations of the time
• Good and user-centric technology

Misconceptions and Red Herrings

• Commercialization, Capitalism

There were plenty of corporate and commercial sites in the 90's and in the early 2000's, they not only were more privacy respecting and minimal but also coexisted peacefully with more personal sites and such, GeoCities and AOL Hometown themselves were commercial, after all. People in "old web" movements tend to blame modern web's problems on commercialization and greedy profit-driven sites and organizations, an argument could be made that as the web got mainstream commercial sites suffered from supply and demand and the quality diminished, or that giant corporations ruined the internet with streaming and other monolithic services and social media, but commercialization was always present on the internet and wasn't always a problem.



• Social Media

The problems here discussed are not inherent or unique to social media. Social media wasn't exactly a problem when it was used wisely, it was still proprietary, but this was significantly less of a problem, it was used primarily to exchange small ideas, humor, non-over-socialized communication, and interacting with real life communities, and it had very little censorship. It was actually "social" and the problems here discussed were much less prominent. It even managed to coexist with other more personal and independent sites.

This isn't possible today because the intricate structure of modern social media makes it virtually impossible, hence why most people nowadays think the idea of blogs and personal websites are ludicrous or passé, modern social media removed the use-case for personal websites in favor of a self-inflicted nightmare.

An Ideal Web should be...

1. Antisocial by design, with minimum socializing.
2. Written by real people.
3. Focused on the exchange of ideas, meaningful discussions, and creation. (i.e., Art, Software)
4. Decentralized, minimal, free as in freedom, and open-source.

Available solutions:

• Offline-first software, pen and paper, real life.
• RSS feeds and alternative privacy respecting frontends for mainstream sites.
• RSS feeds, autonomous websites, self-hosting.
• Articles, long form videos, podcasts, interviews, independent wikis.
• Slow-paced image-boards, decentralized and alternative platforms, minimal forums, web-rings, and the darknet.

The internet should shift from being a fast-paced, shallow and centralized artificial space to a slower, more sustainable, thoughtful, and decentralized hub for genuine information exchange, discussion of interests, creativity (as in pursuit of edifying and useful projects), and real-life enhancement, something to enhance the real world and the human experience, rather than a unfit replacement for it.

Stop using social media, but not just social media, distance yourself from using all over-socializing, overstimulating, addicting, and alienating "media" you can. Slow (emphasis on slow because some internet niches are too fast-paced) and anonymous algorithm-less privacy respecting image-boards, forums with minimal profile customization, blogs, and personal websites are all great fixes to our present internet, but overall the better web is as much less web as possible.

Notes

• Pessimism and Gradual Change

Of course changes against the modern web won't happen overnight, but with the information available to the people, systemic changes become inevitable and unavoidable. The goal here is not to reform social media or the modern internet, but to build the alternatives in parallel to the existing system, rather than expecting immediate systemic collapse. This article is "E for everyone", from avid social media users to the people who don't use it but still use other alienating, over-socializing, or compulsively addicting technologies, and everyone who's disillusioned with the modern web in general but doesn't quite know why.



• IRC, Chatrooms, and Chat Protocols

They're obviously very fleeting, fast-paced, and short form, even more so than social media, so they're not very adequate for spreading ideas or meaningful discussions effectively. They might also alienate some from real life if misused. They can be quite useful and harmless if used for interacting with real life communities, as mere contacting means, or used with temperance.

Further reading