Yes, KDE is a desktop environment. It’s one of the “Windows-like” ones and very customizable, and arguably the most technically advanced one at the moment.

Wayland is the display server, as it is called. It’s basically the back-end component that facilitates actually displaying anything on the screen. It replaced another component called X11, which was released in 1987 and had become a completely unmaintainable mess of technological debt.

Wayland took a very long time to develop and there are still some growing pains, which is why you will occasionally still see people arguing that X11 is better – these days you should probably just ignore anyone who says that though, as the overwhelming majority of users will be much better served by Wayland than by X11.

As for what distros support it, basically every up-to-date distro (latest major version release during or after 2024) using one of the following desktop environments will default to Wayland: KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland. Other DEs don’t yet have stable Wayland support. Notably Linux Mint, a very common recommendation, is not on this list because the Cinnamon DE it uses does not yet support Wayland.

A couple of example distros mentioned in the thread and article would be Bazzite, Fedora and CachyOS. These distros all update swiftly, which is desirable because the Linux desktop is advancing very quickly at the moment. Slower-moving distros like Debian or Ubuntu LTS tend to miss out on a lot of nice new features.

I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.

X11 fractional scaling is not great. It may have looked fine if you only had a cursory glance, but it has many issues. “True” fractional scaling in X11 doesn’t work on a per-monitor basis IIRC, instead any per-monitor fractional scaling will be a relatively simple resize operation that results in lots of blurriness.

Human communication is pretty damn complex, so I’d say it’s extremely unlikely whales are going to have the same level of language.

Perhaps they could be at the level of some earlier hominids, but to me it seems more likely they’re going to be something different altogether. Human language evolved extremely quickly, so evolving it in the first place was likely a sort of an evolutionary threshold after which further development happened very rapidly. Whales on the other hand have been, from what we can tell, relatively unchanged for a long time.

Humans of course have hands and are therefore capable of making tools whales could never, and language development and technology appear to have been intertwined in human evolution. It could be that technology is what creates the evolutionary pressure necessary for developing complex language, and if so, then whales would not have had that evolutionary pressure.

Well, the gospels themselves are an example of editorializing. None of the gospels are written by the disciples themselves, most if not all of them were written after all the apostles would have been dead, and it is widely agreed that two of them (Matthew and Luke) are basically fanfiction spin-offs of Mark and a second, long lost source.

To clarify, I think by the time the stories were canonized, the narrative was likely more or less established. But in the 2-3 centuries before that I expect it to have been quite varied. We have no real way of knowing either way because there are very few surviving scraps of manuscripts from that early on.

The New Testament was written after his death too, some parts of it earlier than others. I think it’s also a pretty safe bet that there was a lot of editorializing over the centuries, since AFAIK the earliest surviving copies of anything are from the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE.

Jesus wouldn’t quote the Bible. It was written hundreds of years after his death.

Clicked on link expecting a Tom Clancy book. Was severely disappointed.

As far as I understand it, if the proposal was voted on and lost, there’d be a cooldown period for a certain time before they’re allowed to resubmit the same thing. The people pushing this are using a loophole of sorts where they retract the bill when it looks like it’s not going to pass and then resubmit it later with slight alterations. It’s an attrition tactic; they only have to win once whereas we have to repeal it every time.

I mean that you get arrested and go to jail.

This could literally be a Dwarf Fortress randomly generated inscription.

People like Thoreau and Emerson aren’t fringe; they are extremely influential in American political philosophy, to the point where there’s a long-ass Wikipedia page about them.

Now there’s a lot that could be said about them and I don’t want to start writing essays here, so to cut to the chase I will just write down a couple of bullet points.

• As we can both see, that page considers itself “part of a series on socialism”, which I believe is because these thinkers courted socialist ideas at their time, seeking to come up with an alternative more along the lines of their personal very American individualist philosophy. I think it should not be contentious to say that time has proven that individualism and socialism are not compatible ideologies.

• I think time has also proven that this brand of anarchism did not survive contact with industrialization – this is what I meant by it giving birth to libertarianism, because the same (very American) principles of individualism underpin both.

• Nonetheless, this philosophy is a school of anarchist thought. They themselves called it that, other people at the time called it that, and scholars that came after call it that. Ergo, anarchism is a far broader category that contains more than just the clearly leftist schools of anarchist thought like anarchist communism, and therefore using just the word “anarchism” to refer to contemporary leftist anarchism is incorrect and going to confuse people.

If you think it’s thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don’t think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.

What? It’s possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.

The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of “no rulers”.

the phase space of vague stuff like political ideology would have an arbitrary large number of parameters, not whatever 2 you see in memes.

Weird to hear this from the person who moments ago was arguing that there’s no problem projecting this concept on an even smaller number of dimensions.

Fairphone also lets you change out the battery very easily, so it’s not that big of a deal if it degrades. You might save the world 20% of a battery’s worth of e-waste by micromanaging your charging, which won’t really make a difference.

The political compass has both an X and a Y dimension, you know. As it happens, the Y dimension exists almost specifically because of anarchy.

Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism.

You’re doing the monopoly thing here again. When by “anarchist” you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.

Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.

Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.

One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn’t mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here? But to go along with what I assume your analog is, if you’re talking about height then you need to say you’re talking about height regardless of what unit you’re using. “Two metre box” means constrains only one dimension, much the same as the word anarchy by itself does.

The fact that there’s textbook fascists in the US government and many people I know seem to still be in denial. Mostly non-US people, in case that changes the equation.

This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren’t the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.

I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.