Personally I use a Guix template I made (Typst, LaTeX) which downloads necessary software/libraries and the LSP and pins the software versions, and I use the Helix text editor for editing. Not sure what the more common methods are. Also Typst’s package management is weird.

If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.

it increases your chances of getting accidentally added to confidential group chats

If we go the electoral route, I think the main first focus needs to be on local elections in cities since those have the biggest proportion of progressive voters and less obstacles to fuck them over. In this case, probably the biggest problem aside from far-right conservatives is progress being inherently more divisive than keeping the status quo so winning over trust is difficult and Democratic voters are still biased toward voting for conservatives, as shown by the amount of people I’ve seen voting for conservative Democrats over progressives because they’re afraid that the progressives will lose elections, which then ironically leads us to people losing trust in Democrats because they don’t do shit and ignore problems that impact most people (or even worsen them). Competing with fascist candidates and their successful marketing would require very careful/well-coordinated and intense outreach to motivate people and also focusing primarily on offering solutions to domestic economic issues over stuff like LGBTQ and Palestine while simultaneously keeping strong stances on those issues as well (which is the opposite of what most Democrats are doing) and dodging attacks from the far right. Considering how badly the Democrats fucked up their reputation, I’m not sure if it would be better to run as Democrat or third party at this point. I do know that my local PSL chapter is interested in running candidates if they can find people who are interested in running and know how to navigate this sort of stuff, and PSL, while still being relatively obscure, has won a few local elections in the past.

Even with this there is still a long way to go, since even the most “progressive” parts of the country are still capitalist racist shitholes with most of the same problems as more conservative cities. Federal politics is extremely fucked and the people currently in power will do everything they can to prevent an actual leftist from peacefully gaining power, even moreso with Republicans controlling all branches of government. So it doesn’t address the immediate issue of Trump/Musk genociding Palestinians, deporting immigrants left and right and sending them to concentration camps in remote areas, stripping away LGBTQ rights, and privatizing public services while worsening the state of the economy while a third of the country cheers it on.

If they’re pushed away from harming property owned by the relatively well-off but not from committing genocide on actual people, then that’s on them

If these are the best ideas and people that the left has to offer we are never going to win this. Ugh.

Do you have any better ideas?

If you’re working paycheck to paycheck and bought a $37k vehicle you need to rethink your financial decisions

those 90% of Americans don’t own an expensive Tesla

I was also raised in a conservative family, and leftists vandalizing stuff didn’t stop me from arriving at socialism, at most it delayed it slightly since I wasn’t yet aware of what the driving factor was, which I ended up connecting later. Everything leftists do pisses off conservatives who have different motives, I don’t think vandalizing cars from fascists running our government is exceptionally different and I don’t think most people who are still developing a baseline political framework can afford them anyways so it doesn’t directly affect them.

The damage done to the Teslas costs insurance companies money. Insurance companies hate paying for stuff, so if this is sustained, insurance rates for Teslas will increase. That combined with dealing with the vandalism itself gives customers a reason not to use a Tesla, which means car dealerships and rentals will sell less, who will then purchase less ultimately losing Tesla money. People who buy expensive cars from fascists who are actively controlling our government aren’t innocent, and IMO the people vandalizing Teslas are doing more for society than the peaceful parades and book clubs are since it actually costs them something.

https://archive.ph/iKxfy

There’s also Kiwi Farms targeted harassment involved as well

I have a friend here in the US who is on a visa and is planning on leaving the US after undergrad and doing grad school in Europe somewhere

Street Complete lets you walk around and answer questions that go to OSM

Fedora Asahi Remix. Considering how the M1 has no official Linux support, it’s impressive that it runs as well as it does, and they have compatibility hacks to run Steam games and get Widevine to work. There’s still a lot of rough edges however, like no microphone (should be coming out soon though) or fingerprint, aarch64 software support is second class and tends to have more frequent bugs (cough Electron cough) that get ignored by package maintainers and some (even FOSS) software isn’t supported, I don’t think high refresh rate is supported yet, full disk encryption isn’t supported (but there’s blog articles from people who figured out how to set it up), limited distro options, worse power efficiency so gets hot faster (just got a cooling pad to deal with this, get a Pro if you can so you have a fan) and battery life is barely different than what I’ve heard from Framework users so there’s not really much to gain atm. Currently only supports M1 and to a lesser extent M2, and also the fact that you’re dual booting makes the soldered overpriced SSD space even more limiting.

As far as distro support goes, Fedora Workstation is the only distro that has official support. There’s other options with community support but there’s a higher likelihood of stuff being outdated or not packaged (i.e. Arch Linux ARM doesn’t have the same level of community support as normal Arch Linux). I haven’t tried NixOS or Guix System on M1, but I use Nix/Guix on the Fedora install. aarch64 Guix packages keep breaking making it annoying to update and issues tend to be ignored (also certain core packages don’t like the tmpfs 16k page size so you need to make it use /var/tmp instead), aarch64 Nix is a lot better but support is still slow to where Signal is several versions behind and has been broken for weeks despite there being multiple pull requests with fixes, and both Nix/Guix prioritize x86 over aarch64 for builds so it will need to compile a lot of things from source.

Agreed. I got the 16/512 (max specs) M1 Air for a decent price for the performance and battery life, and I currently run Linux on it, but I’m constantly bottlenecking both the RAM and SSD and it sucks that I can’t upgrade it, will probably get a Framework when it dies

Great battery life on macOS, although turns out a lot of it involves software-related optimizations since with Asahi Linux it’s barely better than x86

lemmy.ml federates with almost all instances most of which aren’t leftist, the admins are leftist as is a lot of the local userbase, but the moderation varies between communities and this one tends to be one of the more permissive ones. If you want one that’s more exclusively leftist you’re probably looking for Hexbear or Lemmygrad.

Lemmy, Reddit, Instagram, local communities on Signal and Discord

Alternatively they could decompile it

Also blocks Tor and tried to push a Zionist “fact check” bot