Episode: 3272
Title: HPR3272: In GNU/Linux, there is no "diversity", we're all just data.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3272/hpr3272.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:59:35

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3,272 for Tuesday 16th of February 2021.
Today's show is entitled, In GNU Sasha Lux, There is no diversity, we're all just later.
It is the first show by GNU host some guy on the internet and is about 17 minutes long and carrying an explicit flag.
The summary is, How I Experience GNU Sasha Lux and the Topic on Diversity.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's AnastomFair at Ananasthost.com.
Hello everyone, my name is Darwin.
Welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I want to discuss Diversity in Linux.
It's a topic that came up a little bit earlier on and I heard another host by the name of Swift.
I believe it was a Swift 101 or Swift 110.
He covered the topic and I thought he had some very interesting takes and I thought that,
why don't I come on here and give it a shot myself?
So first of all, I'll just talk to you about how I got into Linux.
I basically was running Microsoft 8.1 Windows 8.1 for a while.
Like everybody else, I was forced to upgrade to 10.
Didn't really want to but I had to because they just wouldn't stop bugging you
and even when I said I wasn't going to upgrade, like physically was not going to click on the button,
it just would upgrade anyway.
Like it just downloaded this stuff and it's like, oh crap, like my operating system is outside
of my control. I am no longer in control of this computer that I built.
I bought the parts assembled them and because I put Windows on it, I no longer control the machine.
Well, eventually because of Microsoft's will, I ended up on Windows 10.
Fine, no problem. I'm just going to have to deal with it.
I really didn't have an alternative. I'm not going to go on by Mac.
I had heard of Linux, but not really, you know, not anything serious.
I think the last person that ever talked to me about Linux tried to make it sound good.
The first thing they did was jump into a terminal and it's like, okay, I'm out.
I forgot what happened. It was something crazy happened. It was like, let me just
hop into a terminal. Okay, done. I'm out. Not hacking into any Russian nuclear power plants today,
buddy. You know, but yeah, so I eventually got fed up with Windows.
Like every single time an update would come through, they just oh, wait, got a sneeze once I get
my apologies for that. Had a quick sneeze. But yeah, every time Windows would come out with a new
update, I would be just, you know, I would have my control taken from me. It was like, hey,
buddy, we're not asking you to update your updating. You know, that's that's what we will have
you do. And you know, Windows just felt like spyware. It was like I had ransomware on my computer
controlled by Microsoft. And I just said, man, look, there's got to be another way.
I still remember the date. It was September 2nd, 2019.
That was the day I actually burnt Linux Mint onto a, a flash drive and put it into my laptop.
And I was scared that thinking, oh my god, I'm going to blow away this install and this better work
because if not, I'm probably going to buy another Windows product key just to try to put Windows
back on this thing. And I was scared when I decided to say, okay, well, I'm going to try to find
an old hard drive lying around and just swap this Windows one out just to see if, you know,
I can kind of, you know, do without blowing away the Windows install just in case something goes wrong.
So when I took the laptop apart, you know, take the shell off, whatever. And I saw that it was an
unadvertised M.2 SATA slot in there because this is a cheap little $250 laptop that you can pick up at,
you know, it's an HP laptop. I only paid like 250 bucks for it comes with an H and I three in it,
eight gigs a ram. But since I popped it open and voided my warranty, I went ahead and just
ordered up another eight gigs. Stick a crucial for 30 bucks from Amazon. Got that 500 gig M.2 SSD
and plopped them bad boys in there and booted up Linux. I have my laptop sitting on the table,
plugging the ethernet cable because I figured it's probably going to be some updates and things
of that nature. But decided to go ahead and check it out and I'm going to fast forward through
the story a little bit because the saying the story about too much about Linux is it's more about
the diversity and Linux. But to get there, I have to lead you through how I got into Linux. So
yeah, you know, I jumped in and everything went smooth at first until I discovered the Wi-Fi
issues because I was plugged into ethernet. So I thought that the internet was working fine,
eventually realized that there was Wi-Fi issues. And that's when I got the other half of Linux because
my my original understanding was it's GNU Linux and you know, GNU being the user land,
so to speak, and Linux being the kernel. The part that wasn't really mentioned when I got in was
the community. The community is bundled in with all of it. It's not just software. It's the
community and software. You don't get one without the other. It's like having a distribution without
a package manager. You're just not going to have it. All right, it's not in and if you somehow
manage to get it, if you manage to divorce a distribution from its package manager, I'm pretty sure
your experience is going to be terrible. And I think Linux is the exact same way the community
is, you know, melted in. You got to have them both or you got to have all three of them rather.
So let me clear the throw real quick because I got a cough drop in. My apologies if I
sounded a bit rough, a little bit of time says going on here, but either way, you know, I ran
into this issue with the Wi-Fi and I'm like, man, I can't have a laptop without Wi-Fi. Not much
of a laptop if you don't have Wi-Fi. Going through different forms and things in that nature,
and I'm, you know, I fell in love with Reddit shortly before this because I was kind of asking around
on what's, you know, what's a good Linux distro to start with after watching tons of YouTube videos
because YouTube can be a little misleading and I discovered that with the Wi-Fi issue. Not one
person out of all the videos I watched mentioned, oh yeah, be careful if you try it on a laptop because,
you know, sometimes the Wi-Fi didn't work. I didn't discover those videos until I after
learning the Wi-Fi didn't work. Yeah, so you got to be careful out there. The way the community
was wonderful. Not one person ever stopped to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute. Let me make sure I'm not talking to a black guy here before I help him. You know,
not one person was like, wait, hold on, hold on. I just want to make sure this is at least
a guy I'm talking to, right? Now, if it's not a guy, we got a problem. But if it is a guy, we're good.
Not one person said that. Every single person was just 100% helpful. They didn't care about any of
that guy, female, black, white, whatever. It just didn't exist. It was like we were all just
different forms of data floating around on the internet. And we interacted with each other the
best way we could. And that's how I experienced Linux. All right, so there was never a diversity
issue from my point of view. There was just information that's all there was and software,
which is just another form of information. You know, it's kind of like, you know, they say,
energy doesn't actually go away like you'd never create more energy or create more mass or whatever.
It just takes different forms or whatever. I'm sure I butchered that, but you know what I mean?
Energy is not a created or lost. It just takes different forms or is it mass that isn't created
or lost? It takes different forms. Either one, you know what I'm trying to get to. And Linux is
basically the same thing. When you're there, you're amongst people who are on their own journey
and if they have managed to travel down that path that you're currently going down,
they'll help you out unless they're from the arch community. And you know, I don't mean to
I don't mean to sound like I'm banging on the arch community, but that is where I first met
people who were not exactly friendly. Yeah. You kind of know when they're not friendly when
their model has a curse word in it. You know, read the effing manual. Yeah. You kind of know
things aren't going to be as friendly when you get there. But that is where I've met some people
who were, I wouldn't call them, you know, bad. They're just different over there in the arch side
of things. You know, it's like you finally got your system to boot. So now you're, you know,
on top of the world or something, you figure you can just talk to anyone any kind of way or whatever.
Or maybe they're just so frustrated with all the problems they're going through over there on
those rollings. But either way, I don't know what the hell is going on in the arch community,
but they're just different over there. But other than that, whether it be Ubuntu or Ubuntu
derivatives, devian, I haven't tried Fedora at all. I've spoken to people who have recommended
Fedora up until I realize GNOME. Well, well, I think you can get spin off so whatever they don't
have the GNOME desktop. But once I bumped into GNOME, the same thing like with Ubuntu,
I just ran away from it. GNOME just, it's a DE that isn't meant for people to use it.
You know, it's meant for the developers to show you they made a DE, but you're not supposed to
actually use it. And that's what it feels like. Because the moment you try to touch something
and change it and customize it, you know, but anyway, this isn't a rant about GNOME. Let me
clear my thought real quick. Again, apologies for the constant throat clearing and stuff. I'll
cut all that out and try to clean it up. But yeah, my experience overall has just been wonderful.
And I think that some of the people who I've spoken with on Reddit and other forms and things,
if they actually heard what I sound like, they probably go, oh, you know, no idea. I guy, you know,
seems black, but I mean, you know, not like it mattered. You know, he's polite. He helps,
participates in the way that he can, which is for me, I'm not a programmer or a coder.
Once I find a piece of software that I feel like I can't live without, I donate. Very simple.
You know, it may not be much at first. The one project that I made sure that I focus the most
is Libre office. That is like my main thing. So that gets the bulk. But everything else,
I'll try to, you know, feather off a little bit here and there to go to other projects because
a lot of the software I actually need. And including all the ACI, I actually got to put together
package for them. But oh, pardon me. Yeah, but it's just been 100% freedom-loving software.
Everybody's come together, help educate each other, help you get past the trouble spots. And
if you're willing to learn more, they point you in the direction of some valuable resources.
And not once have I bumped into someone that made me feel like because I was either a certain sex
or a certain race or whatever, I was treated differently. That that just did not happen. It
doesn't exist as far as my experience has showed me within the Linux community. Now again,
if you're out there in arch somewhere, I don't know about that, but you might run into a jerk
or two out there. But even then, I don't even think that out there in arch community people
behave that way. So I don't know, I guess I'm curious as to what a community like this,
you know, coming from my perspective with everyone just being data out here interacting with each
other. You know, it's like it's a massive server and every single human being on it. We're just
bits of data and we're interacting the best way we know how. How do you, I feel like you create a
problem the moment you start trying to turn it in race. Like the moment you say that we're no longer
just a bunch of binaries. Now we're going to be, you know, we're no longer ones and zeroes. We're
now going to be people and we're going to be white and we're going to be black and we're going to
whatever else. The moment you do that, that's when you create the problem. Now you have just given
people a target to shoot at or you know, me erase the shoot part, but you give them a target to
focus on and that's where your problem is going to come in and in my humble opinion. So I don't
know, I don't think we need to focus any further on it. I've seen some great strides being made
and again, I'm not a programmer, but I've heard about what they were doing with programmer,
air condition, just kicking on the me check out for us. Okay. Yeah. So I heard about in the
programming space where there are programmers that they were talking about changing certain
language and I thought that was wonderful. Even though I'm not a programmer, I thought it was
wonderful what they were doing. They were talking about changing the language where they have master
slave and don't get me wrong. Whenever the closest thing I've ever done to that was dealing with
multiple drives in a computer, multiple what do you call them, this drives and went back in a day
when we used to burn CDs and stuff, you know, you'd have the master drive where you do your reading
from, but you did all your rights on the slave drives and you know, don't get me wrong. Each time
I have to say it, it was like, couldn't we have just, you know, couldn't we have just chose better words
for this, you know, I don't like to say slave for anything really because the idea of slaves not
putting any sort of race or even species or anything attached to it, just the idea of a slave
period is distasteful and I don't like the idea of it, right? So because, I mean, you could
make anything a slave. It didn't have to even be a human. So I can't, you know, it just feels bad.
So, you know, I was very happy to hear that, you know, maybe one day if I do learn a language
and I'm able to participate in the project, one of the things I want to look out for in that
project is if they've made those kind of changes because I, you know, I just feel better
that I don't have to deal with that, but I don't feel like if I had to deal with it, meaning like,
you know, if they were paying well enough and I just needed the money, so I took the job,
yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with that. So, you know, make the money, do what I got to do,
but if I had a choice in the matter, I'd choose something that didn't have it. And not because
of, well, I guess, I guess you can link it to diversity. I just, I don't feel like the race matters
there. I feel like it's just a bad thing to do, morally. It is just not a thing you want to
participate in or promote in any way. And I feel like when you have any discussion and you're talking
to people and you go, oh, yeah, that slave already, it's just like, gee, it's good, yeah, it just picked
up, but you know, could you just pick up better term or something to pick that? And I know we created
some confusion with the, what did they call them now, main and branch. And then there's primary
and secondary and now, you know, I know created some confusion with that. So all that matters is we
just need to refine our standards now in open source, you know, create better standards where we
can all get behind and go, okay, this makes sense, something that we can actually, you know, move
from project to project and kind of, kind of unify under these standards. Because I mean, it was
easy enough for them to unify under master and slave. So it should be easier enough for them to
pick a different set and everybody just kind of get behind and go, okay, this, this is much better
than saying we, we, we are understanding that we're decent people and we're not promoting slavery.
However, making anything a slave just, just, you know, we just want to remain decent here. So
let's just not make anything a slave. Yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I kind of
rambled on a little bit and I hope you got the message I was trying to put across. This is my
first time ever communicating here on a hacker public radio. I look forward to doing a couple more
episodes, hopefully with me being less stuffy and, you know, less air conditioning noise in the
background as well. So I hope you guys enjoy. Take care. Bye-bye.
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