Well your original comment translates to defending Merz. To answer your follow up question, I don’t know the names of individual politicians in the CDU as I’m still new to German politics and learning as fast as I can. But I have no doubt the CDU has a handful of less ambitious people who could strive to produce some form of centralist policies. Will any of them be good in an absolute sense? No, if Merkel was the best they could do then no. But could someone be relatively better than Merz, who from what I can see would sell his mother down the river for more power and money, yes - most likely.

I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.

Yes, really. My alternative would have been any progressive party and failing that any centralist party, and failing that the CDU with any centralist leader, but all of those failed and now we have Merz. He will damage the working class, exasperate the issues that promote the AFD, and he will normalize them. He is, and the CDU are, Republicans 20 years ago in the US. He will lead to Germany’s Trump and the decline of the standard of living for the common man.

Merz is bad for the working class and for Germany. Every day out of power is a good day for the world.

Right! They got punished by the voters but they haven’t received the social stain that should follow them for a decade. They’ll be back next election and I fear not enough people will remember what they did. That’s not enough punishment for what they did.

Being new to German politics I was shocked how obvious it was that Merz was not someone working for the betterment of Germans but for political power - and he is still successful in his party.

I also don’t understand why the country has fallen into this belief that the squabbling of the last coalition has caused AFD to be successful. I think it’s incredibly clear that the FDP sabotaged the coalition from the start - people should be calling for the removal of the FDP at the federal level for what they did (and thankfully they were punished in this last election). But why we didn’t go back to giving progressives more power and another chance I don’t understand - it was the one conservative party that undermined them. Instead we gave more power to conservatives who are the real cause for the rise of the AFD.

The only cure to the AFD is to shrink wealth I equality and a continued push for pro-worker progressive policies. Improve the trains, improve our green energy, regulate our businesses so they have higher quality bars to reach, protect the workers, tax the ultra wealthy, tax landlords out of existence so a working German can afford their flat or their home, support farmers, hold media accountable for misinformation, and protect us from foreign interference.

We need more actions that Die Linke would endorse and less actions that the CDU would, because fundamentally the CDU are pro-corporation and anti-worker and that’s the heart of the rise of fascism - a decline in living standards brought on by corrupt politicians bleeding the public coffers for the betterment of their corporate friends.

And we just witnessed this, they paid for corporate contracts with debt when they could have paid for it with increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy.

I don’t have a favorite source so any searching will give you various perspectives but here’s one I fully read that seems reasonably objective.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/

Essentially, they praised the Republican platform. Then they took it back and said we won’t share political comments that aren’t neutral. Then they shared some more pro-republican opinions. And then they again said “whoops our bad back to politically neutral comments.”

I personally think political neutrality is a coward’s position and most often used by the supporters of “The Empire” to hide their uniforms and obscure their salutes. I can understand when your company employs X people, it’s a highly public company, and your product is something as detached from politics as possible like - oh idk - a twitch streamer showing videogame footage or something entirely entertainment based. Even then, I still think neutrality is the garden which allows weeds to thrive.

But this is worse than that, this is pro-republican people who got excited their guy won and got vocally bold, got punished, and are now going into hiding. And their company isn’t an entertainment business, it’s one who’s product is intertwined with privacy and the digital/corporate landscape we live in today. Proton wouldn’t be doing as well as they are if a pro-worker party was in power for the last 50 years. They wouldn’t be as profitable if monopolies had been busted sooner and mergers denied. And this is only the tech related focus they’d like you to consider, which isn’t fair. If the KKK are burning crosses in the front lawns of your neighbors and lynching people, it’s a bit tone deaf to talk about how good their sponsored lunches are and it’s evil to walk around the town square praising them for their lawn care. There are more important things they’re responsible for than the things that benefit you. And that’s even if you believe they’re doing any good on this subject which I have not seen. Trump has approved historically massive mergers, republicans have removed people like Lina Khan who was actually doing good, and introduced people who have publicly said they want less scrutiny on business - while deregulating corporations and defanging the agencies responsible for holding corporations accountable.

I haven’t seen, read, or heard any reasonable defense of any of these points and I think more people should be aware. We all make deals with the Empire at times, I’m not here to shame the workers, but if you’re like me who wanted to move their email from Empire to something Rebel than you might as well know that Proton is not the best alternative you could choose.

I’m currently looking at mailbox.org as an alternative.

Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.

But you are, you’re defending the line “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.” That’s your stance. I’m saying Trump got put in office by not one billionaire but by dozens. He was funded by big corporations and his actions show him supporting them. In his first term he gave a massive tax cut to corporations and the rich and he raised taxes on the working class (disguised as a temporary decrease in taxes while he was in office). You’re literally saying wall street was okay with RvW being repealed, an anti-humanist action done by Republicans, as long as they got tax cuts, an anti-worker action done by Republicans. Republicans did two bad things you can recognize that go against your central argument you’re defending “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.”

When the trump administration successfully does something Anti-Trust related and the American people benefit THEN I will say “wow look at that, one good thing they did.” Until then I’m gonna focus on the fact that they’re generally and overwhelmingly NOT doing good things. Including but not limited to pro-corporation anti-humanist anti-worker actions like deregulation, disrupting oversight, allowing massive monopolistic mergers, going against unions (except for police unions it seems) and taxing the working class more while giving slush fund money to their corporate donors. All the while they’re locking up judges and US citizens and immigrants without due process.

I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a bad progressive and I’ll happily join hands with you in making good policy changes but I will call out what I think to be bullshit that hurts the cause because we need to have a united front against the billionaire class and they win by creating wedges and one liners that are plausible and divisive. Like “Republicans are pro-worker and Democrats are for Big business” which is at best reductive and misleading and at worst fucking obviously stupid, wrong, and dangerous.

Just one of the sources detailing some of the billionaires that funded his return: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/08/14/here-are-trumps-top-billionaire-donors/

Privacy focused company praising a political party jailing opposition and citizens without due process, ignoring the rule of law, and generally grabbing power to maintain complete control.

Speaking as someone who currently has a proton account, I was super disappointed. Thought I was leaving Google for the Rebellion, then I found out Proton was happy the Death Star’s construction was underway and doesn’t understand why the dissolution of the Galactic Senate is a bad thing. I’ll be leaving when my subscription expires.

Ya, nah this is some bullshit. You’re actively defending Trump and Republicans even if you’re pretending you don’t like Trump or his policies.

Republicans are definitively not the party for “the little guys”. That’s demonstrably false, Republicans are consistently the party working against progress in most fields but especially worker protections, wealth inequality, and competitive regulated business. I agree Dems have big business backing as well, that they have some corrupt ties going against their constituents interests but the fact remains that applies to nearly all republicans. That only applies to some to most of Democrats. There is no Bernie Sanders in the Republicans, there is no AoC in the Republicans, hell there’s barely anyone of color or who isn’t a male - like Republicans are entirely private sector goons. To equate the Republican and Democrat partys is to fundamentally misunderstand the political climate of the US.

Lina Khan was the FTC chair appointed by Biden and she’s been lauded as a fantastic agent for Anti-Trust and consumer protection reasons. Andrew Ferguson was appointed by Trump and although his track record doesn’t seem to be the worst he’s said he wants to ease scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions (so the opposite of Anti-Trust) while “continuing critical oversight over big tech”. To me this is a clear demonstration that Republicans are in bed with big corporations and Democrats were working with what tools they had to break up big businesses. To me, this should be an obvious concept to anyone who says they pay attention to the political happenings of the US.

Big tech paid into Trump’s campaign, famously, and there has been no indication that the billionaires behind Trump’s reelection are doing worse off for themselves. The US is now further away from having laws similar to the EU’s consumer protection laws and it is directly thanks to Republicans being corrupt. Are some Democrats corrupt in the same way? yes. Do I think voting Democrat will fix the country? No. But I’d argue day and night that if Democrats won every race in the country, worker wages would go up, standard of living would go up, crime would go down, wealth inequality would slow down or shrink, and the country would be in a better place because unlike the obstructionist Republicans enough Democrats care about their constituents that positive change would happen.

I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.

Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!

I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.

I think in the US we’ve seen a small rise in characters like Bernie pulling in new blood along the same ideological lines like AOC which didn’t feel present 20 years ago. I also think Obama’s tenure was sold to the public as a period of progress and change and I think in all actuality whatever good it did it wasn’t enough to steer the boat. To me that was the sign that the US was likely too far gone from a political standpoint to recover. BUT if there is a chance, I think the past 25 years have been a clear enough signal to me that things must drastically change for things to get meaningfully better. Trump is the dark side of that “drastic change” coin and we’ve yet to see what the good side looks like but I would argue the US is running out of time to figure out which side of the coin is going to come up the winner.

Britain is seeing a minor rise in Wealth Inequality awareness. I think that knowledge could be the exact anti-bodies the world needs distributed to reverse this course. In Europe wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, etc are higher than in the US but still not enough. Unions are also more prevalent, at least in Germany. I like to compare it by saying both the US and Germany are on the same graph of declining living standards and for the exact same reason, Germany is just a decade or two behind the US. We still have a lot of power in the hands of the people, but it seems to me that the media is still able to whip up 30-40% of the population into being conservative despite their best interests and something like another 30% being too moderate to make a difference.

Right now we have a conservative government, things will only get worse while they’re in power, but if the wealth disparity conversation continues anywhere in the world and billionaires are removed from the population, the entire world benefits. If the next progressive government enacts a tax plan like Die Linke’s or takes step to removing land lords from existence or provides a UBI I think the results will speak for themselves rather quickly.

It’s a big pendulum, right now in Germany and the US it’s swung to the right (yours further than ours) but it all comes down to how effective the left swing can be. Take hold of all the power you can at the local level, form a union, conquer the state level offices, and educate people. That’s the best advice I can give.

It buys us time to elect a party capable of making good changes. As long as a conservative or centralist government is in power I would agree with you that the root causes will not change, in fact with Friedrich Merz and the grand coalition things will get worse faster. But if we can buy the population some time not going fully into fascism we can hopefully point to the decline into fascism brought on by the CDU/SPD/FDP and elect politicians that actually care to serve Germans.

I think it’s important to treat the rise of fascism, the growing wealth inequality, the new wave of media, as a flu we have to fight but also get through. We need to build up anti-bodies against these things. That means taxing wealth, strengthening unions, breaking up monopolies, etc.

I apologize, I think we’re getting tripped up on terminology.

Where ever you live, you are correct in believing you should strive to make that a home. Make a community, make a place of comfort and security and artistic energy etc. But that’s not what I mean.

Owning your place allows you the freedom to make your home better in a way that renting it doesn’t. How many people with they could add AC to their flat but can’t because the landlord doesn’t want them to? How many people wish they could add solar panels to their roof but can’t because the landlord doesn’t pay the electricity bill and therefore doesn’t care if it’s inefficient? How many people want to renovate a bathroom, tear down a wall, install permanent fixtures or shelves, etc etc but can’t because they don’t have permission or the rights to the place they live in?

The relationship between landlord and renter is one whose major purpose is to drain money from the poor to the wealthy. I don’t really wanna turn this into a rant against landlords, but they should be outlawed or taxed out of existence. Landlords are deincentivized to improve their properties, they are deincentivized to help you make your house a home, they are deincentivized to charge you the cost of that housing. The system should be abolished.

Going back to your ancedote, relativity is not a good measurement of objective truth. The fact that most people didn’t own their homes where you grew up doesn’t change the fact that that meant they were losing money every year, that they weren’t building wealth every year. Things should be improved based on and towards objective truths/metrics - not comparatively to bad examples. The US has worse public transit - does that means we shouldn’t strive for better train networks and services? It’s illegal to be a homosexual in Singapore - does that mean we should allowed gay rights to worsen simply because they’ll still have it better than other countries?

I make this point because this argument of relativity often hinders progress. Humans are creatures of relativity and if we allow our systems to be judged relative to others we will make progress slower than is possible (and arguably necessary).

You should be able to own a home. You should be able to own a home within the first 5 years of working at least and it shouldn’t cost you a loan that’ll last a lifetime. Housing shouldn’t be an ever growing cost. We can make this the reality if we vote correctly and hold our politicians accountable (and our neighbors).

If the CDU/SPD/AFD remain in power there will be plenty of countries that are at a similar quality of life and that are improving or worsening at a slower rate. Some country will eventually crack the code of taxing the wealthy and banning landlords and focusing on the working class (the 99%). It’s only a matter of time. The goal is just to avoid needing a WW to get us there.

I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.

Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.

Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.

Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.

I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.

Thanks for this, I found it very helpful! I’m gonna go look into flatpak and see if I have some applications that would be better served by that system.

I’d probably agree in general but I’m a software engineer and my friends that would be moving over are software engineers and so I’m less worried. I wanted to take this opportunity to learn more about OS’es and get more familiarized with each part of the process and Arch has made that super easy as it obfuscated so little. I still used some cheat scripts to get up and running like arch_install I think but it’s been generally nice.

I am on the Konsole Debugging random issues far more than I’d like but right now it’s a hobby I’m partially choosing to spend time on - I think things would function just fine if I ignored them for a bit. Still, all things to consider and improve on - which is why I’m asking about package managers.

Hey everyone, I would love some guidance here.

I’m new to Linux, I’m using Arch Linux and pacman currently. Would it be better to get more acquainted with flatpacks? If I wanted to swap to flatpacks would I just start using it? Would I need to transfer currently installed applications from pacman to flatpack?

Would it be wiser to move to Nix? I love the concept of atomic updates, that’s the main functionality I’m interested in getting - I like my system cutting edge but stable. But I’m fully uneducated on how applications get used by the common man. Like in Windows if I find a small application like Hex Kit I find its .exe and install it. In Linux I download their version online and I get .bin’s and .pak’s and .so and .dat and I have no idea how to get the bastard working. Same with like a Godot export to Linux, I get a .so or a .pck.

Any advise or educational sources are much appreciated. I’m learning as fast as I can but I’m drinking from a firehouse right now lol. I’m also building a doc to help my friends jump over so if I’d be better served using something other than pacman I want to know so I can update the doc before handing it to them.