While I definitely agree that most advertising these days is terrible, I do wonder how it should be done. How would you market a product you made? I genuinely want to know what you find acceptable.

Say that you invent a new type of ladder that is much more stable than normal ones, or maybe you start 3D printing a very cool figurine that you’ve designed. In either case, you realize you have a product that some people will probably want to buy, if only they knew about it.

You probably won’t go to an ad network, I wouldn’t. But do you make a post about it on Lemmy? That’s advertising. Do you tell your friends about it? Most of them probably don’t need a ladder, but maybe a couple would buy your figurine, though that is unlikely to be enough to kickstart your 3D design company.

My guess is that they will work just fine! Most distros will work equally well once set up, but some may require an extra step or two for driver installation. From what I’ve seen, Mint is a good starting point overall and is what I’m recommending to friends right now who are using Linux for the first time :)

You make very well expressed and thought provoking arguments!

And while I can recognise myself in a lot of what you’re saying, I think that us millennials are just now beginning to reach the age (28 to 42 this year, by the definition I follow) where we have some weight to affect that system from the position in it that we grew up in.

Any of us who wants to make our own space: work on a good website, start a coffee shop the way we want it, run a node in a federated social network… I feel it’s not until now that any of us have had the skillset, long-term motivation and economical position to be able to do any of those things seriously. Building a better internet is what we are doing right here and now :)