"They would probably not want me to tell you that you can change your settings so that Facebook and Instagram cannot profit as much from your data anymore,” Oliver said, before directing viewers to a guide set up in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to prevent Meta from tracking you. “If you’d be interested in a step-by-step guide on how to do that, simply visit johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com.”

The article mentions how basic programs are missing. They acknowledge the existence of FOSS alternatives, e.g. GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements, but complain about it being too difficult or that some alternatives are simply not to be found via Mint’s “Software Manager”.

Which is not news and probably one of the reasons why desktop Linux-based distros have still not become mainstream. There’s just a lack of all that “user-friendlyness” less tech-oriented people need.

These things can be changed, although there is an economic barrier. FOSS projects are great and we see how many of them took off. However, if the main portion of users are not on Linux, but on Windoofs, then it doesn’t make much sense to invest time and money into developing and maintaining software for Linux while having commercial interests.
The sad reality is that Microsoft has gained that market dominance. You won’t get end-user oriented software companies on board with Linux as long as the user-share is so comparably low. This is a self-reinforcing cycle.

Windoofs meets UX needs and there is a lot of software people need -> most people use Windoofs -> companies develop and distribute for Windoofs -> people keep using Windoofs, etc…

To break out of that, people need convincing alternatives. Not just for Linux alone, but especially for the software running on it.

Which is hard to achieve, given how a plethora of Linux projects have to survive on donations alone and too few companies take the leap.

There is a silver lining though. With the Steam Deck and Proton, Valve really got a lot more people on board with Linux. I can only hope, that this trend continues.

But at the moment I fear that this will be short lived, especially with Microsofts “handheld Xbox” on the horizon.

So let’s see, how this unfolds. The EOL of Windows 10 is really a strong incentive to switch to Linux. For my part, I will go for the full switch, since I’ve used Windoofs mainly for gaming anyway and am using Linux systems daily for my job. But then again, I am an engineering scientist and I can’t picture, e.g., my parents being satisfied with a Linux distro.

I hope they feel welcomed here to stick around. I’ve quit Reddirt in 2023 during the API exodus, came to Lemmy and never looked back.

“Humanity has been striving to increase food production to feed an ever-growing population [but] these ongoing efforts are now being jeopardised by plastic pollution,” said the researchers, led by Prof Huan Zhong, at Nanjing University in China.

Meanwhile:

In 2022, the world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food. This amounts to one fifth (19 per cent) of food available to consumers being wasted, at the retail, food service, and household level. That is in addition to the 13 per cent of the world’s food lost in the supply chain, as estimated by FAO, from post-harvest up to and excluding retail.
• […] Out of the total food wasted in 2022, households were responsible for 631 million tonnes equivalent to 60 percent, the food service sector for 290 and the retail sector for 131.
• Reducing food waste provides compounding benefits: Food loss and waste generates 8-10 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – almost five times the total emissions from the aviation sector. It occurs while 783 million people are hungry and a third of humanity faces food insecurity.

Source: UN Environment Programme – Food Waste Index Report 2024 (Key Messages)