@bumbar A lot of it is just down to personal preference. The Gnome 3 desktop used to be regarded as heavyweight, but I know that a lot of work has gone into it in the last few years so it's probably more optimized now.
@bumbar I think it's possible to install GNU/Linux onto old macbooks, since I'm pretty confident that a couple of people at my previous company were doing that. There are also some desktops which are intended to resemble a mac.
@bumbar For me the year of the Linux laptop was 2006, so it doesn't surprise me that you can make old hardware usable again by installing GNU/Linux. Currently I'm reinstalling Debian 9 with MATE desktop onto a 7 year old netbook, and I expect the performance will still be quite good.
@lnxw48a1 @gargron The challenge for fediverse growth is really more about sustainable admining. So anything which makes the job of the instance admin simpler will help, including things like having a recommended way to cover any hosting costs.
the good news is that most of what we need already exists. alternative routing protocols, alternative DNS implementations, p2p protocols and userland software built on it. we are awash in alternative networking infrastructure and there are massive implementations in use today like freifunk that not only provide working software but which also organize the labor to maintain these alternatives. we can do this! we are doing it already.
@cocoron (b) usually happens first. Because of the information loss involved in commodification you can also think of it as an entropy generator. Financial industries create situations of information loss in order to then exploit them, and in the world system if enough information is lost through commodity relations then world war becomes likely.
Note that this is the opposite of the neoliberal view of trade bringing stability.