this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 days ago (6 children)

That's not true anymore, there's distros like Alpine which are not built using gnu tools.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago

"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux." The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long." With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

If memory serves, Alpine is not entirely free of GNU software. Checking their own website, they use GCC and GNU Make:

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages

But even when/if Alpine (or anyone else) creates a distro entirely free of GNU software, the vast majority of mainstream distributions would still fall under the "GNU/Linux" umbrella when the typical user is discussing Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Was Alpine built specifically to be able to tune out Richard Stallman?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Apline is Linux/Busyibox or smth like that. However, that does not make 99% of distros not GNU/Linux.

Saying that the whole Debian, RHEL, SUSE and Arch realm (ie. stuff like Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Opensuse, EndeavourOS, Manjaro etc) and countless other distros are not GNU/Linux would be as, if not more, disingenuous as calling Alpine "GNU/Linux"

Also Alpine is not only dwarfed in terms of quantity of GNU/Linux distros, but also in amount of users/instances; both desktop- and server-side

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (3 children)

dot world users don’t get to talk about instances lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

lol. lmao, even

[–] dubyakay 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

wow, the KDE Advanced Text Editor in person!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

i use vscode sry

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

And Chimera Linux (not to be confused with ChimeraOS, the GNUish gaming distro).

Ironically, Stallman himself is probably a prime motivation for Alpine and Chimera Linux, in a sort of "I'm sick of hearing this crap" way. Although it does say something about GNU that Alpine was also shooting for a distribution with as little bloat as possible, and it largely succeeded. For a long time, it was one of the most lightweight distributions around, leading to its popularity as a container base.