That’s what I’m learning these days… balance. On one hand, there’s the over-arching need to make ethical choices when it comes to software, even in the world of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), since some of the best and best-known FOSS companies are extreme left wingnuts. Mozilla has branded itself “a global crew of activists” and spent a million dollars on a fancy retreat in Zambia to host a workshop on “Feminist, Decolonial, LGBTQIA+, Climate Justice using Al” event. Woke, far-flung-leftist crap. Also a Mozilla partner, the folks who make the Thunderbird e-mail client fired their very first employee, who ascended to one of the most important contributors of the project – because he refused to participate in “woke” bullshit. He went on to create Betterbird, a really nice fork of Thunderbird! Mozilla’s former CEO met a similar fate – fired for not going along with far-left, anti-family, anti-God, anti-wholesomeness stuff – went on to create the wonderful Brave browser. I want to support these guys!

Even Linux itself has gone woke. In the interest of “ethical purity,” I went to GhostBSD: No Linux, no Mozilla, no Google, no Microsoft. Oh, and no systemd (IBM/RedHat). Yay for ethical purity!

But on the other hand:

Software has to work. And without complex, resource-draining excesses to make it work on my hardware. I wasn’t able to get Betterbird on GhostBSD, so I settled for Evolution. To get Brave browser to work on GhostBSD, you have to install all kindsa “Linux stuff” that “makes” it work on BSD. So I settled for ungoogled-chromium. For as long as I could.

I remember for years being warned about updates breaking things on Linux. It’s true, updates can break things, but in all the years I used Linux, it actually happened only twice. On GhostBSD, an update broke Evolution and I settled for Geary, which in some respects is nicer because it’s so very simple yet full-featured. The very next update kinda sorta “fixed” Evolution, but broke a bunch of other stuff and made the OS sluggish. Very few of the nice “gooey” (GUI – Graphical User Interface) tools I always enjoyed in Linux are available for the BSDs. And the ones that are there are decades behind Linux when it comes to function, versatility, and ease of use.

A balance between “ethical purity” and practicality is what I need.

So far, the best I’ve come up with is MX-Linux (because I insist on having a full desktop environment), with Betterbird and Brave replacing the defaults, Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla). While my “ethical purity” side isn’t entirely happy about using Linux instead of GhostBSD, it’s happy that I can support the two guys that Mozilla kicked out for refusing to embrace evil. And my practical side? It’s delighted.