The country of free speech.

Thank you! That's the difference between rhetorical freedom and substantive freedom.

What gets me is how people will look at China's poverty alleviation (800 million people lifted out of destitution, actual material liberation from hunger and desperation) and call that "authoritarianism". Meanwhile, the US lets people die of treatable illnesses, go bankrupt from medical bills, and drown in student debt... and for some reason that's perceived as natural.

And on wealth inequality, you're right. The CPC doesn't let billionaires write policy the way the Kochs, Bezos, or Musk do, which shouldn't be acceptable anywhere in the world.

Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don't trust. And if you're going to run something you don't fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness... also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.

I disagree with the anti-west part. Anti-USA (as government or as an example for ethical governance) then, sure, but with good reasons.

And regarding pro CCP views, it depends on the context actually. You can't just throw everything on a bubble... The thing is that for a LONG time we have been fed by North American or European media the idea that China = Evil and USA/EU = Good, but nowadays, thanks to the expansion of information and people accessibility to other sources (such as the Fediverse), we know that's simply not true at all.

When you see, for example, powerful countries allying to Israel genocidal acts, maintaining civilians under siege for almost 20 years, or just turning their back to it as if they can't see the fucking obvious, you realize these governments are full of shit.

But it's not that people here are anti-west, or that they don't like western people as a whole. In fact, I'm sure most of users here are westerns. We just don't like how big western governments deal with things, and here people can actually talk about it. When you say some of these things on platforms such as Reddit or X, the rigged algorithms will sure punish you.

This, AND the fact that companies usually don't give a flying fuck for developing countries. They want to sell their services for USA and European markets, and then they just make it "available" for the rest of the word with absolutely no regard for the monetary reality of each of these countries. You can't expect people to think it's fair to pay 70 USD on a game, for example, or 15 USD a month on a subscription service, when this translates to 30% of a minimum wage somewhere else.

In my experience, the main cons are overall support from some 3rd party applications. I can't as easily access some software as I can on Windows, such as a digital certificate software that's required for my job, for example, which requires me to have Windows on a VM just to upload some files on a specific system. In this case, Wine/Bottles unfortunately does not work.

And, for gaming, sometimes modding is not as simple as it might be on Windows, requiring some extra tinkering to make things run on a same prefix, which is generally not very intuitive.

But the gap is definitely way narrower nowadays. Running games, without mods, is super easy with Steam or Heroic. And software support is also huge nowadays! Even Nvidia driver support is getting much better - I usually have zero issues running (stock) games on CachyOS with Proton.

My Windows usage nowadays is very minimal. And even then, I don't really support Microsoft anymore... I don't pay for a Win11 license, I don't use Windows Office, I don't use Xbox app, and I definitely don't use OneDrive. And I also cleaned lots of telemetry and other bullshit with WinUtil.

And regarding the pros: Full control over my device (never again locked by the system to access a path even with admin rights, for example) is the big one.

No telemetry, no ads, no one trying to force me to use software I don't want, and ZERO dark patterns. No more having intrusive notifications asking me if I want to use software X when I said I didn't numerous times, while also offering me just "maybe later" as an option. No software being intrusively installed on my system without my consent. No setting options being silently re-enabled without my consent after an update.

And, as a nice extra, Linux distro's are generally way cleaner and lighter than Windows, with much better performance all around, since they're not filled with clutter and a bunch of shady processes running in background.

I despise using Windows nowadays. I don't want to use a product or a service that does not respect me as a consumer.

I have it on my desktop just as a remote server for gaming with Moonlight/Sunshine, and as a VM on my laptop exclusively to digitally sign some documents as I mentioned earlier. Other than that, everything else I do, I do with Linux. I don't miss Windows at all, and that has been the case for some years now.

I'm not banned but I haven't participated much there for a couple of years.

I've heard that Fediverse wasn't much better, but the fact that Lemmy, Piefed, Mastodon and pretty much any other Fediverse platform are open source, and completely ridden of ads, and data collection from giant corporations is already a HUGE difference.

Sure people are just people and you're gonna find toxic communities everywhere, but at least here you don't need to "fear" getting banned because you can choose an instance that has core principles you share, and through them you can access pretty much any community you want, and keep active.

On Reddit, you have no other place to go. You either shut the fuck up and accept their terms, or you, if you get banned, there's nothing you can do about it.

Also, a lot of communities here in Lemmy/Piefed are very active. I don't need to be drowned on an infinity number of posts when most of them are just silly repetitive memes or karma whoring, with zero meaningful discussion.