I wish to end all wars

/turns into the letter s.

They're at different angles.

Probably best not to go wishing for the motivated and smart kind. This is bad, that would be worse.

Yes, your Highness. Will you be needing any further artifacts aquired for safe keeping and preservation?

University is about a lot more than the piece of paper you get at the end. If it's of any real quality, and you are actually engaged with it, you'll be learning from experts in your chosen field, amongst engaged and eager peers, whilst also being exposed to different viewpoints on everything from what to have for lunch through the latest innovations in your field, and adjacent ones, to the geopolitical state of the world. The people you meet, and the connections you form can, and often do, form the bedrock of your working life from then on.

All of that does make the assumption that you actively engage with university life and those around you. Make friends in different subjects, seek out your professors during office hours and talk to them about their interests, join clubs, do stupid, but ultimately harmless things.

It also assumes you are attending a 'good' university, rather than a profit driven degree mill, and those might be harder to find in some places than others.

That would explain the slightly dazed look...

The critical bit is now maintaining that level of engagement. People keep missing that bit from the original commentary. It said that no protest with 3.5% of the population consistently engaged had failed. A one off event will do very little, constant presure will yield results.

The thing with the 3.5% that most people keep missing, is that it needs to be 3.5% of the population consistently engaged in protest, not just in a one off event.

If you are just a user, in that a computer is just a tool you use, then you're right, there's comparatively little reason to be concerened or even know about the underlying details of the system. If you go further and start making changes to your system, or even building more complex systems, over time you will find yourself forming quite firm opinions about various parts of the underlying system, especially if you've had experience with other options.

Honestly, I'm not sure, I was looking at Devuan, but then noticed that Debian supported sysvinit natively so I went that route instead. I figure that sticking to the source distro was going to give me fewer headaches, and so far it's been plain sailing.

Debian, installed without systemd as per the wiki. So far I've not hit any issues, whilst I've recently ended up diving through both kernel and systemd code to find the root cause of an issue I was hitting on one server. I could have just bodged past it, but I wanted to actually understand what the issue was, and what else it was going to affect.

Maxim 29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.

That doesn't mean you can't work with them, or that their actions can't be useful, but be careful, and be aware they are not necessarily an ally.