I’ve seen it off and on in random Lemmy and Reddit talks, along with some of the usual “best xyz” article search results, that you take with a grain of salt. Though in these days where even Lemmy has its boting I take dang near everything with a bit of salt. Lucky me that I’m a bit of a salt fiend.

Emphasis on it being conversations for true blue noobs haven’t dabbled and may not be very technical. To your point Mint and Ubuntu are right there next to it. By way of comparison I actually use Cachy and it’s not “hard” but I would not give it to my parents.

Manipulating people. Pushing value and rhetoric “as a fellow American” when you’re a bot in Russia.

Ok, that explains the references. What’s up with the downvoting? I see the Nordic/Islandic connection, is artificial use of the character some kind of white supremacists viking dog whistle or something?

Makes sense for the reference s, thanks, what’s the subtext leading to the downvotes?

They actually come up relatively often in the true newby conversations. They put a big emphasis on making the OS feel like Windows by default to make people more comfortable as they look at switching.

Clearly something’s going on here, but I’m uninformed, would you mind doing an ELI5? I figure it all ties to the weird characters they used.