He's got a point on the whole stable base but wanting some up-to-date apps. The experience with Debian's backports repo is pretty good, I always check that first in this situation. But there's only some stuff in there, so you have to do a bunch manual compiling or whatever otherwise.
I guess flatpaks are supposed to also fix this, but there's a ton of bullshit with this. First of all, flatpak downloads one or more mega base packages, basically a full on distro, when I've already got a perfectly good stable distro here.
Then I've had a bunch integration bugs, and you always have to make an alias or script so you can actually run the thing.
Supposed sandboxing benefits are complete vaporware and by my reckoning Linux desktop app sandboxing will kinda work by 2035. Maybe.
But the biggest problem: I don't trust upstream developers not to be dipshits. Will they actually update their deps when there's a security issue with one of them? Are they going to push unstable bleeding edge crap on me with no testing? Try to spring user-hostile anti-features on me?
The Debian package maintainers (and that whole process, really) are like a shield that protects me from this sort of shit. Sidelining them is going to have lots of annoying consequences.
Federated Ebay.
Anything riscv.
Middleware, tools for games and contribution to existing FOSS games and engines.
And there are probably a ton of little things out there... (specifically to make Linux and FOSS more competitive with proprietary brands in every day usage and specific niches.)
I think it's good to ask comrades these questions who may not have time or expertise on their own.
It’s fucking relieving that’s for sure. Too many techbros who seemed to do something because it was awesome and good end up fucking rugpulling and are suddenly like “now that it’s become essential/you’re addicted, it costs way more money and I’m selling it to this giant corporation to exploit all that free labor you did; also they’re grooming our kids and I love Hitler now”. The enshittification of entrepreneurship.
Torvalds being a real one though, that made my day a lot brighter. Go off, king!
With China embracing Linux, we'll likely see Linux pass Windows and MacOS at the most used OS in the world within a decade. China alone has a comparable population to the west, and then there are all the countries where China will be exporting their tech to around the world. Truly an exciting time to be alive where we might see Linux running on RISC-V based open hardware as the global computing standard!
I legit put a defense of it on a communist youth pamphlet we targeted toward the Compsci center. All countries that want any tech sovereignty should build FOSS stat
Yesterday I was writing a git commit message. I have my terminal configured to use vim to do this. I wrote half of a lengthy explanation with a very long chain of thought and paused for a second to proofread. Then I turned around and accidentally mashed a button which pasted my clipboard all over my nice message. I was like fuck I'll just undo, but I guess I hit more than one key because after hitting undo i was left with a blank message.
I thought I had to start writing from scratch and then remembered that vim has time travel. I'm not joking. You just say :earlier 2m and it goes back to the state two minutes ago. But here's the thing it actually has branched history, kind of like git. If you undo and then make some modifications you have made an alternate branch in the history. I hit g- (or g+ I forget) and got my message back.
Having flipping time travel with every possible history is an absolutely batshit insane thing to implement into a "simple" editor, and I seldom use this feature, but it actually saved my ass and I'm glad people like Bram spent what was probably an eternity on implementing stuff like that.
richard stallman may disingenously call the copyleft licensing as "idealist pragmatism" but it has nothing of idealism. It is a materialistic approach through and through, they studied the current intellectual property laws and designed the copyleft license to use intellectual property laws for their goals!
open source =/= free software, richard stallman extensively wrote about this. i think you may be confusing open source with free software.
I find that the classic "copyright wars", de Raadt vs Stallman/ BSD vs GPL arguments about freedom are really analogous to idealism vs materialism.
"Ours is the most Free", the idealists preach. "You can take our stuff and close it and sell it if you like! Yours carries authoritarian restrictions!".
And this is true, but those restrictions insist on the spread of freedom, in that you're forced to grant others the same freedom you enjoyed.
Look at how Microsoft took a lot of BSD code and profited from it, giving nothing back. Where is BSD now and where's GNU/Linux?
Often we just need to accept the paradox that sometimes freedom must be imposed and that maximalist, idealist freedom includes the freedom to exploit others and limit the fruits of their "freedom".
This is 100% correct, and why no one should be using "permissive" / soft / weak copyleft licenses. All they do is permit corporations to take your work, extend it and then close it off, under liberal notions of freedom.
Ironically, a lot of corporations who began by extolling the virtues of "open source" are now changing over to source-available restricted licences. At this point, licenses like MIT seem to exist only for the small developers who hope to use their open source projects as a vehicle to jump onto the payroll of established companies.
GPL and similar licenses which enshrine these four freedoms are legally actionable. You could argue how actively a bourgeois law apparatus respects them is dubious. But I don't know what you mean by idealistic here. Are you saying that the four freedoms do not guarantee freedom in reality?
This is similar to Marx's critique of freedom under liberalism as merely 'formal'. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.
This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn't unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase 'equality of opportunity', for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I'd say this a problem that has shaped liberal 'privilege' discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.
Like in other cases, I'd say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it's better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it's easy to conceive of them too 'thinly'. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.
To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the 'open-source' perspective.
If you want something solid you can depend on, especially when you forget to update and don't really need the newest features, Debian will carry that need. I love that distro and it's good to have installed as a backup tool even if you don't think it's a good main choice for you.
Linux for Leftists
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