Hopeless yuri addict.
I subscribe to the philosophy that information should be free, and that computing should be a collaborative effort, driven by community. The world is better when we all work together to improve it.
These days, I’m less gung-ho about the technical merits of free software; I just prefer using systems that feel like they’re trying to work for me rather than exploit me.
Haven’t those issues been found in pre-release software that’s months out from being pushed to the general public?
Permissive licenses also allow corporations to build off of open source software without giving anything back to public. I don’t see why they’re entitled to profit off the free labor of a community they don’t contribute back to.
Been a while since I used it, but I thought XBPS was pretty neat. I contributed a couple packages to the repos, and the recipe system did most of the lifting for me.
Yeah, the only real issue I have with the “rewrite it in Rust” approach is the absolute plague of permissive licensing. It is much easier to write safe, correct code in Rust.
So, this isn’t really an answer to your post, but I felt it important to bring this up. I’ve bought a lot of games on GOG and don’t plan to be giving them any more money in the future. Just wanted to give you a heads up.
I actually like the assurance of immutability. The main downside is that there’s just less documentation on how to do things, since it’s a very non-standard configuration for a distro.
It’s also annoying having to reboot every time I layer a new package into the system image, but I try to avoid that as much as possible and haven’t had to do it recently.
Adjusting to Flatpaks has also presented some challenges. In theory, I really like what Flatpaks offer in terms of app-level isolation, but some things are still rough around the edges. I’ve encountered at least one app that didn’t obey the system’s dark mode theming… Also, they still haven’t quite figured out a good way to handle GPU drivers, so you can run into compatibility issues between the usage driver in the runtime and the kernel driver in the system image.
In my case, I’ve just had to update and restart the application when this happens, but it might cause problems if you try to roll back the OS image after already updating all your runtimes (resulting in a newer userspace driver trying to talk to an outdated kernel driver).
Yeah, I’ve got a couple extensions as well. I tried out Bazzite and liked some of the changes they made, but wanted something closer to stock Gnome. Ended up just installing Silverblue and adding a few of those extensions back, to taste.
Gnome
I’ve used Ubuntu, Arch, and Void in the past. Ended up settling on Fedora Silverblue for the time being.
Modern PCs can trace their lineage all the way back to the IBM PC Compatibles. Multiple vendors across the industry consolidated on a set of standards (because IBM basically had a monopoly at one point), and consumers came to expect that these standards would be followed.
When smartphones came on the scene, there was no expectation for them to follow desktop standards. It was the Wild West, and every manufacturer ended up doing things at least a little differently—much like the early PC market, actually. The customer base was the general public, not the hobbyists and tinkerers who bought into the early PC market, and there was no regulatory pressure to adopt open standards. In addition, I don’t think people anticipated the extent to which phones would become the dominant form of computing for much of the globe.
Honestly, in terms of the actual system architecture, I prefer NT’s object-based approach to the the file-based design that Linux (and other Unix systems) use.
The best part of Linux is the license. The OS can definitely be rough around the edges and have some maddening problems. But it still feels like something that is built and maintained by actual users rather than by a corporation that’s slowly trying to milk you for all you’re worth.
This is just masturbation.
A secure OS should account for dumb/malicious users and mitigate the damage they can do. If a user can be convinced to disable protections on Windows or Android, that same user could easily be convinced to download a script and run it with sudo.
I’ve had a hot take for a while now that Linux isn’t “more secure” than other operating systems like a lot of evangelists will claim. I think people get this impression because the user base for desktop Linux has been small enough that no one was writing malware targeted at us.
Unix’s security model was developed in a world where the primary concern was protecting the system from users and protecting users from each other. It wasn’t really designed for single-user systems where the main concern is protecting the user from their own applications.
I have a dual boot set up, and even I find it annoying to reboot into a different OS just to play an unsupported game. Especially since I use Windows so rarely now that the first thing it wants to do is install a dozen updates.
So that’s why Fedora is complaining about running out of space on /boot/efi!
Biggest benefit to Fedora over Ubuntu would be more up-to-date packages. Debian-based distros tend to run much older versions of everything. Fedora brings you closer to upstream releases.