Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
I love that Linux is everything that Microsoft is not. I love that I have full control of my hardware. I have control over processes. I have control over packages. And user control is the default.
I can already join a Linux PC to a domain and run VPN. I can easily transfer files. I’m good.
Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
That’s a good point. I feel like there would be a lot of suspicion or skepticism behind it
Technically speaking, OpenRC doesn’t really have any benefits in the real world, some people may claim faster boot times, but that’s debatable on modern hardware. In fact objectively, it’s inferior to systemd in many ways.
The real advantage though is that it’s pretty simple and easy to use, understand and maintain. It follows the Unix philosophy of “do one thing, and do it right”. People who like to have full understanding and fine control over their systems would prefer using OpenRC or similar init systems (with a mix-and-match of other utilities and daemons as per their need), instead of relying on a giant monolothic package like systemd which keeps getting bloated with more and more “unnecessary” features with each release.
Basically, you can say that it’s a difference of ideology.
Systemd is not monolithical, it just happens that it’s made of elements optimized to work well together, instead of running everything through different text parsers when “mixing and matching” random daemons.
I tried PopOS finally after many glowing reviews… and it was beautiful, snappy and had lots of unique features. But while it was very friendly, I had trouble finding my way around. I think still aimed at linux users who are a little more knowledgable. (Not me.)
I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.
Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
There are some opinions mascaraing as fact here and some not very evidence driven at that.
Linux is a beneficiary of great timing. The pre-cursor to FreeBSD, BSD 386, already existed and was much more mature when Linux appeared. The reason that Linux became popular was primarily that AT&T launched a lawsuit against BSD which made its legal status questionable during a critical few years. This was at the dawn of the Internet and the distribution and collaboration that enabled. By the time the lawsuit was resolved, Linux was massively more popular and BSD was left behind. Ironically, early Linux never faced early legal trouble as it was not taken seriously by UNIX players. The Linux lawsuits came later but, by then, Linux had major corporate backers ( see SCO vs IBM with IBM being the on the Linux side ).
Hell, Linus himself has said that he would never even have created Linux is Minix had been free ( meaning explicitly free as in beer, not as in freedom at the time ). In fact, Linus did not want to adopt the GPL at first because it allowed charging for the software.
One reason that Linux was able to advance so quickly ( or exist at all ) was the existence of GNU and especially GCC. I hate the amount of credit GNU tries to take for moderns Linux distros but there is no denying its importance in making Linux viable early on.
Today, Linux succeeds over BSD primarily because of the greater corporate interest. Apple does not really use the BSD kernel either.
These days, the most popular license used in typical Linux installs is MIT and permissively licensed software is more common than GPL. Some MIT communities, like the X Window Project, are decades old and represent strong trends away from corporate dominance and exploration over time. The vibrancy of all the Open Source communities cannot be explained in terms of the world-view expressed in the comment above. I do not have the numbers in front of me to support this but it is my own impression that permissively licensed software generally succeeds more often at creating sustainable communities. Or maybe it is just the FSF. While there are many successful GPL programs, fewer than 500 of them are GNU and there are almost as many abandoned GNU projects as there are active ones.
In my view, the most important GNU program by far is GCC. That evil Apple company you cite created LLVM / Clang and licensed it permissively. They did by far the most work on it and yet have it away. Today, other evil companies like Microsoft contribute to Clang / LLVM as well. LLVM is of course the basis for the Rust language, another corporate contribution. The lack of GPL here does not seem to have prevented any of this innovation, the massive contributions to the community, or collaboration between these giant corporate interests. This is just one example.
I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn’t even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it’s not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I’ve used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.
I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don’t know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn’t game.
SourceMage! It’s a source based distro like Gentoo. I’ve been using it as my main distro for a solid 10 months now, I’m very happy with it! We have flatpak so steam works great, as well as lutris and everything else. Definitely wouldn’t recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!
Honestly, the times aren’t too bad as long as you have a recent CPU! It definitely varies though - on my main PC, compiling glibc takes about 15 minutes, on my netbook that I had a smgl install on, it took about 20 hours lol
When it comes to gaming, I can’t really say I’ve found a distro that “felt” better for gaming, and I’ve been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven’t noticed a difference. I didn’t measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.
Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there’s a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.
I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I’ve heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven’t done any benchmarks so I can’t confirm nor deny this.
These days Ubuntu can install the nvidia drivers for you during the install as well if you just click the “install proprietary blabla” so you get a pretty game ready system there as well tbh so I’m starting to feel like a more gaming tweaked version of Ubuntu is a bit redundant?
Grr Lemmy just ate my comment, I guess I have a chance to refine my response a bit now!
Ah, thank you - it’s been a while since I used Ubuntu on my main system (Ubuntu was my foray into Linux back in the Hardy Heron days!) but now that you mention it, I do remember seeing that option when I briefly had Ubuntu installed on my old MacBook (which I then moved to Fedora to play around with before using it on my main PC). Having that option was quite nice for the broadcom wireless drivers that those Macs need for WiFi.
That’s a surprisingly pleasing font by the way!
Thanks! I came across it a couple of years ago, and I joked about it at first but it grew on me over time so I purchased (it is a paid font but there is a very similar one called Comic Mono) the font and have been using it in my IDEs and terminals since then! I wouldn’t use it everywhere of course, but for a monospace environment its really good and I can’t quite put my finger on the “why”.
Funnily enough, I’ve tried to use Comic Code on both Windows and macOS as well and there is something about the FreeType system on Linux that makes the font really excel for me. On Windows the font feels too “thin” and on macOS the font feels too “thick”. 10 years ago if you had tried to tell me that I’d enjoy the way fonts look on Linux better than the other two major platforms I would’ve fell to the floor laughing for a few minutes - I imagine its due to a combination of improvements over FreeType and displays over the years, along with me actually branching out and not just sticking with the default font that happens to be picked for me by whatever I’m using 😅
I stumbled upon Comic Mono myself a while ago and have been meaning to set it up in my IDE’s but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Might just have to though. It looks strangely easy on the eyes. Almoat relaxing somehow? Cant really putn my finger on why however.
I can agree with the fact that fonts feel different depending on your OS. I usually use Source Code Pro and I never got the feeling that it looked quite as good when I went from Linux to Windows after getting a new job.
I installed Kubuntu… I couldn’t be assed to resize my efi partition to a gig and disrupt windows… Done that in the past with varying results. Wish they didn’t require it to be that big tbh.
I do miss Arch… wouldn’t surprise me if I’ll install it again soon.
Kubuntu works. But where’s the fun in that? :)
It’s like… I installed it, messed with lutris a bit (needed a newer version) and installed Diablo 4, everything works… and now I feel like I’m missing out somehow. :)
You’re missing out on chasing the dragon for the latest and greatest. :)
Arch is fine once you get it setup, but I feel like the nerd in us can never just leave it be. I’ll probably go back to pop_os next major release they have.
Make sure you’re running the sdl environment variable that makes them native on Wayland, in my experience when that’s on it makes my games that are native significantly more performant.
I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you’ll get 12 different answers
I ended up installing Kubuntu 20.04 for now… I was going to install Pop but they require a 1GB EFI partition and I didn’t have the patience to move my Windows partition around to resize it so… Kubuntu it is.
Knowing myself I’ll probably distro hop in a few days again.
Trying out different distros are almost as much fun as actually using them (probably more fun at times!)
If I were doing it on some spare PC maybe I’d find it fun too but I rely too much on my main workstation to just constantly reinstall stuff on it, and dual booting looks like a risk/hassle too. I am prepared for the inevitable day I take the plunge into linux for good, hopefully the number of distros doesn’t triple by then ^^
It definitely feels like they have in the past decade. When I last used Linux everyone would just dump Ubuntu on you, give you a nice pat on the head and wish you good luck. PopOS got big at one point but I think there were some issues when LTT tried it that gave it a bad rep. I haven’t even heard of 90% of distros in this thread.
I think your next task is to start modding Skyrim so you can have the ultimate experience of spending more time setting something up only to spend a fraction of that time actually using it. XD
That or setting up a retro gaming sysgem… gathering and scraping roms, setting up a nice frontend with cover art and everything just to never touch it again when it’s done. :)
I’ve been using Garuda as well. It’s solid, and I like the fact they have a gaming variant that takes a lot of the nitpick presetup out of the picture.
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