Ironically a Linux-derived OS.

Nothing ironic about it. There’s nothing mystical about Linux, it’s just a kernel. The guy who made it says he doesn’t care about anything but code.

Personally, I only care about the code. When I say maybe there are people who worry about walled gardens and cloud providers who take ownership of your data, I am not one of those people. That’s not what I actually care about. That’s not what I do. What I do is code. What I care about is code.

Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

To be clear, it used to be fully free software, then became proprietary for a little while, and then as of 17 June 2024 it became free again. So the most recent release 11.15.0 (from two days ago) is fully free, but the previous one isn’t.

“Privacy centric” is irrelevant because because this is the free software movement, not the privacy movement (also, this is not reddit, we have a higher standard of conduct here).

Further reading on free software philosophy. Most relevant is why software should not have owners (1994) as this is fundamentally where FUTO disagrees with the open source/free software movement.

I also made a prior comment here about the fundamental difference between “fauxpen source” licenses like FUTO’s and real FOSS licenses. You seem to characterize it as “stealing code and profiting off it” but the strength of free software is in collaboration and community, not so much competition, so sharing is considered a virtue here. I talked more about it here in a reddit comment referencing my previous lemmy comment.

This will probably be my last comment on FUTO/Grayjay in this thread, since I’ve said all I intend to say several times here and on reddit. I might make a master post about the problems of fauxpen source at some point.

I don’t have any opinion on grayjay but this is the open source community and grayjay is proprietary. That’s the only reason I downvoted your comment

Feel free to use it if it works for you but I think it’s poor form to advertise proprietary products in a thread about a free software project.

My guess (and it’s only a guess, I haven’t looked at the source code) is that the scraping is being done on a server end that they can update without having to push an app update.

edit: my guess was wrong, I found where the source code is and they do the parsing locally - however it’s a plugin that I assume gets loaded in on app start so they can still update it without having to publish a new apk. this is the fix

interestingly although Grayjay itself is proprietary this plugin is Affero GPL licensed.

Vivaldi’s target audience is people who don’t mind proprietary blobs as long as they are “good” or make things “work better.” Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.

Icedove (Thunderbird) works well enough for me. Maybe the reason it’s “old fashioned” is because it works well enough that it doesn’t need to be changed that often.

In the proprietary software world we’re used to UI’s being redesigned on a regular basis for no user benefit.

AFAIK FUTO/Rossmann, to their credit, stopped trying to openwash themselves. They created their own phrase “source-first” to describe their proprietary EULA.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s proprietary and not worth promoting here.

If Valkey is the de facto successor of Redis, then maybe abandoning Redict is the right move. If he continued to put effort into Redict, people would just ask why is he wasting time with Redict when Valkey exists.

Note that I generally don’t think time put into free software is wasted, because once its put out into the commons it can be picked up and reused elsewhere - although in this particular case since Redict is licensed under LGPLv3 contributions made to it cannot be reused by Valkey which is licensed under the BSD license. One is, however, free to add their own contribution to both projects as neither requires a CLA, however both do require a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) https://codeberg.org/redict/redict/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md This is as far as I know an unusual case as generally forks use the same license allowing code to be freely exchanged between them.

GNU/Linux != Linux

Linux is a kernel

GNU/Linux is the GNU userland (tools and libraries) combined with the Linux kernel to form a complete operating system

Android is Linux but not GNU. So are Alpine, postmarketOS, and others I can’t think of

Linux is to an operating system as bread is to a sandwich… an essential component, but a slice of bread by itself does not make a sandwich make

Librewolf comes packaged by my distro (GNU Guix) so that’s what I use. I’m sure most “privacy” or “hardened” Firefoxes are more or less interchangeable. The only one that’s really noteworthy is GNU IceCat, because it’s more focused on software-freedom and includes the LibreJS addon, but I switched to Librewolf once it was packaged for Guix.

If Linux is just the kernel then Android and Ubuntu are equally Linux.

It is and they are. These are demonstrable facts.

I have no problem with referring to the family of Linux based operating systems collectively as Linux (with GNU/Linux being a subfamily of such), however, I firmly believe that the mythical concept of “real Linux” where some Linuxes aren’t really Linux is what creates the confusion. I would rather use other terms, like POSIX, Unix(like), and FreeDesktop to refer to so-called “real Linux” (with the caveat that they also include BSDs and the like - but I include these as part of the free desktop operating system spectrum, as most so-called Linux apps also run here. I don’t place special importance on the kernel because it is technically the furthest thing away from the user experience).

(Android being Linux isn’t a mere technicality - it means you can get a full terminal environment with a package manager and “Linux apps” and even run a full desktop environment if you really want)

Stallman’s attempt to rename Linux

There was never any “attempt to rename Linux.” Stallman simply wants to clarify which part of the operating system is “Linux” (the kernel) and which part(s) are not (many of which are his work, which Linux fans insist on also calling “Linux” even though the GNU project predates it by almost a decade).

Any “confusion” on this point is the result of Linux fans spreading mistruths (I assume only sometimes intentionally). Unfortunately at this point the myths are so firmly ingrained we have myths about the myths (like “Stallman wants to rename Linux”) and in my mind Stallman is definitely fighting a losing battle nowadays. Still, a falsehood being widely accepted does not make it true.

Linux is an operating system kernel and Windows is an entire operating system. You can’t really compare them

The most obvious difference going from Debian stable to GNU Guix is that Guix is a rolling release distro, not stable (in the Debian sense) at all.

Package management is also very different as it’s fundamentally a source based distro, although sometimes the build servers can provide prebuilt packages if they’re available. Also, Guix has the concept of “profiles” which group sets of installed packages; typically, there is a system profile as well as a profile for each user, but users can also create their own separate profiles. This means that a user can install packages to their own profile without needing root permissions.

Profile updates are done in an atomic manner, such that changing the set of installed packages (installing, updating, or removing a package) actually creates a new generation of the profile, and it’s possible to roll back to a previous generation if something breaks. This is true of the system as well as the user profile(s), of course. A profile generation can also be exported as a manifest, which can then be imported to create a profile generation on another system, allowing package management to be done in a declarative manner.

Finally, Guix has a commitment to ship only free software, and uses linux-libre as its kernel. Debian has a clear separation between free and non-free components but does ship non-free software, including firmware blobs, and I believe as of recently the installer provides them by default. There are unofficial Guix channels (=repositories) that provide these things.

I will continue to maintain that it is bitterly ironic for a product which is 95% based on free software to be so hostile to software freedom. They feel so entitled to take but don’t want to give back, and they justify it by saying that that others will do the same thing they did if they do make it fully free.

A proprietary browser is a non-starter for me, especially when there are many free alternatives, even Chromium based ones. I’d take Ungoogled-Chromium on desktop or Cromite on mobile, heck I’d take Brave even.

Currently I run GNU Guix on my desktop, laptop, and servers. I like the dedication to software freedom and the way package management works. Before that I used Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until around 2010. Debian and Trisquel are fine and I don’t have anything against them, I just like the Guix package manager more. I’ve used Xfce with all of these (and before then, GNOME 2). I set it up the way I like it and it never changes.

I typically run LineageOS on my mobile devices, without microG or any proprietary apps. As I’ve said before my preferred OS would be some variant of GNU/Linux, preferably Guix as well, but LineageOS works well enough.

I run OpenWRT on my router, and had a previous router than ran LibreCMC (a variant of OpenWRT using Linux-libre).

Windows games are made for Windows so I prefer to use Windows for them. I don’t particularly want to turn GNU/Linux into Windows, I think it deserves better than that.