Jellyfin has been rock solid for me, especially since the move to .NET 8. Looking forward to this release.

The F in FOSS stands for politics

Very nice link that not only does not have a list of names but also fairly explicitly explains that it is not talking about Americans killing Americans.

I am not going to spend more than 30 seconds on it but here is the first list of “lots” of Russians that are believed to have been assassinated by their own government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_notable_Russians_in_2022–2024

Despite your personal attacks, the trivially discoverable facts are not on your side.

I used Wikipedia since you apparently find it credible.

My favourite “suicide” of a notable Russian in the last couple of years was the one that had a suicide note signed by “illegible signature” ( what it actually said ). I guess the FSB did not totally understand the instructions.

Indeed A LOT of falling out of windows. Quite a bit of poisoning as well. These are the successful ones. How about that time they poisoned the entire Ukrainian peace team including the owner of the Chelsea Football Club?

That likely has more to do with the culture of KDE vs GNOME. You can make pretty much the same UI with either toolkit.

They are C++ already. If they deigned the application well, a UI toolkit change should not be too bad. Not trivial but manageable.

I always hate to see apps move off GTK but their first point is about cross-platform and there is just no denying that Qt has a vastly better cross-platform story than GTK does.

The “ran Linux on a 4004” through emulation. The 4004 was actually running a MIPS emulator ( that emulated an MMU ) and Linux run on the emulator.

They( Code Weavers ) do a lot of the work on Proton. I believe that Valve pays them.

GNU / Linux is an overstep. It is inaccurate and misleading.

“Linux” as the majority of people that know the term use it refers to a family of operating system “distributions” that share a large number of common traits ( including the Linux kernel ).

GNU / Linux is a poor name for the majority of these distributions. It would be an ok name for a specific distribution from the Free Software Foundation.

Not all Linux distributions use Glibc. You mentioned Alpine Linux. There are others. This does not make Alpine less of a Linux. ( this is a tangent but saying “most” software does not work on MUSL is wildly inaccurate ).

Not all Linux distributions use the GNU utils. Check out Chimera Linux sometime. If I sat a Linux user down at Chimera, they would be perfectly at home. They can of course even install Flatpaks or use Docker or Podman. Because it is Linux even with no GNU.

Not all distros use GCC. I have listed one already.

Saying Linux was “never completed” is wildly inaccurate. Linux has been completed in many different ways and it continues to expand and evolve.

Even on the most popular Linux distros, GNU represents only a tiny fraction of the software installed. In most distro repos, the most popular license is MIT. So even if we pretend that GPL means GNU ( itself a totally inaccurate overreach ) a GNU label for the entire system makes no sense.

As above, there is more MIT licensed software in most distros. Should it be MIT / Linux? Red Hat probably contributes more code than anybody ( including to Glibc and GCC ). Should all Linux be Red Hat / Linux? Both those are bonkers but, fair attribution wise, they make more sense than GNU / Linux does.

Yes, Richard Stallman has asked all the Linux distros to call themselves GNU. He should not have. He should stop. There is no problem to solve other than he has not stopped asking.

GNU is a massively important project historically. The GPL is a vital piece do the Free Software landscape. These need to be celebrated and acknowledged. This is not the way to do it.

But let’s take another look at history. First, of course Linux would likely not have caught such early momentum without GNU utils and certainly not with GCC. Linux had its own libc but Glibc was better. Sure.

Did you know that the author of GNU HURD originally wanted to use the BSD kernel? That would have been an interesting alternate history. GNU may have truly emerged as an OS alternative. It could have filled the space now occupied by Linux. We would all be using the GNU OS.

In 1992, GNU / Linux may have been a decent description of what Linux was at the time ( though that is a bit of a slap to XFree86 ).

FreeBSD was a complete OS before anybody ( anybody free ). However, they got caught in a lawsuit around whether they were allowed to be free. Linux appeared in the space left by BSD and, it was while BSD was under a legal cloud that Linux filled its sails with wind. By the time that was settled, BSD was way behind. Not as far behind as GNU without Linux would have been though.

If there had been no Linux kernel, the BSD lawsuit would have ended and the world would have had a free UNIX while GNU was still a collection of utilities with no kernel.

If Linux had not appeared and FreeBSD had taken off, few of us would probably ever have heard of the GNU Project. Many GNU fans totally underestimate how important Linux has been to them.

Finally, how is GNU a desktop OS ( especially in 2024 )?

Here is the full list of GNJ projects. “All GNU packages” straight from the horses mouth:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html#allgnupkgs

First, many people will be surprised how short that list is. My distro offers 70,000 packages. Fewer than 500 are GNU. That is what I was saying above.

But where is the display server? Where is the sound server? Where is the desktop environment? How may GUI applications are there?

You can say that that GNU kernel is “unfinished”. If GNU still wants to be a desktop, it would be better described as “unstarted”.

It is not 1992 anymore. GNU is not a desktop OS.

Of course a GNU desktop could use X11, Wayland, and Mesa. Those are all Free Software but they are are not GNU. In fact, all those are MIT licensed and not even GPL.

None of the desktop environments are GNU. There is GNUstep but its homepage says explicitly that it is “not a desktop”.

Anyway, GNU is a massively important project. Let’s educate people on why it did and does matter. But let’s not destroy its legacy and goodwill by abusing its name and misrepresent its role today.

Imagine how much less would get done overall and how many fewer people would participate if we did not let people work on what they wanted to work on.

The only choice left would be to contribute or not and more people would choose not to contribute (probably the choice you have made).

I thought there were two units working now ( maybe not everything ). One Lenovo and one Asus if I recall.

EDIT:

ASUS Vivobook S15 & Lenovo Yoga Slim7x

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-SoC-Platforms

6.11 is released now.

I will just say that SUSE 4.2 was not built off the same base as SUSE 1.0 either. It is not going to be as clear cut as finding a cloned Red Hat source code repository.

SUSE 4.2 was really version 1.0 of the distribution we call OpenSuse today ). It was a reboot. This version was no longer based on Slackware and it was the first version using RPM.

Debian introduced packages in 1995 ( before Debian 1.0 ). RPM did not appear until Red Hat Linux 2.0 in the fall. SUSE 4.2 came out in 1996 and could have used either one.

I was not trying to cause any offence. Mad respect for SUSE. As I hinted, I was simplifying. It is hard to talk about this stuff both accurately and concisely.

SUSE is certainly not a Fedora “fork” as Fedora Core was not even conceived until considerably later. Neither was OpenSUSE really. So you cannot take my first comment too literally.

Let’s remember how early SUSE was in the Linux timeline. Back then, everybody was downloading their software from the same FTP sites. A huge component of what made a Linux distribution different from an FTP repo was the package manager and those came from Red Hat or Debian.

The provenance of SUSE is also a bit complicated as the first versions were explicitly based on Slackware. Starting with 4.2 ( a made up version number meant as a nod to Douglas Adam’s I think ), SUSE became Jurix + RPM. So it is a Jurix fork in that sense. However, I cannot imagine more than a handful of people ever used Jurix. I would be interested to know the numbers. In contrast, in terms of both users and industry awareness, Red Hat was THE Linux distro back then.

Red Hat was certainly an influence on SUSE beyond the source code. Red Hat and SUSE were not just communities or collections of code. Red Hat and SUSE were two of the earliest company backed distros. Both had clear commercial ambition. It is no accident that they both evolved into explicitly “enterprise” subscription products flanked by explicitly community distros. SUSE and Red Hat were more like each other than they were like other Linux players ( especially in the days before Ubuntu ). It is not far wrong I think to think of SUSE as the Red Hat of Europe with Red Hat attracting American infrastructure giants like Oracle and SUSE becoming the platform for big European players like SAP.

SUSE is not a fork in the sense that we are going to find an import into the source code version control system from Red Hat ( other than RPM itself of course ). Again though, we should note that this is not how stuff worked back then ( see comment about FTP sites ).

RPM could have been a purely technical choice for SUSE but, in my view, they had a clear desire to use Red Hat as a template more broadly. That is what I meant by saying SUSE could be seen as a fork while also acknowledging that the statement is not quite fair ( or perhaps more that it is not technically accurate in the strictest sense of what the work fork means even if it instructive as a historical perspective ).

OpenSUSE itself could be seen as a fork of Fedora though it is from long enough ago that perhaps that is not fair.

In the beginning there was Slackware ( well, maybe SLS but it is gone now ). Slackware has no packaging system. Most distros want one. Debian is not really a Slackware fork but it was a response to it.

The first two distributions to bring true package management were Debian and Fedora ( well pre enterprise Red Hat really - before Fedora ). So Fedora and Debian are the classic bases for other distros.

Red Hat created the first, and most successful, “enterprise” distribution so lots of people want to clone that.

Ubuntu was the first distro to really succeed at a “mainstream” desktop experience. Ubuntu is itself a fork of Debian but, because of its early success, there are probably more forks of Ubuntu than anything else.

Arch was the next really successful attempt at a new packaging system and a distro for more technical users ( that still wanted a binary package distribution system ). There are forks of Arch but, as the repos are Arch’s biggest strength, few of them deviate too much beyond the installer and default configuration.

If you are going to create a distro based off another one, it is typical to start with the base distro that is how to the package format of your choice.

There are now other distros with their own packaging systems ( eg. Alpine and Void ) but they have not been around as long.

Importantly I think, OpenSUSE is European base and, for a lot of the history of Linux, it was largely an American phenomenon ( yes, I know it was invented in Finland — how long did Linus stay there? ).

Finally, “forking” is often a little more sophisticated now. In the past, you started with some other distro that you liked and changed a few small things that you didn’t. A lot of that is taken care of with repos and spins these days so you so fewer unique distros start life this way. The exception is maybe init systems.

As an example, you could consider Chimera Linux as a successor to Void but it is not really a fork. It uses a different package manager, userland, and init system for example.

OpenSUSE itself has multiple versions. One of them is likely to be close enough for fans that they do not need to splinter off.

Backed by a hardware reseller. Likely to be around as long as they stay in business.

What did you not like about EndeavourOS?

What is the name of the dinit system designed for containers?

As others have said, macOS does not “just work” anymore.

I am primary tech support for a few “normy” users including my mother and wife. My wife, the more technical and capable of the two, uses macOS. My mother uses Windows. My wife requires substantially more tech support. Worse, the issues are often complete mysteries to me like “why is everything so slow” and it turning out that some OS level process is consuming huge amounts of memory and / or CPU. Web searches reveal lots of people with similar issues but no real insight into what to do about it or why it is happening. I have moved OS versions just to solve this kind of crap on Mac. Another problem is software not working on older versions of the OS.

I am no Windows lover but, once I show my mother how to do something, I never hear from her. Every once in a while I stop by to marvel at how many updates need to be applied but that is about it. She is in the Windows 10 that I installed for her many years ago now. It just works.

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.

That is honestly a decent analogy. So, on what rides is it ok if something goes wrong and a young family member is killed? Rust says, it is never ok so we won’t let you do it.

To use your analogy though, the issue is the driver feeling quite confident in their skills and rating the risk as low. Then a tire blows on a corner. Or somebody else runs a red light. Or, there is just that one day when an otherwise good driver makes a mistake. History tells us, the risk is higher than the overconfident “good” drivers think it is.

In particular, history shows that 70% of the real world injuries and fatalities come from passengers without seat belts. So, instead of each driver deciding if it is safe, we as a society decide that seat belt use is mandatory because it will prevent those 70% of injuries and fatalities ( without worrying about which individual drivers are responsible )

Rust is the seat belt law that demonstrably saves lives regardless of how safe each individual driver thinks they are. It is a hard transition with many critics but the generation that grows up with seat belts will never go back. Eventually, we will all realize just how crazy it was that they were not always used.

Mint would be a perfect distro to start with. Don’t listen to them—just download Mint. I don’t like Ubuntu but honestly it would be fine too. In other words, although it does matter, it does not matter as much as people say as long as you do not start with something to too hard to install.