S410

In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.

You’re linking a post… From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That’s what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.

Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.

As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don’t contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.

Furthermore, if you look at the page you’ve linked, you’ll see that “the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release”. While the possibility of contributing is mentioned… Well, it’s Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.

The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it’s probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers… But it’s not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.

k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine.

Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can’t?

The popular distros are what counts.

Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.

Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.

Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn’t necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn’t be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.

Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has

Oh, it’s no way perfect. Never claimed it is.

I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn’t provide that out of the box.

This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a “usable environment”.

If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won’t have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don’t, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won’t have the best experience.

A lot of people, however, don’t really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.

If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.

Real life example: I’ve switched my parents onto Linux. They’re very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it’s minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by… A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don’t suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?

wacom tablets

I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play… Unlike on Windows. Go figure.

Both Intel and AMD GPUs work fine on Linux. Both work fine with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for over a decade and has been in a usable state for the last 3 or so years.

Attributing the fact that Nvidia stuff still barely works to the fact that some distros have made Wayland the default is just stupid wrong.

Besides, Nvidia experience isn’t/wasn’t the smoothest even on Xorg. Linux desktop is simply not a priority for Nvidia.

To be honest, most things in Nobra can be installed/done to regular Fedora. And, unlike Nobra, Fedora has more than 1 maintainer: goof for the bus factor.

Focusing on the things I need to actually do.
I swear, if even if I was forced to do something at gunpoint, I’d manage to get distracted anyway.

Trying to represent oneself in court is a pretty stupid thing to do, generally.

I am not a lawyer, I’m pretty you need to be able to defend yourself withing the legal system following all of its rules. You need to know the laws, their quirks, loopholes, etc. to construct your defense properly. Even if the case is complete nonsense, but you lack the knowledge to defend yourself, or the ability to use the knowledge you have coherently, you’ll loose.

A neat paper a filed in accordance with all the rules, a paper that quotes actual laws and precedents, will, generally, beats oral argument backed by common sense. And that’s in general! Let alone when you’re going against Disney and their nigh infinite army of lawyers.

Even with the character in Public Domain, I doubt Disney would be particularly happy with anyone using it.

They can send cease and desist letter left and right, claiming that “the use of the mouse is fine, but the elements X, Y and Z were introduced in a later work of ours that’s still protected”, even if it’s a plain lie.

Trying to take Disney to court is suicide.

The have enough money to hire half the lawyers in the world and make them come up with a lawsuit even if there’s no basis for one. They can stretch the lawsuit process to last years, and yet the fees would be but a fraction of a fraction of a percent in their yearly spending. Almost any defendant, meanwhile, would be financially ruined by it, even if they end up winning.

Almost everything that’s not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.

Human’s for you, what can I say.

We all are guilty of similar behavior. You, I, your neighbor- Everyone.
It’s often hard to believe something, when your own experience is vastly different from what someone describes.

I’ve noticed Youtube nuking my comments if they contain words related to money, if they contain too many brands, if they contain technical term, etc.

Comments that don’t have much in terms of meaning or information go through just fine.

So… Just, write like you’re 5 years old and split long messages into several comments.

Being able to do things to your property is one of the basic concepts of, well, property.

Let’s say your car’s manufacturer fixed the wheels using security bolts and they’re the only people who have the sockets.
With actual cars it would be, at most, annoying. You’d still be able to undo the bolts, either by buying or making a fitting socket, or just smacking a regular one until it fits.

In the digital world, however, just because it’s called a “security” socket, you’re forbidden, by law, from tampering with it. And if the licensed services stop servicing the model of your car one day… You’re fucked. Because, even though you “own” the car, you are legally forbidden from doing basic maintenance required to use it.

Whenever a game or program or goes unplayable you can not go and fix it, despite “owning it”.
Removal of any kind of DRM, even if for personal, even in products you’ve bought, is illegal.

And there’s no lower-limit on how “secure” DRM has to be: even if the client-server communication is not encrypted in any way, doesn’t include any identifying information, and you can perfectly re-implement server-side software, tricking the program into itself into talking to your server, instead of the original, is, at best, legally grey area.

When you “buy” digital content, be it music, movies, software or games, you almost never actually buy the product. What you get is a limited license to view or use the product for an undefined amount of time.

Generally, companies reserve the right to, at any moment, restrict how can access the content (e.g. force you to use a specific device and/or program) or remove your ability to use or view the product entirely.

For example, a movie or song you’ve “bought” might get removed from whatever streaming service you’re using. A game or program might stop working due to changes in the DRM system.

Actual example from less than half a year ago: Autodesk disabled people’s supposedly perpetual licenses for Autocad and other software, forcing anyone wishing to continue to use their software into a subscription.

Imagine buying a house, only for the seller to show up 10 later and state that they change their might and staring from this point in time the house is no longer yours - despite the fact that you’ve paid for it in full - and you own them rent, if you want to keep living in it.

Well, to elaborate: I never purchashed Windows willingly. I mostly pirated it.

XP was the only Windows that was worth its money. Back then there was nothing better.
Seven was, too, best for its time, but it was still meh, compared to XP.

If it was possible, I would’ve never stopped using it.
If Windows was more like Linux, XP would’ve been still supported, even if by different people (like Mandriva is living on as OpenMandriva, or Gnome 2 as MATE).
But, no, we can’t have nice things. Microsoft have to force their “upgrades”.

Also: Almost everyone younger than 20-25 has grown up with Window 10. There’s a ton people to whom the fact that Miscosoft kill off operating systems and force new, objectively worse ones is news.

I’ve, in fact, never purchased Windows willingly.

The only few times I (technically) did were with laptops and small form factor computers which were only available with it pre-installed.

This, honestly, should not be legal.

I suppose it’s true for very old or more exotic hardware.
Since last year we can’t even run Linux on i486 CPUs, and it’s not even some relatively exotic architecture!

You can use Debian Sid, for example. That way, instead of waiting for a bunch of updates to install them as one big upgrade, you, basically, always have the last version. You don’t get those big upgrades at all, this way.

That’s not possible with Windows. Even if you were to install every update that comes out, you wouldn’t end up with a system that’s somewhere between Windows 10 and Windows 11. You’re forced into a major upgrade.

You do, in fact, need to accept support to benefit from it. Those releases are the support. Support = updates!

Sometimes people or companies retire their distros (e.g. Mandriva), or just do stupid decisions that piss of their users (CentOS) and force the users to switch to a different distro. This, however, is extremely rare. Microsoft do that on a schedule.

Debian releases are more similar to Service Packs on Windows.

Windows releases are entirely different products.

There are changes to the defaults, sometimes, but they’re just that: changes to the defaults. If you’re upgrading your existing install, they won’t affect you.

For example: Debian switched to Gnome as its default DE a couple years ago. It used to be XFCE. However, if you already had a system with XFCE, if wouldn’t go and replace it for you.

On Windows side, meanwhile, when Microsoft decide to change up the DE, you get the changes, whether you like it or not. Remember Windows 8? It’s not like those who upgraded from Windows 7 got to keep their Aero theme and Start Menu.