hendrik

Sure. But I think the total number of desktop Linux users is a two digit millions number. So those few millions we’ve attracted lately are more a decimal point when talking about 400 million. They’re there and part of the picture, though.

Linux is like the only bastion remaining. I hope we all take care of this one!

I certainly hope so. And at this point Linux is too big to fail. And some clever people are shaping it and keeping corporate interests in check.

It’s an interesting situation. Linux is on my computer and helps me emancipate myself and stay in control. At the same time it’s also Linux powering the cloud and the big services.
Plus I even have Linux on my phone. But it’s usually a really weird one, full of Google stuff and spyware. (Well… mine isn’t.)

But I feel how things change. It’s getting harder each day to live without smartphones, proprietary apps and cloud services. And since everyone else is doing it, the alternatives might just vanish. I still don’t understand why companies forfeit control, even if they have a appropriate size and business type where it makes sense to have own people and hardware, but hey…

Correct answer. And I think we’ve been there. We had serial terminals and thin clients before. Just that they were operated by your university or employer and not a for profit megacorp. We even had projects like FirefoxOS, interestingly enough not by Microsoft back then. But the idea was to move everything into the browser.

It’s certainly going to help any of the service providers. Any data and control moves away from the user, onto their computers and into their control.

Thanks for explaining. It’s a bit tricky if you invent words without explaining them at the same time.

You’re right. I’m used to read stupid takes here on Lemmy, so I mainly ignored those. It is like you said. People are moving more towards mobile devices where they’re not in control of anything. They’re mostly walled gardens. You don’t get administrator privileges, Google or whoever is making those choices for you. And they’re so easy to use, you don’t even learn anything about the internet and their inner workings. It’s all a service and content magically appears on your screen. All of that is a step down from where we’ve been before.

I struggle to recommend Microsoft instead. While it’s still a computer and that definitely changes things, they’re headed in exactly the same direction. Everything is set on spying per default these days, and they also try to lure you in into their walled gardens, paid services instead if owning software or disk space… It’s not the same level. But not good either.

Ideally we don’t want any of them to be in control of our platforms and devices, but have some control ourselves. With smartphones that’s next to impossible. With windows you might be able to pull it off if you put in some effort, since it’s not the default experience. Given it’s something that can be changed.

I’m sorry, I don’t really get it. What sides? And who didn’t read the article? That’s their main conclusion as well. Plus they add some fluff before and after. But that’s not really important. Could you maybe explain what an “device open alternative” is? I don’t know that term. And it’s kind of hard to find anything just by googling “device open”.

Hehe, I don’t think they will. Looks to me they must be aware of this. Likely they weighed their options and they do this on purpose.

I see that, too. Always makes me feel like a boomer (despite being in the wrong age group to be one), because I like my computer for the hundred and something keys which fit snuggly underneath all fingers, the separate keys for brackets and umlauts and numbers. And that I can open and operate like 3 programs next to each other while doing work. Somehow people younger than me(?) do it very differently.

(Plus I can install an operating system I really like on my computer.)

I think it’s mainly because the entire PC market is shrinking. Most people use phones and tablets these days and those don’t come with Windows.

Unpopular opinion, but I install Linux on my computers and they just work for like 5 years straight, with me spending exactly 0 hours each day fixing anything. Whereas I fix other peoples stupid printer issues and Windows becoming incompatible with the hardware or some nasty messages from some antivirus or strange software, multiple times a year…

I see however how some disgrunteled people would write something like this.

Maybe it’s easier to use another tool to create an install USB stick, like FAI or a preseed file or another method of doing an unattended install. At least Debian used to have those. Though I haven’t done it for a long time.

We have some of these things. You can type in dpkg --get-selections to get a list of all packages on a Debian distribution. You can use apt-clone to install or transfer all installed packages to a new system, with a single command. You don’t need to install every package seperately. And Fedora will have a similar concept. I think the package manager also keeps track of some of the config files. You can use dpkg-reconfigure to configure your locale and several other things. These are being used for fully automated rollouts. And I believe other distros have similar tools and package managers. And then we have proper configuration management like johntash said.

And remember, Linux is an organically grown ecosystem for quite some time now. We have things like the FHS and it’s always the same 3 locations where config files reside. But it’s not a tight ecosystem like iOS and there is no central authority mandating every developer on earth use the same config format and syntax to describe things.

NixOS on the other hand follows a declarative approach. You’d compare that to Debian configured by Ansible (for example). Not Debian alone. And I mean go ahead and install some software which isn’t packaged yet, and you’ll find out why NixOS isn’t more popular. It’s a nice and clever thing, though. Both the declarative aspect and being immutable. But it comes at a price. And then we have some issues with the implementation and I think the error messages are always very unclear. That’s the two main issues I struggle with. It always requires very advanced programming concepts to do very simple things, and I often need to have a look at the source code to find out what to do. And if the config doesn’t apply, it often provides a very unhelpful trace, sometimes it doesn’t even say which of my config file broke. Earlier this week, I spent almost 2 hours to do something that would have been an “npm install && npm run dev” on a different distro. And that’s why it isn’t very popular. It is very nice, though.

I didn’t know that. Wikipedia says it’s only 35% of contributors who are employed by RedHat. But isn’t governance split equally between the community and RedHat? So it’s not entirely independent, but more a mix?!

I’m all for Linux distributions run and owned by the community. With those we don’t have to be afreaid of weird business decisions. Debian is a good example, and very democratic. But I believe several other distros are maintained by a community as well, including Arch, NixOS…

Seems we’re now at an ungodly amount of fabricated bug reports and wasted developer time because they were made up. And one meaningful contribution to the kernel.