The two candidates don’t come from nothing, there is primaries etc. My point is if people wanted change they could have change, but they actually don’t. Look what the French did to their monarchs and aristocrats when the people actually got fed up.
But step one is getting fed up, and most people ain’t fed up. They actually resist change, that’s why they go with the transparent lies the media and politicians feed them. They want minor change, not revolutionary change.
But thats just not true. Well maybe it’s true for a country like china or north korea. But the rest of the world? We could elect people changing the system and there is nothing the 2k people could do. Sure they can influence elections to some degree, but if there was a true will for change? The reason the billionaires have so much power and protection is because a lot of people side with them and the system they support.
But again, the oligarchs ain’t the problem. Getting rid of them just changes the ownership of the companies producing the pollution, what we need to do is change the companies and the way to do that is legislation. And that legislation is not supported by the majority of people. I mean look at east germany during the cold war if you don’t believe me, not a single billionaire yet still horrible pollution. Billionaires don’t cause pollution, people do.
This is so stupid it makes me worried for the human race that people actually fall for that. Do people honestly think that the problem of emissions goes away by taking out the people owning the companies producing the emissions? Isn’t it extremely obvious that the same companies will produce the same emissions regardless of who owns them as long as the demand for their goods, services and laws governing them stays the same?
I mean sure, lets blame the owner of exxon for the emissions caused by cars and powerplants. I’m sure people will enjoy riding to work on a horse amish style if it means limiting global warming to 2 degrees instead of three, how about you pitch that idea to a large group of people an see how that goes.
You know what would actually help? Electing the right people. Not just caring about this on election day when you have the choice between two shades of shit, get the right people primaried. But you know whats the truth? The truth is that it’s not the billionaires fault. The truth is the majority of people don’t care about saving the planet, not if it inconviniences them and thats why democracy doesn’t nip this in the bud. Because it works. It actually represents the people and their will and the people who care are represented by the guys that loose by 30% in the primaries, as in getting 3% instead of 35%.
You take out the billionaires and the industries will be run by the workers, the state or whatever anarcho socialist conglomerate you can think up, but nothing will change. Because 90% of people are too busy with their own little lives to care about 3 degrees global warming and nothing will change that.
The emissions from their investments … thats the same as the emissions of your place of work or the emissions of the company you buy your stuff from. Lets blame that on an extremely small group of people instead of the billions of people who consume the products enabling them.
Anyway, the point is: if it works, then it’s good. Rust does not make Linux worse. If anything, it makes it better because it makes it more accessible to programmers who know Rust but not C. And that’s a good thing. It ensures the Linux kernel will be around longer than whomever ends up being the last C developer.
Nobody is going to rewrite the entire kernel in rust. Parts of it are still written in assembler. It’s well over 30 million lines of code, 60% of it drivers. You can’t just go and rewrite that in a different language, hell it doesn’t even compile on the wrong C compiler version. You would need access to the hardware and run tests for every module you change at least or risk breaking stuff in production.
C programmers will always be around since they are necessary to keep the old code running on newer hardware. There are thousands of companies relying on the Linux and BSD kernels, for example every network router, switch etc.
I have nothing against rust, but there is always a danger of having too many programming languages used in the same project, especially if a error in one language can break something in a module written in the other. That’s just a nasty complication, especially for a time critical project like the kernel.
sysV is the init system linux distributions used before systemd, openrc, upstart, runit, smf etc. It’s pretty much the old daddy and comes from Linux unix roots. Even MacOS used it before they made their own called launchd.
S6 sounds like a update to it since the capital V in sysv stands for the Roman numeral 5.
I didn’t spot that, thank you.
Great, a subscription based mail program. Because that’s clearly what people want and need, paying rent for the software on their machines.
Using ptyxis even on KDE, it’s neat. Very clean and some interesting integration with distrobox, definitely recommend.
Huh, didn’t even know my country had a sovereign tech fund. Looking more into it … yeah. It gets money from the federal government but it is in no way run or even associated with it. Looks like a GmbH is behind it, which is a for profit company in Germany. It has a volume of 17 million €.
Also its name is literally sovereign tech fund, even in German, I.e. that’s not a translation, that’s its literal name. I wouldn’t say it’s sketchy, the people behind it definitely look legit, but it certainly doesn’t quite meet the lofty associations the name suggests.
I get visits multiple times a month because a Eula or something shows up on phones or tablets asking them to accept whatever. You know, the stuff nobody reads and just clicks accept on. Old people sometimes have trouble discerning where messages come from, anything from a pop up to a disclaimer for an update is “my phone asking me something”.
Chrome OS is still corporate BS. They will manage to confuse people with legalese. I have elder neighbours come to me confused that were literal pages into that BS. I always tell them they can just accept everything google/microsoft/apple asks of them, but that’s the problem, they can’t tell where it’s coming from. To them it’s just a legal contract showing up when they wanted to read their mails, it’s scary and they rather want me to check everything is ok.
Aurora is better for them. No legalese pop ups, fully automatic updates(no “click to accept”, “when do you want to schedule the update” or even an info that an update happened). I just tell them to make sure they turn off their PC at night and they will boot into the update next morning, never being the wiser. It just works.
Careful with gnome, it works for people that are unfamiliar with gnome, if you use extensions. Then gnome updates, the extensions break and you have to come over do maintenance, maybe use a different extensions which will look slightly different, throwing them off.
And yes I’m talking from experience. It’s bad because there is no easy fix for a broken extension, you essentially have to wait till the author fixes it. It was dock to dash in my example.
For old people you need point and click and the thing they have to click on should be permanently visible. They often do not understand the logical separations with virtual desktops and things showing up on screen only sometimes can be confusing. It’s easier if they have an area that’s always the same.
Installing things on fedora atomic spins is hardly tinkering more than necessary. You either layer the package, install it in a distrobox, use something like homebrew that installs packages outside of /usr, use app images, nix package manager, docker/podman or a flatpak.
These things exist for a reason, because they complement many distros that would be otherwise lacking. They can add a new app to a stable Debian, a stable dev environment to a bleeding edge arch, an isolated environment to use a untrusted app. If you use Linux these days you should be aware of these distribution agnostic options, or you will have issues understanding what is even going on and limit yourself unnecessarily.
I remember so odd not so transparent stuff not working well when I tried it years ago, like throttling of cpu/gpu, fan control, sleep modes, stuff like that. Provided your hardware is fully supported though I think they provide an excellent experience.
Maybe I should try to rebase my home server to freebsd …
How is HDR on the BSDs? On Linux it works nicely with plasma6 and wayland.
Eh, the way you phrased that I think it’s either fedora or opensuse. The up-to-date criteria basically knocks out everything with a fixed release cycle besides fedora which is pretty bleeding edge since they update certain things like kernel between releases.
Some criteria are non-sensical though imho. Ease of use? Speed? They are all the same, sure pacman works faster than zypper but it’s not like I’m waiting for either, they work in the background while I do stuff. As for ease of use … kde is kde, terminal is terminal. I think you would have to branch into the realm of the BSDs to get real differences there.
Debian is really solid, prefer it over any of its derivatives. You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part, ofc you’re going to have issues with a distro if you don’t know how to perform the most basic stuff. Stay far away from nix if kinoite gave you issues, with nix 90% of your pre-existing Linux knowledge will not only be useless but actively harmful.
Reading between the lines I think opensuse tumbleweed might work for you. Stable, powerful installer, very up to date and most of your pre-existing knowledge should transfer. Fedora is nice but you mentioned the magic word production, I don’t like fast cyclers in production, major version updates are a hassle at the best of times.
Ublue provides a really solid base template that makes it very easy to do stuff like this, all the heavy lifting of a distro is done by fedora, ublue adds the codecs and drivers and build system for updates.
Wouldn’t be unreasonable to make your own distro with it honestly.
Nice overview, don’t want to contest anything you said, just add my 2 cents to it.
The truth is the lines have gotten awfully blurry the past decade. It’s not just about FHS(basically a standard how the file system is laid out, where binaries go etc) getting more or less phased out(there are dozens of places where binaries can end up these days for example) but also some deeper changes of how we run software on these distributions.
Frankly arch and cachyos(which is a arch variant, yes it has optimised packages, but so does opensuse, it’s just a decision to leave behind compatibility with older hardware, not some inherent magic) belong into the standard Linux distro bin for me, they do nothing special or noteworthy beyond being competently implemented. They are not really different from Debian, fedora or Ubuntu, you can install those just the same manual way you do arch. Yes arch is rolling and others are release based but opensuse shows how there isn’t that much difference between the models, they run both on the same package base, as did Debian with its sid repo since forever.
Then we have gentoo and yes it is a bit special even today. The idea behind it is that you compile your own packages instead of using a binary repo. But why? The answer to that is that when you compile a package from source you have a vast influence on the resulting binary, for example by giving instruction to the compiler, that’s how cachyos gets its optimised binaries. But another even larger influence is by using configuration options built into the package by its developers. For example to disable or enable certain parts of the code. What gentoo did was collect and categorise the most common of these options into what became known as use flags, a system configuration that affects every single package built on that system. If you add the -dvd use flag it will strip dvd support from any package that has it. Or maybe you don’t have a printer -cups will remove cups support from all packages. This doesn’t just not install cups, it removes the very support of cups from packages that would otherwise interact/look for it in some way. This has obvious security advantages and is where the notion of gentoo being a lean system comes from, you’re stripping out entire functions of code from your binaries. If there is a bug in a certain OpenSSL mode that’s included in all binaries shipped by other distros, but you have deactivated all modes besides the one you intend to use, you are not affected by the bug. The idea behind gentoo is a kind of customisation that goes beyond the package layer, you’re no longer just choosing your individual packages but also the options of these packages.
As for the others, immutable, declaratives, cow or a/b root distros… that’s where the lines are getting blurry. The declarative like Nixos are very different in their implementation, but then again, you can use the nix package manager on other distros and we have been using docker containers set up declaratively via compose files for years by now. Likewise the immutable seem very alien, until you realise that they are only divided from their normal counterparts by a very thin line, important yes, but thin nonetheless. There is a reason these new distros get spearheaded by the old guard, a fedora workstation distro is very similar to a fedora silverblue immutable and from opensuse tumbleweed it’s a very close step to opensuse microOS. It’s mostly different default packages and some config options with an added package or two. Sure they seem very different, but just because you bolt the hood of your car closed doesn’t fundamentally change it does it?
These days I’d say gentoo is for learning. Not just about Linux but about interacting with source code and learning about the individual software you choose to install. The optimisations frankly matter less these days, sure you can optimise for speed or size of the binaries but are you going to be able to tell on that 12 core machine with 2 TB of nvme storage? No, not really. Security through a lean system might be nice, but there are specialised distros that already do so and you can run software in their own namespaces, control them via SElinux, put them in jails, bubblewrap them, containerise or VM them, hell even flatpak them, all probably more effective ways of archiving security.
There is literally a gentoo-install: https://github.com/oddlama/gentoo-install
Sure you can, happened many times in history. US independence, French Revolution, suffrage movement, civil rights movement. Elect radicals and they will change the system. But only if people wanted change, which they don’t.
People that want to get rid of billionaires, corporations in politics and people getting fairly represented are the minority. The majority want a wall on the border with Mexico, arming teachers or abortion rights and lgbtq rights etc. That’s what they care about. Highly controversial topics that ultimately change nothing about how the show is run.