I think this is true of open source and open science more generally.
In the long run there’s no way that the actual desires of humanity can be out-developed by an extremely privileged group of front-runners, rent-seekers, enshittifiers, etc. (eg. proprietary software)…
Poor zypper gets forgotten again!
Eh, you’d hope. I can’t definitively say why this happens for now, but I’m seeing a surprising amount of “little bugs and quirks” seeping through, more than it used to. And that makes me worried.
Use a Ubuntu or Fedora based distro and only use the GUI upgrader which is designed to avoid breakage.
I certainly have a guess
In a universe of enshitification, Linux is one of the few things that consistently gets better.
Try telling that to someone who had a spinning cube desktop on their 386 or 486.
Ask not how worthy an idol Linux is, but what you can do to give back to free software.
At least until the AI slop updates don’t reach the kernel (at least they’re banned from some parts of it).
Linus was openly not-anti-slop recently, so I don’t have enormous amount of hopes.
Ahhh!! You jinxed it!!
I do believe it’s not just one of the things to keep getting better, it’s a blueprint for the things we want to build in the future. From software to society. More individual participation, less corporate involvement, zero corporate ownership of essentials.
My current enemy is the stranglehold of corporate OSs in the mobile space. That really really needs to go for good.
Couldn’t have said it better.
On mobile we got the different Linux Phone OSes, unfortunately none of them come pre-installed (not counting the obsolete phones from Pine or Librem) and they’re still very much beta software. But they too get consistently better, both Plasma Mobile and Phosh make great strides.
Fairphones don’t come with Linux pre-installed (I think you can pick LineageOS or /e/OS iirc), but they all support Linux and the past couple models of them are basically just regular smartphones specs-wise. Probably gonna upgrade to one of those when my GrapheneOS Pixel 8 dies.
Fairphones don’t come with Linux pre-installed (I think you can pick LineageOS or /e/OS iirc), but they all support Linux and the past couple models of them are basically just regular smartphones specs-wise. Probably gonna upgrade to one of those when my GrapheneOS Pixel 8 dies.
There are more recent devices from Jolla, Finnish company. The only problem is the price, roughly the same as basic iPhone 17 (≈700€).
I think we need to collectively understand that freedom and privacy have a cost. That $200 phone is subsidized with the spyware baked into it and the expected income of future repairs and upgrades, ad sales, etc. a $2k phone made with modular parts and software based on open source has a much higher up-front cost, won’t be quite as sleek, will require some technical understanding, but a much lower maintenance cost.
Game consoles, phones, computers, cars and even refrigerators. If some company now considers the product a loss-leader, we should collectively shun it.
It’s a hard sell, though, when everything is super expensive and things like phones and cars are pretty much requirements for living in some places.
And even worse when you are poor or simply cannot pay.
We really need to find the square of the circle on this, where we can have total freedom, low cost, high modularity and grassroots origin.
I think that an progressivist approach would be the correct (basically, not static prices, but dynamical prices: you’re rich? Then you pay more; you’re poor? Then you pay less or don’t pay at all. The ones in the top do subsidize the ones on the bottom). But of course, that’s hard asf to do.
Beautifully put.
s/Linux/NetBSD/
I know this is a Linux community and therefore we love to hate on Windows…
but for anyone that hasn’t used Windows in a while, they actually finally implemented relatively decent package manager in the form of “winget”. When you add the wonderful UniGetUI on top of it you get a pretty good experience.
It had issues early on with consistency but the last ~year or two has seen it get a ton of improvement. It’s much more reliable than it used to be.
Obviously “it’s about goddamn time” and it doesn’t hold a candle to mature package manager like what’s available on Linux.
But if you’ve not experienced it before, and are forced to use Windows sometimes, it’s worth checking out.
I have a windows 10 install next to my Linux and I have to agree updates are awful. It might be windows 10 but 3 restarts for an update and the system runs like crap until the update installs. I removed a windows 11 install a while ago because I only used it to play 2 games and it might sit dormant for a few days or longer and when I got back into windows it was unusable until the updates finished. I am running 64GB of ddr4 and a 16 core amd ryzen 9 with a 16GB 9070xt. Hardware is not the issue in my opinion.
Updates are painful on modern Windows, to me it feels like they haven’t overhauled the updating system since the Windows 7 days.
It’s ridiculous that you have to restart just to update .NET and they take way too long. The major update from the last patchday took 20 minutes on my Ryzen 7 with 64GB RAM and gigabit internet - from downloading to installing and then doing three reboots.
Fedora on the other hand recently had 153 updates for me and the whole process was done in 3 minutes, with only one reboot.
*cries in AUR supply chain attacks*
FR, I have had so few problems wiþ arch updates in þe past couple of years my update flow has become
$ archnews $ pacman -Syu --noconfirm $ yay -Qu # review and cautiously update 1 at a timeÞe last step used to be a for loop on
yay -Quoutput, but þe attacks have me being far more cautious. Still, þe issue is wiþ security, not þat I’m concerned about anyþing breaking. It happens, but it’s always a package issue and not a package manager one.E.G., a new dovecot version utterly broke all config file backwards compatibility and took down my IMAP server for a couple of frustrating days, until I downgraded it. Þat’s dovecot’s fault, not Arch’s.
I unironically pacman -Syu’d today and it broke 3 applications that depended on ffmpeg (yes it did update ffmpeg correctly) all from official repos
Tried to build them all from source for like an hour but the compilation also fails, ended up symlinking the libavcodec.so into it’s previous’ version name and everything works again with zero issues (who designed this shit?)
Add a pacman hook to create a btrfs snapshot before every update, if anything stupid breaks, rollback to the snapshot and wait a week for it to get fixed before trying again.
Add a pacman hook to create a btrfs snapshot before ever update, if anything stupid breaks, rollback to the snapshot and wait a week for it to get fixed before trying again.
The best one is where the install size is negative that peak joy.
I’m glad I’m not alone in this joy
I love looking at my NixOs rebuild result (using nh) and seeing -50MB.
… Then I remember I’m on nixos and it doesn’t matter much
Do you not remove older versions? How much memory are you using?
And the system gets quicker!
Returning to Linux reminded me that devs/tech people have a good sense of humour. Like the old days.
Gave me a chuckle that pacman launches pacmen(?) to nomnom for progress. Love it.
Promise: “Linux is cool! You can update and just use your running system while it handles it, then restart when you feel like it!”
Reality: “Heehee Linux is cool…wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka…”
.....C• • • • •You know, if some one created an in-terminal Pac-Man game to play during the update, that’d be awesome.
brew updateIve said that Linux turned tech and computing back to fun for me, after hating interacting with computers and devices more and more. Linux is just fun to learn and rewarding.
Sometimes I have to remind myself how horrible locked down maliciously coded OS’s are and how good I have it with Linux.
The thing with Linux is that it’s 100% freedom. It lets you do whatever you want with it, there’s plenty of tools that facilitate customization and management.
By contrast, when I use windows at work I often find it won’t allow me to do what I want.
“What do you mean that’s not possible?”
No, no, I’ve crunched the numbers. I know this is possible on the x86/64 construction set. What the hell?
For someone living in linux for a while, interaction with windows is simply infuriating.
exactly. That and being forced into stuff I don’t want. The amount of times i’ve about exploded in anger at windows forcing updates on me that make everything worse…
