Captain Beyond

There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.

This is proprietary (and running in a web browser does not make it less so)

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.

Aaah so a backtick is for strings? WRONG!!! IT EXECUTES THE FUCKING COMMAND!!!

To be fair this is what they do in Perl and shell scripts (and in PHP too), so it’s not unexpected behavior in that world.

This

I go out of my way to look for Linux-libre compatible hardware and everything “just works.” Sure it’s not a gaming rig but I don’t expect it to be. Expecting some random “Linux” to be a drop in replacement for Windows is going to disappoint.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I’m too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.

I don’t use brew but I do use Guix on top of PopOS, for most of the same reasons I use Guix System as a daily driver distro on my other machines. The PopOS install is meant to act as a “Windows replacement” so it has proprietary drivers, Steam, etc. For anything that’s not a system package I get it from Guix if possible, because I prefer Guix’s package management and its commitment to software freedom.

On Windows I use Scoop which has a handful of similarities in terms of user package management.

Guix is currently hosted on FSF infrastructure and, as another commenter pointed out, is in the process of migrating to Codeberg. It has never been on Github.

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It’s the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They’re not simply a “nice to have” they’re the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free “alternatives” we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards “evil” proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the “lesser evil” ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on “the four freedoms” and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.

Proprietary software is proprietary no matter how “nice” it is. It should not be advertised in FOSS communities and falsely presenting it as “FOSS adjacent” is harmful to the movement IMO.

There are many places so called “good proprietary apps” can be promoted and discussed.

Linux is the kernel, so the userspace is irrelevant. And I’m not sure what the exact amount of Linux you can change before it is no longer Linux, but it’s Linux enough to run entire desktop environments.

Disagree - making it harder to ship proprietary blob crap “for Linux” is a feature, not a bug.

I just think it’s worth to keep in mind that the most widely used smartphone OS already is a Linux… especially since people who want so called “real Linux phones” end up wanting to run Android crapware on them anyway.

If you want a Linux phone that can run Android apps, they are very plentiful. You can even run so-called Linux applications including entire desktop environments. Android is very much not a “fake Linux.”

(That is not to say I have no interest in non-Android Linuxes, I just don’t think it’s worth switching just so you can claim to run “real Linux”)

Yes, pre-NT Windows actually was DOS. Windows 95 was MS-DOS 7.0.