I’m sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort…

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn’t do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

My bet is, it’ll be Saturday that goes, finally achieving a 6-day work week.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

Technically, “enforced pay it forward” is called credit. Your debt would then be “the amount you still have to pay forward”.

Of course, this defeats both the spirit and the purpose of a pay it forward scheme.

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get those instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

:D.

Fixed

Indeed. Linux audio also allows control characters like backspace to be part of a file name (though it is harder to make such file as you can’t just type the name). Which is just horrible.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.

They are major concerns, but they aren’t the only reasons people would use Linux, and also not everyone who uses Linux does it for these reasons. For example, while I care about them, my most important reason for using it is utility features such as my tiling WM.

That only works if the main reason someone uses Linux is personal privacy.

The biggest issue is that there isn’t a universal agreement on what causes harm. There is agreement on the basics - murder, violence, etc - but they’re already illegal anyways, no need to ban them by license.

upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment

So when they say “openness” they do put it in the context of open source rather accessibility.

Because FOSS shouldn’t add burdens. You publish your work and let everyone else use it. That shouldn’t add extra obligations on you. Usually, you’d also write some docs - after all, without them nobody will know how to use your program, so why bother publishing - but it shouldn’t be an obligation. Make it easy for people to open up their code without this attaching strings.

Documentation is nice, but it’s kind of different thing that open source: a program can be open and undocumented, or closed but well documented - and I don’t see why we’d want it different for models.

A bunch of these columns are outright absurd TBH, to the extend I’m not sure the author really knows what FOSS is about. What’s open API access even supposed to be - API access is closed by definition.

Also there has never been a requirement that open source software needs to be documented - and for good reason - so I’m not a fan of the documentation column as well.

However, it also uses halium and libhybris. That means you can’t just install your favourite distro and upstream tools. Everything that needs GPU acceleration needs to be patched for libhybris. For example, that means no upstream wlroots - and the latest patched version I think is 0.12 or so.

Actually, no, this seems to work on a very different principle.

Not really. It seems to use a very different technology from termux.