Captain Beyond @ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promo

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Joined

4 yr. ago

That's debatable, since what people generally call "Linux" is more GNU than Linux anyway. "Linux" as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).

Linux doesn't have any GNU in it. Linux is a kernel that GNU runs on top of. That's what Stallman means by "GNU/Linux."

Maybe he is a little bitter about his life's work and philosophy being erased by Linux fans, but that is understandable. Maybe he is a little too bitter.

• uBlock origin of course
• Dark Reader
• Open in Reader View, which allows me to open a link directly in reader view. This can actually bypass some login walls surprisingly enough.
• Activate Reader View, which allows me to force a website to render in reader view even if the browser decides not to show the icon in the address bar.
• LocalCDN which hosts some CDN resources locally (it's a more frequently updated fork of Decentraleyes)
• Open With, which allows me to open a url in another browser or another command. I mainly use it for feeding urls to yt-dlp.
• Web Archives, which allows me to open a link in Archive.org among other archive services.
• LibRedirect, which allows me to open links in privacy frontends (up-to-date fork of Privacy Redirect)

For mobile only,

• OldLander, which makes old.reddit.com more usable in mobile. I started having issues with almost every teddit instance once the API changes came in, so I decided to bypass the frontends and use reddit directly.

The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.

Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?

Apple is actively hostile to software freedom. Even if a particular iOS app is free, actually exercising the four freedoms is difficult given the barriers Apple puts up against developers.

This is not considering the culture of Apple users which is generally indifferent to software freedom, of course.

indignated FSF extremist

It's not like this is a generic unrelated lemmy community, it's literally called "open source" (with a rule specifically saying "Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology" in the sidebar). there are a million other spaces where proprietary garbage can be promoted, I don't go around those places chewing people out for doing so. You chose to come into a space called "open source" to trash open source and promote a proprietary application, the fact that you are getting upvoted for doing so is just sad imho.

Anyway, you don't seem to have anything other than childish personal attacks in response so this is where I disengage from this thread.

This is the FOSS community.

Given people are regularly promoting proprietary trash and being upvoted for it, while people taking a pro-FOSS stance are downvoted, I don't think this is a FOSS community in anything but name anymore.

At the very least I'd have hoped we'd left the childish name calling behind at reddit, but it seems you can't really take the reddit out of the redditor.

huh, I had no idea that being pro-FOSS in a FOSS community was that controversial. I guess this place really is turning into the new reddit.

A privacy policy isn't the same thing as the Four Freedoms. !privacy@lemmy.ml is next door, this is !opensource@lemmy.ml.

It's proprietary, therefore I have no interest in it. The fact that it uses Matrix on the server end isn't noteworthy because software freedom is about what I run on my local hardware, not what the company runs on theirs.

I would be interested to know what changes/additions their client and server make to the standard Matrix experience. I know their proprietary client is coupled to their service but can I use a standard Matrix client with their service? If normal Matrix clients cannot interact with it then the use of Matrix on the server end is but an implementation detail and not relevant to users.

Linux is not an operating system and pretending it is one is counter-productive. Take Ubuntu or Mint or SteamOS or whatever and call that Official Linux™ if you want, I guess. Or, we can actually promote those operating systems in their own right instead of calling them "flavor of Linux"

There is no such operating system as Linux, but there are operating systems built on top of the kernel called Linux. In other words, Linux (a kernel) is not an alternative to Windows (an operating system), but a specific Linux-based OS could be.

IMO it would help if we stopped pretending that Linux is an operating system unto itself and started promoting the actual operating systems that are built on Linux. I see people in this thread arguing over whether "Linux" is user-friendly or not and it's meaningless because they aren't actually talking about Linux, but rather some unspecified thing that runs on top of Linux, and may not even be talking about the same thing.

It feels like last week we were defending proprietary software, ads, and tracking against those mean old FOSS zealots who actually care about privacy and freedom. Are you saying we care about those things now?

not FOSS, but doesn’t have internet permission

The free software definition is about whether users have the freedom to use, share, and modify software. "No internet access" is irrelevant.

As an end-user I believe I am entitled to the freedom to use, modify, and share the software I use. If your business model is incompatible with my values I won't support you, simple as. I don't have any problem monetarily supporting developers but not if they disagree with my principles.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact argument made against ad-blockers, too.

There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

I prefer my version of stage 3: I still care about software freedom and advocate for it (as well as related issues like interoperability, privacy, and right to repair) but without being an obnoxious fanboy for "Linux" or talking down to people who still use non-free technology for whatever reason.

Simply caring about an issue doesn't make one a cultist or zealot, and not caring about anything does not make one enlightened.

I say this as someone who is probably one of the biggest supporters of software-freedom around here, but bullying or shaming people for preferring non-free apps does nothing but incite resentment towards the movement. I value the four freedoms because I think I deserve control of my computing, not because I think it's my place to dictate what others should value.

I think people are complaining about ads because ads imply tracking. I don't know, I use Jerboa because I value the four freedoms, I'm not out here protesting non-free apps because the free apps work well enough for me.