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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Well, to run with your analogy, I prefer things to be recyclable then to just throw them away.

    I agree with you - to a point. The linux kernel is too big and complex to understand all of it as a single person. However, its critical software. Meaning, we are not depending on some nerd to find a bug anymore. There are companies that look through critical code to check for security issues.

    Now imagine I made some somewhat popular open source server software that saved passwords in plaintext. Chances are good, that by sometime next week ill have someone on the internet scream at me for that. With proprietary software, no one is coming.

    (Maybe at the next code review, someone will say something, but proprietary software does not imply me working at a corporation, and corporation does not imply the software having to be closed source)

    Open source does not guarantee 100% secure software, but it does make obvious lapses in judgement much less likely. And sometimes, there IS a nerd who will look through the code because they wanted a feature, and finds a critical bug. Like the person that found the xz backdoor. The chance for that happening with closed source is zero.



  • A lot of drivers for hardware are actually not open source, just unreadable binaries that do …something. No one knows exactly how they work, so some people consider them a security risk.

    I think its because the linux kernel is GPL2, not the modern GPL3 like most free software, so I think thats why some components are allowed to be non-free. Not sure though.

    So, that practice violates the spririt of free software. So some distributions have those components removed. Its safer, but you may lose functionality, depending on what computer components you have.

    Its an important project, and judging by the other comments here, underappreciated.








  • soooo… you want KNOME?

    serious answer: Just like you said, behind these projects are different visions and different goals so it would make no sense to sqash both together. Whats a sensible default to someone is horrible to another.

    And open source has no such limit, take the linux kernel for example: a giant project of crazy scope which is free software and works better than commercial kernels. What free software lacks are in my opinion UI/UX designers, which is why many non commercially made free software have wierd user interfaces.






  • … have practically relaunched the same press release that praises Mammoth, the Mastodon app developed by The BLDV Inc. , the Californian start-up financed by Mozilla (and THEREFORE by Google, which now finances 90% of Mozilla)

    Thats a pretty crazy statement. Mozilla is not a shell company for google. They have very different goals, and google pays mozilla for google search as default because otherwise, firefox users would have a different search as default, giving another search engine a serious opportunity to get big.

    Mozilla funds many things, and this is just a well made open source client for mastodon. There is no secret big corp. agenda behind it because that would be crazy. Why wouldnt google develop such a thing in house and use their influence to bring users to it, and why use mozilla, the rival browser company, to do it? This is a major flaw in the article, serious enough that I cant take it seriously.


  • In my opinion one of the full design themes should be picked because some of those single designs look very nice individually but would clash with others.

    My pick would be Emiliano’s theme, it looks the most like an evolution of the opensuse style. Imo the others are either a bit too minimalist or deviate too strongly from the original design.

    Nikolayan’s design is also good, but I prefer Emiliano’s because that you can recognise the chameleon better in every logo.