@rl_dane

Linux is primarily a tool for fortune-500 companies first, and end-users like thee and me, last.

Given the fact that most Linux contributors are on a corporate payroll, no surprise.

Computing as we knew it, is dead. The future has been robbed from us.

@jns

OBI-WAN: That boy was our last hope.
YODA: No. There is another.

I mean, there's always the BSDs, Haiku, heck, the Commodore 64 is back, so anything can happen. ;)

@rl_dane Hah :) Haiku gives me some hope. They do actively resist the ai nonsense, so far,...

The c64 might be the better way to go :D

Anything that needs to be general purpose enough to work with modern hardware is always going to be disadvantaged by having to reverse engineer proprietary drivers and hardware.

There used to be enough people to somewhat keep up with that, and some shift in mentality at the manufacturer side to be a bit more reasonable with providing open drivers and/or documentation, but in the past few years or so, none of that is true anymore.

I am seeing projects long considered stable fall apart due to losing maintainers left and right, and projects that are still alive get flooded with new developers pushing bad practices as if it were a personal crusade. The software landscape in general seems to be slowly unraveling into complete dysfunction.

Sticking with an as-simple-as-possible stack where all parts can be maintained by one person seems like the most reasonable way out of the mess. (there's more capable options other than a c64 these days though ;) - reviving something like Wirth's project oberon on a somewhat more modern fpga would be a fun start.. )

@AnachronistJohn @jns

It’s not a coincidence that we’re not making bullshit excuses to de-support x86 and lesser known architectures, and that we’re not allowing “AI” anything.

What is the rationale for removing support for i686? It it just because all they care about is servers?

@rl_dane @jns Some Debian developer who is also paid by a megacorp wrote about how supporting big endian and 32 bit are are too hard and incur too much “maintenance” work.

Obviously, saying that is just saying that he’s a shitty programmer, but really, it’s an excuse for corporations to push Debian towards not supporting stuff that doesn’t directly support corporations.

That’s an oversimplification, but in a nutshell, Debian is being led by corporate shills. This is how I feel about systemd, too - it seems to prioritize server use above everything else, not infrequently to the specific detriment of other use cases.

@AnachronistJohn @jns

> That’s an oversimplification, but in a nutshell, Debian is being led by corporate shills. This is how I feel about systemd, too - it seems to prioritize server use above everything else, not infrequently to the specific detriment of other use cases.

I'm also getting that impression, as I'm sure @mirabilos is as well.

We seem to be in the "MacOSification of Linux" phase of the corporate roadmap.

This is good for some things, and bad for others. It explains why end-users are generally happy, and UNIX-loving nerds are livid. :/

@rl_dane @jns @mirabilos macOS is actually coming out as the least shitty of all options these day.

Most people use computers for pre-packaged stuff like Zoom, video editors, browsers, et cetera, and an appliance with excellent hardware integration works very well for those uses, whereas open source OSes don’t.

I can run stuff like that in VMs on my open source OS of choice (NetBSD), but I can’t get GPU acceleration because of the proprietary nature of GPUs and their drivers.

So if I’m going to have some proprietary stuff, like GPU drivers from a big, evil company that acts like a monopoly, then why not just choose a proprietary device like a Mac that 1) has fewer problems and better battery life, 2) is openly antagonistic to the other huge, shitty corporations?

I’m not a fan of many things about Apple, but are they more secure than Windows? Yes. Are they less shitty, less problematic and less pricey than NVIDIA? Yes. Can I open a shell and run whatever VMs I want? Yes. Is it ideal? No, but nothing else right now is closer.