Well, that's depressing. :(

https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

List of #FOSS projects using #slop (yes, including the Linux kernel and of COURSE systemd)

#NoAI

open-slopware

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives. Fork of the repo by @gen-ai-transparency after its deletion.

Codeberg.org

@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.. )

@jns @rl_dane #NetBSD has a careful and deliberate developer selection, so the scenario where lots of corporate shills come in, invite more corporate shills, then push out or outnumber non-shills won’t happen.

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.

@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. :/

@jns @rl_dane @AnachronistJohn yes, Debian is pretty much run by Canonical and Red Hat/GNOME/fdo/systemd at this point, shoved into corpo-think ("all in a central gitlab, and we even use the vendor’s binaries for that", "no single maintainer any more, always teams", "delegates get yearly performance reviews but we’re not calling them that yet", etc.) and discussion culture is shot, plus a vocal minority is shoving slop in with no thought about the consequences

@mirabilos @jns @AnachronistJohn

Bloody tragic. :(

I know I've asked this, but I haven't gotten a conclusive understanding... what's wrong with DeVUAn? I know that it has some political undesirables involved, but I didn't get the impression that their leadership were whackos. Have you looked at them recently?

@AnachronistJohn @rl_dane @jns ugh, that’s the one where all the alt weirdos joined because of course.

I also have absolutely 100% trust in that they lack sufficient tech expertise to support anything Debian actively drops.

@mirabilos @AnachronistJohn @jns

> I also have absolutely 100% trust in that they lack sufficient tech expertise to support anything Debian actively drops.

Ah, same problem as is inherent in most Firefox forks, except Palemoon.

@rl_dane @mirabilos @AnachronistJohn @jns
Ditched Devuan after the first attempt because the installer was a miserable pile of disjointed dialog windows.
MX and Antix have some rough edges, but they do a good job of catering to GUI-minded users and 20+ year old laptops.

Haiku managed to stay in the hippie commune, because whatever advantage it may have in consumer gadgets is overshadowed by Windows and Linux being more established (millions of software developers, years of experience shared with the datacenter world, over 1 billion Dells served).
@rl_dane @AnachronistJohn @jns @mirabilos
My view of Haiku is that it's neat to have an OS that's 1000% focused on desktop use and 32bit "relics": even if it'd be nice to port the userspace to Linux/BSD for the sake of drivers and muh security (full disk encryption, not running everything as root, etc.).

Haven't really used it, but still reserved a flush-fit USB for an install.

Would also be nice to have a fully loaded FreeDOS environment embedded as a disk image on the BIOS chip, as a modern equivalent to the built-in BASIC prompts of the '80s (probably not the best candidate for such an OS if you're concerned about portability but still).

@moses_izumi @moses_izumi @jns @mirabilos @AnachronistJohn

My only reticence when it comes to Haiku is,

  • not being so much of a GUI fan anymore (give me options to move windows with the keyboard, like i3/sway do extremely well, and KDE Plasma can do okay with some config tweaking)
  • I was in #infosec long enough to not want to use an OS without disk encryption, let alone passwords.
  • But I think I'd enjoy playing with it in a VM, and if I like it enough, I might try to make some kind of very bare Linux boot environment that just fires up the VM when you log in. ;)

    @rl_dane @jns @mirabilos @AnachronistJohn
    bonus points if it's a startup script or install template, in addition to yet another jackass specialist distro XD

    (not using Gentoo or the BSDs right now, but I appreciate that they actually try to teach end users how stuff works)