Mastodawn

Linux desktop news feels split in two right now.

On the one hand, Wayland is finally getting long-needed session restore, fractional scaling work is moving forward, Linux gaming just pushed past 5% on Steam, and GitHub had to retreat after backlash over Copilot pull request "tips”.

On the other, the office suite world is a proper mess: Euro-Office has launched, ONLYOFFICE has suspended its Nextcloud partnership over licensing and attribution claims, and the LibreOffice ecosystem is locked in a very public fight between TDF and Collabora.

This is what happens when open source becomes strategically important again. Governance, sovereignty, trademarks, attribution, and control all come to the surface.

Are we seeing healthy competition, or the start of fragmentation that could hurt Linux users?

https://youtu.be/eweMlWewcVg

#Linux #OpenSource #LibreOffice #OnlyOffice #Nextcloud #Wayland #GitHub #LinuxGaming #DigitalSovereignty

What is happening to our Office Suites?! - Linux Weekly News

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Alien software, human hardware 11h ago

@beitmenotyou fragmentation is healthy. It's the solution to committee deadlock.
Eventually some projects will attract the most development work, and the process starts again.
Open source free software is not bound by deadlines or fiskal years.
It's developing (or not) and it gets forked (or not) and it gets new features (or bugs) and life goes on.
There is zero reason for breathless sensationalism in free open software.

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Michael J. Burgess 11h ago

@mavu Fragmentation can be healthy when it breaks stagnation, I agree with that. Forks and public disagreements are often how free software corrects itself.

That said, it stops feeling healthy when ordinary users get caught in the fallout: broken partnerships, unclear branding, duplicated effort, and trust issues between projects people rely on.

The tension is not really “forks bad” or “forks good”. It is whether the ecosystem can compete without turning coordination into collateral damage.

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Alien software, human hardware 11h ago

@beitmenotyou yes, and no. The users are not losing anything though, right?
No one can take the software they are using today away from them, they could just keep using what they have?
I'm aware that this point of view might be incompatible with open source free software use in enterprise contexts.
But I'm actually fine with that.
Let them contribute. Develop their own forks. Everyone profits longterm.
We should not forget the roots: just some people putting in their time for fun for free.