I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.

But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.

And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.

So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.

They all use the same switches.

That happens to the commercial folks too. It is just the nature of the adoption curve.

It is the same with price. A few will say that your product is already worth 10x the price. Most will say it’s too expensive. If you drop the price, a few more will see the value. Lots won’t.

More users is more users though. It is not something to get discouraged about. The advantage with Open Source is that, as long as it is useful to some, we have almost an infinite amount of time to expand it to new audiences. Baby steps pay off for Open Source.

Agreed. At the cost of Adobe software, it is amazing that we cannot get a Kickstarter to fund software that closes the gap.

$250 one time from 4000 people would be a million dollars. Isn’t it $300 a year for Photoshop?

They said it was included, not that it was free. I imagine removing the “included” screen would drop the price too.

Wow. $211 is a steep discount. People are going to buy with Linux just to save money, some will try it (because it is there), and some may like it and stay.

At the very least, people may learn that Windows is no easier to install (or even harder).

RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.

I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.

Are you a Debian Stable user perhaps? It feels like you have been trapped on an island alone and are not aware that WWII is over.

Your point is that it is still rough and then you bring up a bunch of stuff that is no longer an issue.

NVIDIA in particular is a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.

RDP, Rustdesk, and Waypipe are probably going to eat into your billion dollars (and network transparency laments).

As stated in the article, opt-out vsync is already a thing (though not widely implemented yet).

I have not used GNOME in a while but KDE on Wayland is great. And the roadmap certainly looks a lot nicer than xorg’s.

I was on a video call in Wayland an hour ago. I shared my screen. I did not think about it much at the time but, since you brought it up….

If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.

RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022 and RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg as an option. Clearly the business world is transitioning to Wayland just fine.

GNOME and KDE both default to Wayland. So, most current Linux desktops do as well.

X11 will be with us a long time but most Linux users will not think about it much after this year. They will all be using Wayland.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

You do not seem to want companies to be part of Linux. This, despite the fact that the majority of code we Linux users enjoy is corporate sponsored. And the fact more software in a typical Linux distro is MIT licensed than is GPL ( and don’t forget BSD and Apache).

The best free routers are based off FreeBSD which of course is BSD licensed. BSD and MIT are extremely similar.

I cannot think of a worse example (or a better example that proves you wrong).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPNsense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PfSense

Both the above are primarily driven by companies that contribute to the software. Your thesis is that they would never do this unless the license forces them to. They do.

I assume what you are talking about is OpenWRT.

Of course, OpenWRT does not even use GNU Utils. It uses BusyBox which was written for Debian. BusyBox would be available with or without Cisco. As would GNU Coreutils of course.

And OpenWRT uses musl as the C library (core of the whole system). It is MIT licensed. It has not only remained available but has benefitted from many corporate contributions.

The LinkSys WRT54 routers were great. I had several. But I am not sure what amazing Cisco code we are benefiting from today as a result of GPL enforcement. The reaction from LinkSys was to switch over to VxWorks and so we have no further contributions from LinkSys, Cisco, or Belkin as a result. The WRT54G had a Broadcom SoC in it and they remain one of the most closed companies out there. I wonder if this lawsuit cemented that. Contrast that to the FreeBSD based routers that continue to see active corporate contribution.

With the AUR, there is an “it depends” since AUR packages are unofficial and variable in quality.

That said, I have a strong bias for installing the distro package over using AppImage or Flatpak.

There are three reasons not to use the distro package:

• the package is not available
• the package is too old
• the package maintainer cannot be trusted

My #1 reason for using Arch is to eliminate 1 and 2. In my experience, the AUR is almost always fine for #3.

Even when I use another distro, I put Distrobox with Arch on it and get any of the packages that the distro does not have from there.

The only Flatpak I have had to install has been pgAdmin.

Performance is not the ISA. It is just the culmination of historical investment. It will get there.

Remember, it is not about licensing costs, it is about minimizing risk and maximizing flexibility (control).

Open always wins.

OMG. That is the most brilliant thing ever. I normally don’t get excited but that would be so good. Better than prison.

He means that the US and Russia will start a war as allies. With the backing of the US military, you can invade anybody you want.

Except he does care about his reputation. It is all he cares about. He is just wrong about what helps it.

He will go down as the dumbest and weakest President ever. He cares. But without a ghost of Presidents past intervention, he will not believe it. He feels tough right now and, I believe, honestly thinks he is right on tariffs. He is wrong and history will record it so, but he really believes it.

China is more stable and reasonable. Normally, the problem with China is that they are authoritarian despots. In the current situation, the US is matching them on the authoritarian despot front. So, China wins by being more stable and reasonable.

Moving away from doing business with China is a problem that has to be solved in the next ten year. Moving away from the US needs to happen now.

I agree.

Just recently, I used GIMP 3.0 to create what will become a sticker on the side of a dozen hockey helmets.

It was a small project but it probably went back and forth a dozen times as each version delivered sparked new ideas or new questions on what was possible. Layers, filters, alpha channel, Smart Selection, and working with text and font outlines were all essential.

I don’t do all this stuff all the time. There is no way I would ever pay for Photoshop. Yet, my standard Linux install had everything I needed to get it done. And it was not that hard.

Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.

Agreed. They have a lot of the required plumbing now. There are some non-destructive editing workflows in GIMP.

I think holding back 3.0 for so long was a mistake. It no longer matters though. It is out now and it can be improved dramatically without such a long break between the dev version and stable.

We will see what the next couple of years brings.