Captain Beyond

Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

The most obvious difference going from Debian stable to GNU Guix is that Guix is a rolling release distro, not stable (in the Debian sense) at all.

Package management is also very different as it’s fundamentally a source based distro, although sometimes the build servers can provide prebuilt packages if they’re available. Also, Guix has the concept of “profiles” which group sets of installed packages; typically, there is a system profile as well as a profile for each user, but users can also create their own separate profiles. This means that a user can install packages to their own profile without needing root permissions.

Profile updates are done in an atomic manner, such that changing the set of installed packages (installing, updating, or removing a package) actually creates a new generation of the profile, and it’s possible to roll back to a previous generation if something breaks. This is true of the system as well as the user profile(s), of course. A profile generation can also be exported as a manifest, which can then be imported to create a profile generation on another system, allowing package management to be done in a declarative manner.

Finally, Guix has a commitment to ship only free software, and uses linux-libre as its kernel. Debian has a clear separation between free and non-free components but does ship non-free software, including firmware blobs, and I believe as of recently the installer provides them by default. There are unofficial Guix channels (=repositories) that provide these things.

Currently I run GNU Guix on my desktop, laptop, and servers. I like the dedication to software freedom and the way package management works. Before that I used Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until around 2010. Debian and Trisquel are fine and I don’t have anything against them, I just like the Guix package manager more. I’ve used Xfce with all of these (and before then, GNOME 2). I set it up the way I like it and it never changes.

I typically run LineageOS on my mobile devices, without microG or any proprietary apps. As I’ve said before my preferred OS would be some variant of GNU/Linux, preferably Guix as well, but LineageOS works well enough.

I run OpenWRT on my router, and had a previous router than ran LibreCMC (a variant of OpenWRT using Linux-libre).

Windows games are made for Windows so I prefer to use Windows for them. I don’t particularly want to turn GNU/Linux into Windows, I think it deserves better than that.

It’s worth noting the reason why Molly isn’t available on F-Droid proper: it’s entirely F-Droid’s decision. F-Droid policy requires that developers support (or do not oppose) inclusion in F-Droid, which Signal’s developers haven’t. Signal’s developers are also hostile towards forks and do not want them interoperating with Signal. Thus, F-Droid does not allow Signal or any fork of Signal.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/2297

I am not really a fan of this decision, I don’t think it’s logical that an upstream can forbid a fork from being published anywhere - but that’s F-Droid’s call to make.

Notice they avoid using the exact term “open source” in this press release. I’m ~90% sure it’ll turn out to be under some proprietary source-available license.

There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.

Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”

I would certainly hope so. Stack Overflow content is Creative Commons licensed, so the argument is basically that the GDPR would take precedence over the CC license grant. It’d be scary if GDPR could be weaponized against forks of free software projects in this manner.

Firstly, Captain Beyond is the name of a band that I’m fond of - although by far not my favorite one, ever.

However, it’s also somewhat aspirational. “Captain” I define as the sort of leader as in the captains of Star Trek, someone who leads by example, who makes-it-so, takes care of their people and their “ship” so-to-speak. Someone who is more of a steward than a boss. Someone who is first and foremost in command of themselves. “Beyond” refers to the aspiration to go further and achieve great things.

As I said it’s more aspirational than anything - I don’t think I do a very good job of living up to that moniker most of the time.

A tool with fewer features that is harder to use is by definition an inferior tool.

That’s only your opinion, not an objective truth, and I only partially agree with it. Having the most features is not as important as having just the right set of features, and there are anti-features to consider as well. Feature creep can actually impact the usability of a tool, so these two criteria are sometimes in contradiction.

Ease of use is subjective and depends on the user, because users’ needs, ability, tastes, and concerns differ. Of course, I don’t think anyone deliberately chooses a tool because it is hard to use.

I don’t agree that freeness is purely an ideological concern. I don’t think a tool that works against me, or imposes arbitrary restrictions on me is a good tool by any measure. A good tool doesn’t enshittify, or spy on its user, or refuse to work for arbitrary reasons. If a tool doesn’t work and you are legally not allowed to fix it (as in the printer which inspired the movement in the 1980s), it’s not a good tool. If a tool punishes you for something you didn’t even do (as BitKeeper did to the Linux developers) it’s not a good tool, even if it has the right features.

I don’t tell you that your opinion is wrong, only that I don’t agree with it. We are told our concerns are invalid and don’t matter.

This is proprietary software even if it’s been put in a git repo (presumably without the consent of the rightsholder) and run offline.

As has been pointed out in this thread, someone already got hit with a DMCA takedown for this.

I don’t understand why we spend so much time praising proprietary software in these communities.

As to your question, I have a separate Windows machine for gaming, but that’s it. I keep one foot in the free world and one in the proprietary. As for productivity tools I can’t think of a proprietary tool I “can’t quit” or that I would pick in favor of a free tool.

Fans of proprietary software have this weird belief that free software users choose inferior tools for purist or idealist reasons. This is offensively ignorant. No one chooses bad tools on purpose; we just consider freedom to be part of the criteria of a good tool.

They do say that

They will be using a different repository with a different license for some of its new features

“different license” suggests to me it might be a proprietary/fauxpen source licene, since this is explicitly being done to punish a fork.

“purple-discord” is the only free software Discord client I know about. It is a plugin for Pidgin and other libpurple based messengers such as Bitlbee.

“rdircd” the “reliable Discord client IRC daemon” might be an alternative but I’ve never used it.

Neither of these run out of the box on mobile but you can run them on a server you control, or maybe you could run them under Termux (have never tried this).

You can also use a Matrix or IRC bridge if you control the Discord “server.”

I don’t count client mods or web wrappers as they are fundamentally coupled to the proprietary client.

NFT Bros 🤝 Twitter Artists

Seething about their jpegs being stolen

Discord is a proprietary centralized service that is hostile to privacy and third-party clients.

People are recommending the proprietary FUTO voice app. This app, and other FUTO apps like Greyjay, are non-free.

https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/

It is in fact non-free. (The article is about Grayjay, a product from the same company that uses the same license)

Not a copypasta, although given the average community member’s understanding of this issue comes from memes and copypastas, maybe it should become one.

That’s at the core of the myth (and thus the myths surrounding the myth) - that the discussion is about “what to call Linux” when in fact it’s always been about separating Linux from the userland that is often paired with it. Linux is Linux, no matter what compiler you use to build it - but the stuff that runs on top of Linux is not Linux.

I guess I’m being called out here, so wall of text incoming.

Linux and GNU are completely separate projects that have no relationship organizationally or technologically. As basic as this is, this is important to understand as the backdrop for “the GNU/Linux issue.”

Linux was started in 1991 as a project to build an operating system, one that is “not as big or professional as GNU.” In practical terms, Linux is just a kernel. It has no terminal, no command line tools, no desktop, no package manager, no web browser. Yet, people speak of it as if it’s a fully featured operating system that contains all of those things, an alternative to Windows or macOS.

GNU was started in 1983 as a project to build an operating system, but as GNU’s own kernel (the Hurd) is in development hell, the userland components (libraries and tools) are generally used with Linux to form a complete operating system, which is referred to as GNU/Linux. The “slash” is meant to signify that it’s a combination of these two projects. Note that, as the GNU project has adopted the Linux-libre variant of Linux, the Hurd is no longer really a priority project.

Of course, you can have Linux without GNU (Android and Alpine are the best examples of this) and you can also run GNU on non-Linux platforms (Debian has a port that runs on the FreeBSD kernel, and the tools themselves run on any Unixy operating system and even Windows). So I don’t really think you can conclude any of these are the “most important part” of the operating system, and it more or less comes down to whatever brand name you feel the most comfortable with.

And, of course, most GNU/Linux operating systems contain much more than GNU and Linux these days. Therefore, I prefer to understand Linux as a family of operating systems (as Wikipedia defines it) and GNU/Linux as a subfamily. The ironic thing is that, from a UX perspective, Linux, the kernel, is probably the least prominent component of the operating system, as it is furthest away from the user interface - but it is most prominent brand name and so gets applied to the whole “ecosystem.”

A lot of Linux fans think an operating system has to have more than Linux to be a “real Linux” operating system, or that it has to be community run or “anti-corporate” or meet some ideological criteria. But, Linus himself has no such ideology, and Linux is a very corporate project. Android is the most widely used Linux operating system. It is as much “real Linux” as Debian is.

The myth of the fictional operating system called Linux naturally leads to other myths, such as the myth of fragmentation. In that sense I feel it’s harmful, but the damage has been done and even the conversation around the myth has its own myths (such as the idea that Stallman wants to “rename Linux” or is jealous of Linux’s popularity, that “Linux should be called GNU/Linux” because “it contains GNU” or because it was built with GNU tools or licensed under the GPL). It’s hard to argue for “calling it GNU/Linux” when people don’t even understand what “it” is, or even what the admittedly convoluted name is supposed to signify. So, for that reason, I don’t think the “battle” is worth fighting anymore.

For the record, though, I refer to my preferred operating system by its own name, GNU Guix System, and make an effort not to center any particular project or brand name when talking about the free software community and ecosystem in general. I don’t characterize myself as a fan or user of Linux, just a free software enthusiast - the fact that all of my preferred operating systems contain Linux is a consequence of the fact that Linux is the most widely used free software kernel, not because of any brand loyalty on my part. Non-Linux operating systems such as the BSD’s should be considered as part of the free operating system family.