Most Open Source software is written by corporations. The Open Source licenses are an advantage to them.

The biggest source of GPL software is probably Red Hat (IBM). They maintain most of what people think of when they think of GNU software and they wrote many of the newer GPL projects that everybody uses (like systemd).

The trend has been towards permissive licenses for a long time. The have led to more Open Source software, not less.

Look at Clang vs GCC. Clang attracts a greater diversity of corporate contribution and generates greater Open Source diversity. Zig and Rust appeared on LLVM for a reason.

What we should be worried about is the cloud. It allows big companies to outsell the little companies writing Open Source software. Neither permissive nor copyleft licenses prevent this.

I got a laugh at the end as I have also experienced that the hardest part about converting parents to Linux is them not knowing their passwords.

This is me talking out of my ass a but since I do not do it, but you can create your own AUR packages pretty easily. If you have the Deb, you could be rocking it in Arch too.

On Chimera Linux, I do make my own packages. Just so easy.

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

Debian has stopped 32 but in Debian 13. He is talking about Debian 12 which is still supported.

The Debian 12 based version of Q4OS has committed to supporting 32 bit through 2028.

I made the same recommendation. Sadly the “latest” version in 64 bit only. Unsurprising as it is Debian based.

The older release is still available and still supported though. It would be a great option though the clock is ticking on it of course.

The most “batteries included” distro that is I can think of that is not Debian based is Adelie.

DSL is just AntiX with a curated list of software in a CD image. Just go with AntiX if you want to go that route.

Another option to consider is Q4OS Trinity. Trinity is essentially the KDE 3 desktop which is still surprisingly good and very light on resources.

All of these, including MX Linux, are Debian based and have access to the full Debian repos.

A potential issue with all these Debian based distros though is that Debian itself has moved away from 32 bit in Debian 13. It is hard to say how long these others will stay the course.

Adelie Linux is another one people forget about and certainly worth giving a spin. It is not Debian based.

Tiny Core will be the “fastest” as it runs out of RAM but of course that leaves you even less RAM for other things (like a browser). So it depends on your use case.

Are you sure CachyOS has 32 bit support?

See my other post. EndeavourOS works out of the box on MacBooks before 2019. This is with vanilla EOS.

For 2019 and 2020 Intel MacBooks, there is a T2 version of EndeavourOS that includes a custom kernel that again makes everything work after a fresh install. You can just use the package manager after that and it all keeps working, even across kernel updates.

What year?

I have several Mac laptops running Linux with hardware from 2012 to 2020. I find that EndeavourOS works best and WiFi works out of the box.

It uses the wl drivers generally (NOT b43) with DKMS so the module is automatically rebuilt when you upgrade the kernel. You can just upgrade the kernel using the package manager and it “just works” when you reboot. I have been using Linux on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air systems for years and never had a problem (2012, 2013, 2017, 2020). Also iMacs back to 2008.

If you have a T2 chip system, you need a special kernel and apple an wifi/bluetooth firmware blob. In most distros you have to extract the firmware from macOS yourself but it is available in the AUR so there is a special T2 addition of EndeavourOS that makes everything work out of the box. These are the 2019 or 2020 systems I think.

Are you talking about Ladybird?

The US government is a mess but US companies still have all the money. Most Canadian companies have US revenues and will benefit from US deductions.

The first big Ladybird sponsor was Shopify. They are a Canadian company that recently moved their headquarters to the US.

Agree with your last sentence.

My point is that Apple dominates that list of developers (and them and Google before that). How much do you think BlackBerry is contributing these days?

Since we are talking history though, one of the original KHTML devs was Andreas Kling who went on to work on WebKit at Apple and who now leads the Ladybird browser project. He lives in Sweden so I guess Ladybird is European though the newly formed Ladybird Foundation is US based (I am sure to make it easier to raise money by offering US tax deductions).

Sure Blink is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML. But that was 1000 years ago. The biggest contributors by leagues are Google and Apple. Those are US projects. Trying to say they are European is nuts.

LibreOffice is German though and while OpenOffice was from Oracle, it was based on StarOffice which was German. So, the EU can claim that one.

NextCloud is a solid example too.

And, of course, there is SUSE.

Igalia (Spain) brings Servo (web browser) and Chimera Linux too.

Great to see them get them get back on track. PopOS has been a holding pattern for a very long time.

While this is an LTS release, they also say they will release 26.04 LTS in May (just 5 months after 24.04). So, clearly this is a bit of a final beta for that release, at least from a COSMIC desktop point of view.

They are already shipping hardware with the new COSMIC, so things are usable now. I have no doubt though that there will be a lot of improvement over the next six months before 26.04 comes out.

It will be really interesting to see where things go after 26.04 when they are not having to invest everything into just getting to the starting line. Will they continue to pour all this effort into COSMIC? It has a lot of potential.

Governments do not have to be involved in projects to pass laws that impact them.

I would argue greater EU participation in FOSS would improve the situation. One, the number of people in the government that understand how FOSS works may increase and frankly ignorance is often the problem. Second, if lawmakers themselves or the things they care about rely on FOSS, they will be much less likely to kick the legs out from under it.

From a code perspective, the risk is low. If it is just that they add back doors (not because it is the law), we simply create versions without those back doors and use that instead.

I do not think that developers have any greater insight into social or legal issues than you do.

I still use VirtualBox but a version built to work with KVM.

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

It does not need a kernel module or DKMS because it uses KVM.

Oracle is accused though.

Pretty harsh response given that a proper shape tool, and specifically the ability to draw a circle, is on the GIMP roadmap.

I do not think it is the most essential functionality but even the project sees it as missing.

Most distros do not require the extra repos. For Debian though, you do. The ones shipped with the distro, even Debian 13, are too old and have problems.

Two pretty massive facts for anybody trying to answer this question:

1. Since driver version 555, explicit sync has been supported. This makes a massive difference to the experience on Wayland. Most of the problems people report are for drivers earlier than this (eg. black screens and flicker).

2. Since driver version 580, NVIDIA uses Open Source modules to interact with the kernel. These are not Open Source drivers. They are the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA that should now “just work” across kernel upgrades (like AMD has forever). This solves perhaps the biggest hassle of dealing with NVIDIA on Linux.

Whether you get to enjoy these significant improvements depends on how long it takes stuff to make it to your distribution. If you are on Arch, you have this stuff today. If you are on Debian, you are still waiting (even on Debian 13).

This is not an endorsement of either distro. They are simply examples of the two extremes regarding how current the software versions are in those distros. Most other distros fall somewhere in the middle.

All this stuff will make it to all Linux users eventually. They are solved problems. Just not solved for everyone.

But x11 is insecure

ducks

UUtils has, until now, been a niche project with few users. Putting it in the most popular desktop distro is going to expose it to many new users and use cases. Some of those are bound to find differences in behaviour between UUtils and GNU which should be considered bugs. No doubt.

But this “not-very-well tested” mantra is just silly. UUtils itself uses the exact same test suite as GNU does. They have been testing against this suite for years:

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking/blob/main/gnu-results.svg

While not all tests pass yet, the subset of functionality that people are likely to actually use is very well tested.

And the reason some bugs were found recently is precisely because UUtils were put through the normal test cycle for Ubuntu. A small number of bugs were caught which is the goal of that process. These are things that were previously not in the test suite. I see there are some new tests. UUtils may have contributed to that as new use cases were encountered that showed differences in behaviour between GNU and UUtils. The issues discovered were quickly fixed.

Think of what is involved in creating a distribution like Ubuntu and building the tens of thousands of packages that they ship in their repos—all with build scripts written for GNU Coreutils. This is all working with UUtils unmodified.

With the distro live now, the number of users will have already exploded. Where are the bug reports and articles about all the problems encountered? Crickets.

That does not mean there will not be any such cases. That is not my point at all. My point is that “not very well tested” does not jive with how well things are going considering what a massive change this is.

UUtils is much better tested than much of the software I use.