The idea of free software is extremely socialist/communist. People working together to create something that anyone can use for free, with profit being a non-existent or at least minor motivator.
It’s a real shame that generally lefties don’t really care about or ‘get’ software freedom. You should be pushing for free software on all levels. In your personal life and in government. It’s crazy how much power a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google has over everyone.
I was leftie before I was techie. If you don’t know anything around tech and computers you wouldn’t know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.
Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.
Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don’t, and I guess we’ll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don’t ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.
I explained to finance why we had to purchase licenses for for a UI library. To justify the costs, they asked what the alternative was. I told them we don’t have the talent or resources to develop our own UI library… But I offered up free open source alternatives.
Unfortunately the FOSS stuff never gets approved by IT due to vulnerability / threats.
But is FOSS actually more vulnerable?
Depends, sometimes not always. Having source available makes it easy for hackers to find exploit but also makes it easier for community to identify and address exploits.
So… For a large active community project, it’s likely fairly secure but for smaller projects with 1 or just a few developers it might be vulnerable.
Yeah, if a stereotypical construction union rep feels judged by the FOSS world why would they try.
My local bike coop apparently used to run mint on their computer, but when the person who set it up left town it was too much for the bike nerds who weren’t mad engineers (this person also built an electrolysis tub, that had to be gotten rid of when they left Idk if they were actually an engineer by profession, but my dumb engineer ass keeps hearing they did shit I want to do). They’d go back if it was the same, but windows just works for them and linux needed someone to make it work.
There’s definitely a gatekeeping issue, but free software doesn’t automatically mean ‘force people to use Linux’, there’s stuff like Firefox, Libreoffice, Nextcloud, etc.
It’s things like councils working together on common software platforms instead of going with commercial vendors, supported by local companies instead of shoveling billions to Google and Microsoft that gets sent overseas immediately. It’s federal governments hiring developers directly to work on software instead of using commercial vendors.
It’s pretty hard to fight hegemony when your salary is just built on donations. A lot of important tech is also paid for via government grants then the private sector gets to use it and erect the walled gardens when it should be in the commons.
Most big projects survive on more than just donations. The Linux kernel is developed by developers paid by some of the biggest software corporations.
It’s really too bad the original innovators got subsumed by capitalist ‘tech bros.’
The hippies were always capitalist adjacent. Many of them became the Jesus freaks and yuppies.
There were actual leftist movements happening at the time, but those were more of minorities beginning the discussions on how to actively demand power. Black power, gay liberation, women’s liberation, and American communism. Some of this did coincide with the tech hippies.
The California ideology was there from the start.
As a linux leftie, I fully agree. It’s hard to convince people though. Also, I don’t necessarily think it’s the best intro to leftism for layfolk. It’s a great into to leftism for tech nerds and a great intro to tech for left nerds, but the punk who just uses the library computer doesn’t care. Unions are often the easiest intro to leftism for people and not many union folks are interested in learning free software.
I was out drinking the other day and an IBCW friend introduced me to a union brother of his and they’re smart guys who believe in the power of labor, hell they even excitedly showed me that there’s a professionals union in the AFL-CIO, but if I tried to explain a terminal to them they’d look at me like I grew several heads at once.
Free software is great praxis, but it often suffers by the fact that it isn’t what people are used to. That there are intro free softwares like GIMP, libreoffice, and basically anything where FOSS is the default. We can do this, but I think it’s definitely going to not be the easiest sell.
I’m sure they wouldn’t collect personal data for nefarious purposes… Or abuse what they collect 🤔
Big tech that is…
It’s mutual. I don’t necessarily extend my expectations of a machine doing what I tell it to, out into geopolitics.
There’s a lot of overlap in useful terminology and philosophy. There’s a bit of overlap in organizational problem-solving (and problem-having). But you can be aggressively capitalist, and still recognize the benefits of stone-soup development. Even in hardware - RISC-V is going to undercut low-end ARM in embedded applications, and hard-drive manufacturers are not exactly Spanish republicans.
Well, there is also a more right leaning take. You take care of your self and scratch your own itch, and you should not be a liability to the society, but make your self useful and contribute back. And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.
That phrase that you said has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux/Libre philosophy.
You take care of your self and scratch your own itch
While I understand that you meant to make an analogy with people creating the projects they want to use, the vast majority of people don’t create their projects, and instead contribute to others, and they contribute with existing issues not necessarily things that they want or need. Alternatively you can see that a lot of issues are fixed by people who are not affected by it, it’s very common for issues to ask people to test specific changes to see if they solved the issue they were facing.
and you should not be a liability to the society
The vast majority of people just use the software that the community maintains, and when they need a feature they open a PR and let the community implement it. So the vast majority of people are a liability to the community, even if you contribute to one project actively you use several others that you’ve never contributed to.
but make your self useful and contribute back.
This has nothing to do with right-wing philosophy, in fact most right wing people are against any form of contribution,
And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.
You might not like it, but FLOSS is extremely aligned with left wing ideology, where people contribute to the community because they want to and the community provides back without asking anything in return.
So, what you say is that any free society is by definition communism, since society is built on people contributing by free will? Not sure I follow.
People in capitalist economies do not contribute out of free will. They contribute so they won’t starve.
Now, you are just making shit up, to fit your own beliefs. Have fun with that mental masturbation.
I have to admit, this reply has dumbfounded me. Well done.
Well the argument “People in capitalist economies do not contribute out of free will” is something you just pull out of your ass, to define your side as the ones that will “contribute out of free will” (hence, the good side). This is the same logic you see in religious cults, where they define that themselves are moral and right, and the outside immoral. It really doesn’t deserve any serous response since there is no response that will be able to penetrate that kind of brainwash.
I dont think so, that isn’t necessarily the case. I think people in capitalist economies can also contribute out of their own free will, because they have fun with the project. To put it so that they only do it not to starve is, in my opinion, too harsh. I do lots of things in this economy because I have fun with them, not because I dont want to starve. However, I think that of course the aspect “I need food” is always a factor and an influence. Just very often not the only one.
Of course capitalism operates in a lot of gray areas, it’s how it seems freer than it actually is. “I need food” isn’t always a problem, but it is one often enough to be systemically problematic. Abandoning one’s hopes and dreams because one must be “realistic” is the norm.
I think you raise a good point, I agree. Especially that the problem is very systematic.
Yeah, what I said is an exaggeration. A tiny portion of the population will never have to do a day of work in their lives because they’re bankrolled by daddy. Other people will have free time because of the efforts of the labor movement. Some people are lucky to have jobs they like. But, unless you’re super rich, the threat is always there. Capitalists are working hard to roll back labor rights. You could lose your job. You’re always a few bad days away from needing to take a shit job so you can eat.
Okay, makes sense - I fully agree. Just wanted to clarify :)
Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.
A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.
“OK” , just remind me, which are the free communist countries again?
They don’t exist
There are no communist countries. Only Communist countries. Communism is an authoritarian state economic system that is nominally left leaning. Whereas communism is largely against states and state power, and very libertarian in the original sense.
So the answer to your question is that technically all communist countries are free. You just don’t know the difference.
Ahhh… the communist countries are where all the unicorn lives… got it!
Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.
A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.
Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.
Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.
First let’s setup some terminology so we’re not confusing terms.
Free means no money, or monetary value, is needed. i.e As in “free beer”
Free can also mean no obligations or reprehensions, e.g. Free speech.
To avoid confusion let’s refer to the freedom one as Libre, i.e. free beer, libre speech.
Secondly I never said communism, since communism has a hard definition imposed by their creators, I said left-wing, for the purposes of this discussion let’s agree on a middle term of socialism to mean the opposite of capitalism, or if you prefer a type of government associated with left wing parties, which involve social policies and free services.
With those definitions out of the way: Is any free society by definition socialist? It is my opinion that yes, any society that’s past the need for money it’s by definition socialist, whereas any society that uses money (or monetary equivalents) it’s capitalist.
Libre or authoritarian governments can exist on either side of the spectrum of economical policies, so if you meant to ask whether is any libre society by definition socialist? My answer would be no, you can have societies where you have freedom but things cost money. That being said I believe that no society can be truly Libre unless the basic structure and needs are free.
I understand the simplification, but neither post scarcity nor elimination of money is necessary for establishing socialism. There just needs to be a fair and even allocation of it, which mostly necessitates eliminating private ownership of capital.
I hope this is a lightbulb moment for you
Yes it is, but not in the way you hope. I live in a socialist country, but I’m still stunned about the level of the communist delusions people seems to have here.
Social democracy isn’t really socialist…
Anyways it’s just good to know that FOSS is built upon anarchist principles (of course, this doesn’t mean every FOSS project is anarchist) and is a great example of free association in practice. It helps demystify anarchism and communism.
Also what “delusions” are you talking about? Marxist-leninist ones?
The desillusions people seems to have here is the same kind you have for religious people and moral, where the religious people claim that religion is what provides moral, and hence non-religious people cannot know right from wrong. It seems that in the same way, people in this discussion have defined that communism is the mechanism for being generous and being willing to contribute to society. Hence, all non-communist societies cannot exists, since nobody will build it. Basically, it is a very brainwashed take on communism, not based on anything existing but on some fantasy, especially since all practical attempts at communism seems to requires to strip people of all their freedoms.
Eric S Raymond (ESR) is the originator of the philosophy you’re espousing. He’s a Right-Libertarian who has made a lot of contributions to and arguments about FOSS, but in this case i think he’s pretty much wrong. He was a big proponent of the BSD license and opponent of the GPL because, in his view, the GPL interfered with economic activity while BSD was more compatible with it.
ESR’s belief was that open source software was not threatened by capitalism and that it would thrive even if large companies used it, while the other side of the argument was that it would languish if all of the large users were corporations who did not (voluntarily) contribute back. In contrast, with GPL (and similar mandatory open licenses): the corporations would be required to contribute back and thus whether the usage was corporate or not the project would benefit and grow either way.
That was a while ago, though. I think we can see, now, that while the BSDs are great (and have many of their own technological advantages over Linux based OSes) and they are being used by corporations, that has not resulted in the kind of explosive growth we’ve seen with GPL software. Gross tech bros love to use both BSD-style and GPL-style code, but with GPL they’re required to contribute back. That attracts developers, too, who don’t want to see their work end up as the foundation of some new Apple product with nothing else to show for it.
So we now can pretty much call it, i think, barring new developments: the Communist (and Left-Libertarian and Anarchist) approach “won” and the Right-Libertarian approach didn’t actually pan out. GPLed software is running servers and all kinds of things even though, technically speaking, BSD was probably a better choice up until recently (until modern containerization, probably) and still has a lot going for it. The Right-Libertarian philosophy on this is a dead end.
You didn’t write the kernel, write the libraries, or write the user space applications, did you? No, Linux is the product of a collaborative group of strangers working towards the same goal, a goal that largely doesn’t include any considerations for profit. You haven’t pulled yourself up by your boot straps to make Linux. Hell, even Linus didn’t do that. It’s the product of thousands of people working on it over decades. It’s not capitalist, it’s not individualistic, Linux is communal.
TIL: I must be a communist/socialist/leftist/whatever for supporting FOSS. What’s next? Marxism/Leninism? Or maybe I missed that stop, while riding the communism train. Then again, I’m already on Lemmy, so I must be into ML as well, right?
If you believe, for a particular issue, that people should work together to create something that anyone can use for free, then for that particular issue you do have a socialist ideology. That’s the definition of a socialist policy, other examples of this are public education, public health care, or Universal Basic Income. You might disagree with healthcare being public, but agree that education should be, people are not entirely socialist or capitalist, each issue can have a different answer.
People, especially those in the US and Brazil, need to stop thinking communism/socialism are bad terms and look at them for what they really are and analyse the specific issue at hand.
Socialist policies are popular in polling. But as soon as they get called out as socialist, people shut down and revert to their mass produced programming. Capitalism good! Socialism Bad!
Just some leftover trauma from the Red Scare days, I guess.
Socialism has to to with collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, not cost to the consumer. Goods and services may typically be free at the time of use (funded by taxes ahead of time) but that does NOT mean free as in without cost.
Again, like most of the other people in this thread, you’re confusing free as in freedom (software movement), and free as in without cost.
I agree that socialism is not the scary term that staunch capitalists seem to believe that it is. However, perpetuating misunderstandings about what socialism means will not help find a healthy balance.
Don’t we all collectively own the Linux kernel for all practical purposes, for example? Any of us can just check it out and do with it whatever we want (within the limits of the GPL).
I’m most definitely not confusing those terms since my native language uses different words for each. Read my other reply, I use the terms free and libre when I think there’s need for clarification. Since socialist policies revolve around collective ownership and public distribution there’s no meaning to saying they are libre, only free as in free beer makes any sense in this context.
You can support communist/socialist policies without being a tankie. Most rational leftists do. And yeah, if you support FOSS you support a socialist idea. Same if you support public healthcare, public education, or libraries.
Just because an idea is labeled as socialist/capitalist or whatever, doesn’t inherently make it good or bad. People like to label things to simplify complicated topics, but that shortcut isn’t always worth it. Nowadays, I hear a lot of talk about this or that being socialist/communist thing as if that makes it automatically bad. Somehow, I get the feeling that most of those people are Americans. If that’s actually true, it would make a lot of sense.
I don’t think we disagree. Just thought it was interesting how closely FOSS ideas match those of communism and socialism, even though a lot of people probably don’t view it that way.
Yes, that’s the fascinating thing. Using labeling as a mental shortcut for understanding the world is really useful, but it comes with a price tag.
It’s basically the same problem we have when labeling thins as “religion” or “some other stuff”. We might want to call something a religion, but it doesn’t quite match. We might want to label something else a non-religion, but it meets all the criteria. Those labels aren’t neutral either, so using them comes with some baggage.
Same thing with FOSS. If we label it a socialist concept, that label comes with some unfortunate connotations… Well, at least if you’re in a country where socialism is frowned upon.
Or just think for yourself and have your own opinions about issues instead of signing up for an entire ideology.
Yep. This is the way, but it won’t stop other people from labeling you regardless.
No one is labeling you. Though you should perhaps reflect on the world around you and maybe see that adhering to an ideology is actually just applying philosophy comprehensively to all layers of society at the same time.
The idea of free software isn’t political; ie socialist/communist. Free software is also compatible with free market capitalism. In a capitalist market free of coercion there is nothing that stops one from copying something then changing and/or selling it.
If you make a microwave and I buy one and reverse engineer it then I could produce and sell it just fine. Similarly, if you created a program called Adobe Photoshop, and I got a hold of the code, then I could copy and resell it. Neither capitalism nor the free market has a concept of patents or copyrights which are a political thing. Everything is free to reproduce.
Making the software free is just the logical economic price of a product with a marginal cost very close to zero. Give it away and let everyone build on top of it to make increasingly better things because that is the most efficient way to manage those resources. It’s like the progression of science. We give credit for discovery, but encourage all science to happen in the open so others can take the ideas and build on them without being encumbered.
I hope you don’t think that science is socialist/communist.
Note: After going through the trouble of writing this I became concerned that my use of the loaded term “free market capitalism” could be misunderstood so I’ve decided to define my terms. Free market capitalism isn’t a form of government. Capitalism just means stuff can be privately owned. A market is how capital is coordinated. The free refers to the market transactions being voluntary/free of coercion. So free market capitalism is the “voluntary coordination of private capital”. That definition can exist under varying forms of government which is why I argue that it isn’t a political system in itself.
Capitalism just means stuff can be >privately owned
This is the antithesis of free software. FOSS can not be owned. Patents and copyright are essential to capitalism. You are not allowed to copy and redistribute Adobe Photoshop, nor the music of your favorite band, movies, books, etc etc
This isn’t really correct. Free Open Source Software is very much owned. It is just that the owner doesn’t charge for it, has stated that there are rules for use and modification of the software. FOSS was a clever trick that used copyright against itself. It is was a really brilliant trick, but that trick was only necessary because copyrights exist in the first place. If copyrights didn’t exist then it wouldn’t be illegal to redistribute Adobe Photoshop.
You may argue that copyrights are necessary for the betterment of society, but that is debatable. The biggest case against copyright being necessary is, in fact, the FOSS movement. It proves we don’t actually need companies like Adobe to make all our stuff and charge a lot for it.
Free software subverts some of the rent seeking barriers put in place by capitalists (copyright and patents, both are enforced by government). I agree that a real free market wouldn’t have those things, but capitalists don’t want a free market, they want to capture the market and extract as much profit out of it for the least amount of effort.
My problem with what you said is that it isn’t just capitalists that use patents and copyrights. Russia and China have patents and copyrights. It isn’t limited to capitalists, and saying so confuses people on what the actual issues are.
Russia hasn’t been communist since 1991. Not sure what the copyright regime was in the old Soviet Union. As for China, they’ve implemented a bunch of capitalist concepts in order to interface with the wider capitalist world (as part of trade agreements, they decided to honour copyright and patents in order to be able to sell us stuff).
Just because a nominally communist country (and you can definitely argue about that in China’s case) does something, that doesn’t mean that that thing is automatically either communist or capitalist.
You’re missing the entire point of the free software movement. Free as in freedom does NOT intrinsically mean free as in absence of cost. Linux exists because of companies like Cygnus who successfully marketed the Bazaar, as opposed to the Cathedral, to investors.
Stallman and Torvalds themselves have gone on record multiple times stating the utter lack of political motivation in being able to modify the software on your machine.
Please stop posting good reasons to use Linux, I already feel bad enough for the poor people stuck in Win$ and MacO$
I just got rid of my last Windows installation, and I got rid of all my Apple devices a couple years ago. The Linux life is so nice!
On the other hand, I just setup a Windows gaming machine for a friend (I would have pushed Linux, but I live far away and can’t commit to being tech support). There were so many hoops to jump through to cut through all the crap:
- I had to set the region to somewhere in the EU so that my friend can uninstall Edge sometime in March, 2024 without breaking other functionality
- I had to run a hidden script at a specific point during the install to allow me to not have to use a Microsoft account
- I had to disconnect the non-boot drive and reinstall because the Windows installer uses motherboard drive ordering instead of UUID to decide which drive to put the boot partition on.
- I had to run Win Debloat Tools to get rid of all the crap Microsoft adds to their OS
- I had to find a 3rd party driver update tool because the motherboard manufacturer’s software is terrible and installs a bunch of extra crap.
- I had to install a 3rd party Nvidia driver update tool because their official one requires making an account and gives a bunch of unwanted ads as notifications.
It’s seriously bonkers. It makes you really appreciate Linux as a whole and package managers in particular.
Whenever people talk about how difficult Linux is to install i ask them if they’ve installed Windows lately. They all say “yes”. I do not believe a word of it, though. If they had done so–or more likely, tried to do so–there’s no way they’d have that opinion. I’m sure they’ve gone into their OEM’s recovery menu and hit “reinstall” or whatever, but that’s a very different process.
It’s “hard” to us because we actually uncheck the telemetry settings and care about not having a Microsoft account on, including the additional debloating afterwards. For the average user, clicking next every step, ignoring the data harvesting effort and creating / using a Microsoft account is part of the experience and “normal” to them.
It’s funny because I’ve built like six Windows machines and the install process is always a snap. You just select what drive to install to, what telemetry options you want on/off, and then press start.
You don’t even have to have an Internet connection/Microsoft account if you don’t want to, you can just create a local one.
I don’t understand how you guys have such a hard time with it. Certain distros of Linux are pretty easy to get going, but Windows is only hard if you refuse to leave your Linux knowledge bubble, ever.
Sure we can talk about how you have to go in and do X and Y in order to get it configured how YOU want, but that shit applies in Linux too.
I don’t know when the last time you tried to install Windows was, but when I installed Windows 11 Pro yesterday, there was no obvious option to install without an internet connection and a Microsoft account. To make that option appear, I had to hit shift+f10 at the country selection screen to open a command prompt and run the script located at “oobe\bypassrno.cmd” to have the option “I don’t have an internet connection” to pop up and allow me to bypass needing a Microsoft account.
I’ve never installed Windows 11 outside of assisting company IT, but we have install media/network based images we can push.
I’m referring to W10, I don’t like 11 at all.
That’s fine, and people said the same thing about Windows 10, and Windows 7, and Windows XP, and…
If you control for bloat, tracking, and ads, the install process for Windows versions has gotten steadily more difficult as time goes on. Installing Windows 11 is a snap, too, … if you don’t care about all the crap they added.
The thing us Linux users are complaining about is not how easy it is to install if you accept the enshittification that Microsoft forces, but how difficult it is to install without it.
when I installed Windows 11 Pro yesterday, there was no obvious option to install without an internet connection and a Microsoft account
…
Christ on a fucking cracker man, leave the fucking ethernet cable unplugged…
Installing Windows from scratch is as easy, if not easier, than installing Linux. If you think it’s difficult, that really seems like a you problem.
I’ve tried switching to Linux exclusively multiple times, and I always end up falling back to Windows on my desktop. I have multiple Linux servers and VMs, but there are two main barriers. First is gaming. Last time I tried, I couldn’t get RTX working in some titles, EA launcher was broken, and it was generally just buggy. The second reason is for coding. I’ve been coding for Windows for almost 20 years, and I am hugely reliant on Visual Studio. I just can’t find a comparable alternative for Linux.
I’d ditch Windows in a second if I could make Linux work for me, but so far I haven’t had much luck.
I have a friend that does .NET development on Linux. So I guess that’s possible. I know he uses JetBrains Rider as an IDE instead of visual studio. I’m sure there are some other hoops he jumps through, as well, but I never really dove into it with him. I always used Visual Studio in Uni, myself. I also have a Windows partition for gaming and music production.
.NET is infuriating enough on Windows. Any time I have to work with a .NET library, I always write a wrapper with a C or C++ interface first. Your friend who does .NET development on Linux has far more patience than I can ever hope to have.
For sure. If I was going to do .NET again I would just fire up Windows and Visual Studio like most other sane people.
I had similar issues. My Nvidia GPU was the main thing hold me back for so long. I finally upgraded to an AMD RX 7900 XTX and cycled my Nvidia GPU to my home server for transcoding, gpu compute, and KasmVNC GPU acceleration.
I also decided that ray tracing, HDR, and games that don’t support Linux just aren’t important to me, but it took me a long time to become okay with that.
For development, I guess I’ve been lucky in the type of work that I do in that Linux is a perfect fit. I find Windows to be far more of a hassle than it’s worth, but if you do game development or Windows-specific development, I can see that being a barrier.
RTX is one of those things that just isn’t optional for me. I may be in the minority, but I am far more concerned with how games look than how they run. As long as my FPS is above 30 or so, I’m generally okay with performance. I feel like Windows will always support those “extra features” like RTX before Linux, unfortunately. I really comes down to market share, I think; the developers at Nvidia and AMD are going to target Windows first, and the people who maintain Proton are stuck in second place. You’ll have to pry Windows 10 out of my cold dead hands, though; I liked Vista better than Windows 11.
For development, I’m locked into Windows at work, but my job isn’t specifically software development; it just happens to be a useful skill to have in my career. I do far more coding at home, and I certainly have the option of switching to Linux. I think I’ve just been spoiled by Visual Studio’s all-in-one approach for so long. My #1 concern is debugging. I haven’t seen an Linux IDE that allows for stepping back through the call stack and checking variable states inside the IDE quite like VS does it.
To be clear, I’m not bashing Linux at all. I’ve been a homelabber for longer than I can remember, and I have a total of 3 physical machines and VMs that run Windows compared to a total of probably 20 that run Linux, FreeBSD, or some other POSIX variant. I have so few Windows machines that I actually own legal licenses for all of them. I do feel like the people who say “Just run Linux on your desktop PC; it can do everything Windows can” are looking at the operating system through rose-colored glasses. Linux will always be the best choice for anything that doesn’t require having a monitor attached, but otherwise, it feels like it’s playing catch-up to Windows.
For sure, there are compromises no matter what you pick. I just hit the point where Linux checked enough boxes for me to ditch Windows. I hope that it gets to that point for you eventually!
I use VS Code on Linux, but yeah regular VS is Windows-only. Maybe people good at compatibility layers can get it working.
VS Code(ium) doesn’t work for you instead?
Hey, why get rid of valueable computing devices 😃 there is nothing more fun than a rolling distro like arch pr openSuse tumbleweed on old apple hardware
😁 i live a free computing live where I collect trash (mostly from my father and thus apple devices) and install Linux on them to make them treasures
I love it because I hate eWaste
I love resurrecting old hardware with Linux.
When I said “got rid of,” I mostly meant “gave to friends and family.”
I recently installed NixOS on my partner’s 2013 macbook air to give it a new lease on life, too.
🤩👌🏻awesome, we need more people like you
I had to run a hidden script at a specific point during the install to allow me to not have to use a Microsoft account
No, all you had to do was leave the PC disconnected from the internet during the install.
I had to install a 3rd party Nvidia driver update tool because their official one requires making an account and gives a bunch of unwanted ads as notifications.
The nVidia driver, direct from nVidia, certainly does not require an account. Only need an account if you plan on using GeForce Experience.
I wish it were that simple. The motherboard I was using had built-in wifi, which, while technically on a B-Key M.2 slot, was buried beneath RF shielding, heatsinks, and plastic cowling. On top of that, I would have had to take off the CPU heatsink and take out the GPU to get to it.
I tried just removing the external antennae and looking in the BIOS for a way to disable the WiFi card before looking for a way to bypass the network requirement. Removing the antennae still showed a few available networks, and I couldn’t find a way to disable the card in the BIOS.
Sure, there may be other things I could have tried. I could have taken the computer apart, rebuilt it, installed Windows, taken it apart, and rebuilt it again. I could have isolated my wireless access point from the internet in the hopes that it would give up and give me the option then. None of the available options were as simple as “just don’t connect it to a network, dude.”
The windows installer did not give me an option to not connect to wifi as long as there were networks available, of which there are many in my apartment complex.
You can manually download drivers from Nvidia, and that’s basically what this tool I’m using does for me, but for GPU drivers in particular, you want to have the newest version available, especially if you like to play new games on launch day. The only way to officially get automatic game-ready Nvidia drivers is through the GeForce Experience app, which, as you said, requires an account.
For the Microsoft account during install you can just type: a@a.com as username and a as password, then submit. It’ll then tell you this account is blocked or doesn’t work and allows you to create a local account instead.
The setup is so bloated.
That’s a neat trick. I’ll have to try that next time.
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Relevant Section under Gift economies:
The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy’s prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.
Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.
I thought it was an autonomous collective.
Listen, strange penguins biting people is no basis for a system of government.
Supreme executive power derives from using sudo, not some farcical user account control.
Come and see the kernel inherent in my system.
I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a sysadmin just because some angry Finn lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away
You’re fooling yourself. We’re livin’ in a dictatorship, a self-perpetuating autocracy, in which the working class–
Oh, Robert, there’s some lovely filth over here…
Also, Linus is a “woke communist”
I have some newfound respect for the man, it seems. Not that I didn’t respect him earlier, just thought that his toxicity was the defining trait of his temper. I find these takes somehow mellow the image in my mind.
The man is a swedish speaking Finn originally, it kinda comes with the territory. We might technically be a minority but we’re still as Finnish as the rest of them (to a certain degree at least).
I think even he realized his tocicity was a problem a few years ago, so he took time out to work on that and seems much more balanced now.
It’s unkown whether he improved his temper or whether he just built a very good mail filter for himself though.
That’s fair, but the result seems to be the same; he’s nowhere near as caustic when interacting with people as he used to be. I had quite a lot of sympathy with the message in most of his technical rants, but the delivery was counterproductive. If he’s changed that I think he’s done well.
What platform is that? I’ve never seen a mastodon type platform with remote follow
Akkoma, which is a fork of Pleroma. Twitter-like Fediverse has 3 major software pieces: Mastodon, Pleroma (and forks) and Misskey (and forks)
Isn’t it a benevolent dictatorship with Linus at the head?
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
Problem is that the average person cannot discern between an actual expert and a charlatan.
Skilled programmers can see that Linus is an expert. It works in tech. It probably works in any professional environment - anywhere where skilled people are picking someone highly skilled.
For the average person, we have clearly seen average people suck at picking expert leaders, though it works fine in small groups
And yet Linux works fine. Not everyone needs to be a dev, devs can tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
It will be most telling when Linus dies.
No, a king’s power derives from authority, not from the good will of its subjects
See and I see it more as in modern times where it’s a simple figurehead.
But a king must have power and authority, Linus just has influence and labor, thus expertise.
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
Youre thinking of python I reckon -link to wikipedia
The article you link literally lists Linus under the referent candidates section.
So I did miss that Linus is in the article, but the reference to him says he was awarded the title, which makes it sound like an honour rather than a hierarchical system. I don’t believe that he’s ever been anything other than the projects owner/founder but I’m happy to learn if I’m wrong.
Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.
I mean how the community refers to him. I’ve never read a thread where someone called Linus a BDFL, I have with python. If they do, they do. Just haven’t seen it myself.
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
I’m worried we’re gonna have a situation like the death or Tito
Cory Doctorow has a book, “Walkaway” that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It’s pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn’t overly glamourize any political system the way you’d typically see in political fiction.
There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.
I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.
sudo apt install anarchismis a real command in Debian.What does it install?
anarchism would be my guess.
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I mean…yeah
a capitalist funded anarcho-comunist ecosystem, ironic
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Interesting assertion, but is it really?
The Linux kernel is a single software product produced by a single entity and ultimately controlled by a small cadre of highly trusted people.
Anyone can fork it and do what they want, people respect Linus and follow suit because he’s good at what he does and knows it best. He holds no power or authority beyond the willful respect and acknowledgement of the people.
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Anarchy means no rulers. No hierarchy. There would still be rules/laws.
Commenting with no clue what people are talking about
Anarchy isn’t a rejection of structure, but a complex web of horizontal structures.
It’s actually a really good analogy, because it can only run on fully-capitalist hardware.
This not the dunk you think
Amazing how every single part of your comment is so wrong.
It’s actually a really good analogy,
Not an analogy, an example. Those two are different things.
because it can only run on
No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists.
fully-capitalist hardware.
What the hell even is that? Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary. And now that a lot of effort is being made to get that production out of there, those efforts are being sponsored by public money to an incredible degree. Billions of dollars of taxes (you know, community resources) are being poured into that because big corporations are the biggest lovers of government handouts.
No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists
Please explain to me where this “open source collaborative” Internet hardware is on which you run your bitcoin network.
Never heard of RISC-V?
It’s behind by decades of capitalists making the industry a festering shithole.
Why does it matter which software we’re running? Running a Bitcoin node on something comes right after running Doom on it.
Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary.
China hasn’t been communist in a long time.
What is “fully-capitalist hardware?”
Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and capitalist hardware.
Fire at will, commander.
No, not the Bootlicker Beam!
Same sort of deal as “anarcho-communist” operating systems. @@
That answers absolutely nothing. Do you think Capitalists designed hardware, or Engineers?
Do you think Capitalists designed hardware, or Engineers?
I’m just gonna leave this quote as is, so you can think about it.
I have. Engineers, ie workers, designed the hardware. It was not the Capitalists that owned the companies doing the design.
It really seems like you didn’t have an actual argument, you just wanted to whine and duck away from any pushback.
How the hell did you pick lemmy.ml?
Because people aren’t one dimensional objects.
And that excuses a total lack of awareness.
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A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.
In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.
In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.
Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.
Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.
A few things draw significant differences.
Anarchism is fundamentally a firm rejection of unjust hierarchy, including the state, via building up of bottom-up structures using networks of Mutual Aid or other strategies (like Syndicalism).
Communism is fundamentally about advancing beyond Capitalism into Socialism and eventually Communism. It’s fundamentally Marxist, unlike most forms of Anarchism (which don’t necessarily reject Marx, but also don’t accept everything Marx wrote). Communists are generally perfectly fine with using the state in order to eventually achieve a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, as each becomes unnecessary and whithers away.
In essence, Anarchism rejects that a state is necessary at all, and seeks to directly replace current systems with the end-goal of an Anarchist structure, whereas Communists tend to agree more with gradual change, rapidly building up the productive forces, and achieving a global, international Communism.
Anarcho-Communism seeks to combine these into directly implementing full Communism without going through Socialism first.
All of this is from a generally Leftist perspective, without leaning into any given tendency, as I believe the most critical battles now are building up a sizable leftist coalition. Everyone should focus on organizing, unionizing, reading, learning, sympathizing, empathizing, and improving themselves and those around them.
I’ve never heard anyone argue against personal property. Usually the difference is that Anarchists want to skip the workers’ state, while other Communists think it’s a necessity to achieve Communism.
