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?

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 So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.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.

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.

It is a shame this was so obvious. Even though I saw it a week late, it was so obviously an April Fool’s joke that it was not worth reading past the headline.

I feel bad for whoever put the work in.

I love that RiSC-V is already so well supported in the Linux kernel even though the hardware is not really out there yet. When decent hardware does arrive, a fairly mature ecosystem will be waiting for it.

Compare that to ARM which took quite a while. There is already more of a culture of getting device support into the mainline for RISC-V than for ARM even now.

I do think decent RISC-V kit is coming. The existing players like SciFive are getting there, we know big players like Qualcomm and Samsung have projects, and future disruptors like AheadComputing see RISC-V as their attack vector on the current industry. And for sure China is going to surprise with a decent RISC-V offering at some point—maybe Alibaba, maybe Huawei, or maybe someone else.

The only issue with LFS is maintenance. It is one thing to set it up but having to manually keep it all up to date does not sound like fun.

I use Chimera Linux which is musl based. Compatibility is great. If you have the source, you are probably fine.

It can be a pain for projects that ship binaries as part of the build. Two examples that I have run into:

• The Ladybird browser uses vpkg and the version their scripts download assumes Glibc. You can build vpkg itself on musl but the whole process is a pain.
• dotnet requires a binary build of dotnet to bootstrap from. There are musl builds available but they assume GCC and Chimera uses Clang. Not really a musl problem now that I think of it.

Anyway, I use a Distrobox of Arch on Chimera. If I do run into something (like the two above), I just pop into that and problem solved.

Flatpak is essentially the same solution as they run in a container and the freedesktop base is Glibc based.

Not only is musl not generally a problem but, these days, it is trivial to work around it.

You are using Turnstile on Void? Cool.

You don’t like the AUR? I have moved to Chimera Linux but I still use Distrobox just for the AUR.

Older MacBooks and MacBook Airs (pre-2018 or so) make awesome Linux machines and have really come down in price. If you can find one cheap, I highly recommend them.

Intel machines later than that have T2 chips and are still good but take a bit more research.

M1 Macs are pretty well supported now but that is a different universe.

Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.

Why do they?

They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.

Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

How do we explain that?

There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.

Why not?

Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.

How about OpenSSH?

It is MiT licensed. Should somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?

Why haven’t they?

Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?

According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.

The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?

How is actually writing and contributing free software not “actively helping the FOSS community”?

You could do that. MIT is a very free license.

Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.