Yeah, you have the choice of have your software be controlled by companies that could just stop licensing it.
But to Lakso’s question, the point of GNU is to disallow closing down sources. Companies don’t like that, because it’s not profitable. They need non gnu stuff so that they can build money printing closed gardens with it.
The reason for non GNU distros is to maintain the right of closing down the source of whatever product you build with it, disallowing the customer’s software freedoms.
It would be pointless to have a non GNU system with other copyleft protections, because that’s counter to the reason why they exist, in the first place.
What they are saying is that you do not need to use GNU software ( a specific set of software from the Free Software Foundation ) to use GPL software.
The GPL is a license. The G in GPL stands for General, not GNU. It is sometimes called the GNU GPL as the GPL was originally conceived for the GNU Project. Much like the G in GTK stands for GIMP but now GTK itself is far bigger than the GIMP Project, the GPL is much bigger than GNU.
GNU is a software distribution, one with the original aim of creating a free UNIX ( or POSIX OS rather ).
As a percentage of software included, the amount of actual GNU software in a typical Linux distro is quite small actually. There may be a lot of GPL software but the majority of it is not GNU. Look no further than the Linux kernel itself for an example of that. Your desktop environment may be another. Most of your graphics stack is probably MIT licensed though. There is more MIT licensed software in a Linux distro than anything else and the MIT license predates the GPL. There are many other licenses used as well of course with BSD and Apache being a couple of other major ones.
Chimera is proof of what I am saying really. It is essentially GNU free by default. Yet, if you looked at a typical Fedora install, it would be the same software you use on Chimera. Avoiding systemd ( not GNU ), GNU utils, GCC, and Glibc are important design decisions but those are going to be a small fraction of the software installed.
I happen to find the GNU stuff a bit overcomplicated and bloated. I feel the same about Systemd. So, I like the choices Chimera has made.
The “reason” for “non GNU” distros is certainly not so they can be shut down. Technical choices are made for other reasons. Some of us find “permissive” licenses more free than the GPL. The idea that non-GPL is unsafe and will get shut down is not born out in practice as evidenced by the fact that there is more healthy, long lived non-GPL Open Source software than there is GPL software.
Non-GPL software will stay free and Open as long as there is a community around it. Sure, if there is no community and we are leeching off a company, they could take future versions away from us. But if we are just leeching, how is that wrong. It is only their future work they can take away. We still get to keep the old stuff. If there is no community, GPL software is no better. Either way, we only get the old stuff. The Internet is full of GPL and even GNU software that is unmaintained and of little use to anyone.
A negative contribution that GNU has made is the trend of its fans claiming credit for other people’s work. I do not like the term GNU / Linux as most of the software in a distro people throw that label on is not GNU. Similarly, talking about distros as though they are protected by the GPL is crazy as most of the software in that distro is not GPL.
MUSL is MIT licensed which is why Chimera can use it. LLVM / Clang is Apache licensed and Chimera can enjoy all the corporate contributed code and patents that come with that. Obviously the BSD utils are BSD incensed and again freely available. You do not need the GPL and certainly not GNU to make a great Linux distro.
This is not a rant against the GPL by any means though even GNU. I use them both and am very thankful for them. I certainly acknowledge their place in history. I just hate how both the GPL and GNU are positioned to diminish the contributions of others.
To me, the big problem is still updates breaking things.
Everybody needs to update their system from time to time, but if doing so leaves your system in an unusable (for the average person, not a linux terminal guru) state, users aren't going to stay.
I think immutable/atomic OSes like Silverblue, VanillaOS and SteamOS are heading in the right direction to solve this issue. Particularly if they allow users to easily rollback a bad update. Otherwise maybe there is some way to detect and warn about potential compatibility issues before people update.
I’m a new user. How do I disable being prompted for a password every time I want change/install anything? I just want password requirement at logon and not when logged on.
Kind of, but to be fair UAC doesn’t prompt you for the account password unless you’re not an Administrator on the PC (in which case you have to enter the password of someone who is). If you’re on a single user PC, you’ll be an admin and it’ll only be a “Yes / No” prompt.
Now macOS on the other hand does require the password, unless you have an Apple Watch (if I heard correctly) in which you can confirm it by pressing a button on it. Or, using the fingerprint reader on the Macs with a TouchID sensor.
You will want to modify the sudoers file. In a terminal sudo nano /etc/sudoers. You will want to go down to the line %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL and comment it out by adding # in front of it. A few lines down should be a similar line # %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL. You will want to uncomment this by deleting the # at the beginning of the line. With nano, you can save by hitting ctrl+O then hitting ENTER to confirm. Hit ctrl+X to exit nano.
Thanks, I tried that before and I think it only worked until I re-logged (?). I’ll try that again, this time will use something else than vi editor to be sure.
vi is definitely different being a modal editor. If you are new to Linux, I would suggest nano. It is much easier to understand, even if it isnt as fast as vi can be. Many distros have it installed, and pretty much all of them should have it in their repos.
The program that asks for password graphically is polkit. As far as I’ve searched online it only supports bypassing password prompts if you’re admin on the system. It does not have a password less prompt like in Windows. I’m using this and this as source in case you want to disable it all together. I’m not a mint user my self so I cannot validate this without spinning up virtual machine. I would recommend the community just look at whatever I wrote for 24h and mention some issues that might occur. I’ll update it if someone points out any issues.
Open any terminal (sorry) and copy one line at a time into the terminal and hit enter. After the first line you’ll be asked to enter the password. For the consecutive commands password will not be asked. On the last command you’ll open a graphical text editor and make sure certain text is present.
You should now see a text editor appear with a file opened. Copy this and paste it in the file at the bottom. Then save, close and reboot.
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">/*
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> * https://lemmy.world/comment/1396602
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> * Allow members of the wheel group to execute any actions
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> * without password authentication, similar to "sudo NOPASSWD:"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> */
</span><span style="color:#323232;">polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> if (subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return polkit.Result.YES;
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">});
</span>
This is a security risk as you might understand, but it’s your computer and you can do whatever you want. If you have any issues just post them here and maybe we’ll figure something out.
It depends on your distro but there is a NOPASSWORD option in some that you can add to a sudoers file. Without knowing your system its probably best to use your search engine of choice to look for answers to that but be warned that it is a security risk.
Lack of patience and/or unwillingness to learn are what I see as the primary challenges to Linux adoption, and it can be addressed by leaving those kind of people to their own devices.
Chimera Linux actually uses apk or Alpine Package Keeper as its package manager, they acknowledge this but despite that market themselves as if they did something revolutionary that has never been done before
Nvidia. Within two weeks, their shitty drivers broke my system twice. If I didn’t already know about that beforehand, I would’ve probably quit linux for good after that experience.
Out of curiosity, did you download the nvidia drivers with the distro’s package manager or did you go to nvidia’s website and do there installer thing? When I had an nvidia card I had plenty of problems over the years but I specifically remember that using the installer from nvidia’s site caused all kinds of hell to break loose haha
That would be me: My hardware at the time was crap so I couldn’t use the usual mint, ubuntu, etc and I was gonna use debian but I couldn’t find the x86 download button, so after a bunch of messing about with distros like puppy and #!++, I settled on alpine for a bit. I now have decent hardware and use fedora.
At this point, my biggest dream is that these ‘new user’ distros used only Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd and Flatpaks simply to simplify things. Hopefully we’re less than 2024 away from NoVideo Wayland support.
Also as soon as XFCE releases their Wayland support, that soon it’ll become the most famous DE choice of Mint.
What I am really happy is to see how well supported Pipewire already is. Pipewire has never showed any problem in the new installs for me.
That’s what I’m using now, and it’s what I’d recommend for most desktop users. I’ve been using Linux systems on-and-off since before kernel version 1.0: Slackware, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop.
(Admittedly, my use cases are pretty simple: a terminal, a browser, Signal, VLC, and Steam.)
Yes, that pop os. As luck would have it, Linus installed it during a very brief period where the steam package in their repo was broken. This is not a common occurrence, and I have never heard of it happening before or since.
The problem with that is most major distros market themselves as “new user” distros to some extent though. Noob-friendly, out-of-the-box, easy, etc are all distro-marketing buzz-words that mean nothing.
You can’t expect them to only use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks because that dream requires every distro to use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks, which will never be reality.
Most distros will probably eventually adopt these tools, but there won’t be a sudden shift. It will be gradual.
Well, for Pipewire it’s the apps which needs to adjust at this point. Only thing missing currently is the Wayland but it’s coming. Making Linux less fragmented (read: confusing), the more new users will give a try.
Fridge art. Fuck, they MAYBE have nfsroot working. MAYBE. After a decade of fucking around, when it was available for ages. The number of bags on the side of lennart’s piece of crap, just to reinvent the wheels we had before, is absolutely ridiculous.
and Flatpaks
… break single source of truth for as-built information and current software manifest. This kills validation, which dissolves certainty on consistency, then repeatability. And given the state of the software load exported to management tools is NOT the flatpak source of truth, you now have a false negative on the ‘installation’ of a flatpak resource when checking it via management.
Gonna be honest with you I’m an intermediate user and understood jack shit of what you just said. A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.
If I understood the funny words magic man correctly, he is complaining that flatpaks don’t come from a single trusted source and may become a vector for malware, unlike official distro repositories. Still, that was a very technobabble way of saying it.
pipewire seems ready for primetime but I’m more dubious about Wayland. For instance KDE appears to still be a bit flaky and sway still works poorly under Nvidia and will never have proper mixed DPI for xwayland apps. Still seems like a tradeoff vs X which doesn’t require a compromise. XFCE is roughly 10% of Mint users. Mint users are unlikely to switch because of wayland support
So you want them to provide answers by using magic? If you seek support for any software, open source or otherwise, you’ll need to tell them version, build number etc. Why do you think Linux will be any different?
Because people can already barely provide this level of information for a Windows device. Most of these words look like technobabble to non-tech-enthusiasts
Of course the words will be different. They aren’t hard words. And they can be answered very easily. In fact, most forums ask to include an output of something like inxi -Fazy with every question, thus eliminating the need for all of these things.
For more niche problems, people might ask for more specific information. But most of the time, they’ll tell you exactly what to run to get that information.
You know what’s the Windows alternative for this? Most of the time, nothing. You need to reinstall Windows. Mac is similar, except you need to have it replaced. You actually CAN repair Linux. That’s the difference.
Doing tech support, I encountered this attitude. People like that are nearly impossible to help. “Why can’t you just fix it!” The true answer never given is that your problem is probably something stupid you are doing, like trying to make a phone call by physically shoving the phone entirely up your asshole, and until I run through some common problems and ask some questions, I won’t be able to tell you to have your significant other get the salad tongs and pull it out of your rear and then go over “dialing.”
People mostly need to be willing to gather detailed system info with Inxi and share it.
No. That’s the support job to figure out the problem of the user. It is not the user’s job to figure out the support problems.
I work in support, so I know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately most computer guys are elitist assholes who can’t understand a user doesn’t have their knowledge or even the will to understand why this shitty tech is not working.
Free open source software projects you don’t pay for don’t have paid support. If you talk to a fellow user it IS your job to figure out your problem. if you don’t have the will to understand anything you ought to buy a support contract.
I don’t disagree with you, but to answer OP’s question, I think this right here is the problem. I love Linux for the same reason I love building my own PCs and working on my own car. For most people that don’t want to tinker, though, they’re looking for something that “just works” and can be fixed by someone else when it breaks.
It’s such a privileged attitude, though. One CAN get paid support, but they don’t need it if they’re just a bit patient and willing to follow instructions. If you don’t want to pay, don’t expect someone else to deal with your bullshit.
(I’m not saying this to you, but to anyone who has this attitude.)
It case the subject wasn’t entirely clear in my prior post I agree with you, and that is exactly what I was trying to say. You the user of a foss project, aren’t a customer unless you give someone money. It IS your job to figure out your own issues. If you ask for help from your fellow users and they graciously provide you help then this is a gift you should appreciate. Because the person isn’t an expert on that topic in the employ of the creator, they might not know everything, nor do they have the infinite patience imparted by being paid by the hour to provide you help. They have their own shit to do. Treating them with entitlement and contempt like people treat support will burn these sorts of folks out, and they are far from an infinite resource. If you want a paid support relationship instead of treating the open source community as free help whose time you are entitled to, you ought to actually pay someone to do that job.
Why don’t you magically have a magic button that magically fixes everything with no effort of my own? That’s stupid, I think I will go on social media and repeatedly tell everyone that Linux is bad actually
Or… They just want their monitor to work. Instead of refusing to display a picture after a simple minor kernel update that causes a bug that is extremely hard to track down even when you know shit about Linux… That’s also an option.
This is kind of intriguing. I like FreeBSD’s userland tools a lot better. Have you tried running it? If not, I might see what it’s all about. The GNU toolchain is a mixed bag. Some of it is really well documented, some stuff average, and others is just a dog’s breakfast.
I only learnt about it today, so I couldn’t check it. I have this project of building my own distro using musl and a non GNU userland, and it is a very annoying process, so I felt like I should share this one.
I have been running it for a while. It is mostly awesome.
A non-trivial amount of software assumes Glibc though and so you will have the odd hiccup because of MUSL. I think one of the goals of Chimera is to improve that situation.
I have one old laptop where I installed Gentoo with musl+llvm profile. It’s fun to tinker with. If I need to run any game binaries, I guess I’d need to run some containers…
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