I never liked KDE. I used it before there was GNOME but I used GNOME 2 for years and Cinnamon or XFCE after that.
I probably tried KDE4 once and KDE5 a couple times. Not for me. But I have used KDE a lot since Plasma 6. I have to agree with you. They are doing a great job. It is probably the best environment for Wayland.
I also use COSMIC a bit and Niri is my favourite environment. But I do seem to be using Plasma 6 a lot. It is sitting in front of me now.
First, there has been massive amounts of MIT code in important parts of the Linux ecosystem for decades. Xorg, Wayland, and Mesa for starters. The sky has not fallen. I am not exactly panicking.
But let’s address your specific example.
Let start by pointing out that Redis was BSD, not MIT. But let’s assume your cautionary tale applies.
A truly gigantic corporation, Amazon, was making all the money off Redis without giving anything back to the company that actually wrote the code (Redis). So, Redis tried to change the license to make that more difficult. The license they chose is the strictest free software license the FSF offers—the AGPL.
Pop quiz: what part of the above are we “the community” outraged about? The clearly predatory Amazon stuff? Or the defensive action by the company writing all the code? That’s right, we are mad at the company that gave us all the code for free and that still licenses it AGPL.
But even beyond that, what was lost again? Because the implication is that BSD (or MIT) somehow allows companies to “take” free software from us. This is false.
What happened with Redis is that the original code remained 100% available. And it remained part of a 100% free software project. It remains 100% BSD licensed to this day. You can use it, you can study it, you can improve it, you can share it, and you can even sell it commercially! It offers you at least FIVE freedoms.
https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
Not a single line of code was lost from the project. Yes, the project had to change its name (Redis owns the name Redis). Yes, Redis stopped contributing to the project. Is that not their right?
It is that last bit that seems to drive us mad. We yell about corporations taking our code. But all the examples of bad behaviour we give boil down to them choosing to give us less of theirs.
If “the community” is the one writing the code, nobody can take it from us. And even if big evil companies are writing the code, the only code that they can deny us is code they write in the future.
I find it hard to be either outraged or even particularly afraid of that.
Anyway, I do not want to talk you out of your license preferences. I have no beef with that. But I do wish there was less FUD slinging at projects that choose to license their hard work as MIT.
I do not know how that article covered so much background on GNU hURD and the quest for a micro-kernel UNIX without mentioning Redox OS.
Redox is also micro-kernel based POSIX compatible operating system (UNIX compatible). So quite like the GNU project and HURD in that sense.
Redox is younger, 10 years old instead of 30, and more “modern” (eg. written in Rust). It can be seen as a GNU competitor as it does not rely on the GNU C library or utilities.
85% of the Canadian population is within 100 miles of the US border. Why would they go to the high arctic?
Carney already told Trump to pound sand on the “Board of Peace”.
I am ok with Americans that come to Canada. Except the ambassador.
Sure.
But “missing significant foundational and complex functionality is not really a bug”, it is a feature. I mean, I guess I could file a bug that says “won’t run ALL Windows software” and talk about how long it stays open.
As each of these dominos falls, it gets easier to add more functionality on top. I feel like they have made more progress in the past two years than they have in the 10 before that.
Given how slowly they move, the obvious choice is to bet against them.
That said…
It already works for some stuff. There are already people that have been able to use ReactOS to run legacy but vital applications. I cannot remember any details but I have heard of a few instances where businesses saved rather substantial amounts of money with ReactOS.
Similarly, there are certainly people that find it runs the particular applications they want and runs on the hardware they have. Some legacy gamers use it. But perhaps you have hardware that is only supported under Windows XP.
And, if people keep using Windows, it will eventually become usable enough to be a viable alternative. If it had Windows 7 level features today and ran modern apps, a lot of people would find it good enough to switch. It does not have to be better than Windows or support every Windows feature.
As slow as they are, they have gotten further than most people would have expected.
China is a problem we have to deal with in the next decade.
The US is a problem that Canada has to handle today.
Canada needs to increase readiness at its southern border. Focus on where the threat is.
I would agree with you. That said, bad experiences with things like PPA’s are one the reasons people reach for immutable distros.
I think as soon as you start adding PPA’s to your system, you should consider a distro with a larger repository. But that is just my opinion.
Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.
Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.
My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.
Ya. I feel like professional VFX has largely migrated off Windows already.
Photoshop is perhaps the canonical example of software that does not run on Linux and is actually needed by “professionals”.
Photoshop does not run well enough on Wine that I would expect a pro to run it this way. And, if you are a print professional, there really are no Open Source tools that do what you need yet.
But outside of print, I think it is more about familiarity than capability even with regards to Adobe alternatives. And there are alternatives UI options for things like GIMP if the Adobe metaphor works better for you.
Inkscape seems to be attracting some actual professional use. Scribus seems close to getting there too. The furthest behind is GiMP.
That said, I am impressed with the development pace of GIMP now that version 3 has finally shipped. And it seems that proper CMYK support is on their near-term roadmap. I could see them shipping something functional next year. I would say similar things about non-destructive editing.
It will be interesting to see if attitudes change towards GIMP after these issues are addressed. The UI also takes a lot of heat. Now that there is a consistent cadence of releases (it seems), perhaps that will see steady evolution as well.
This is a funny take given that for most of Linux history, the majority of Linux desktop user have been “working professionals”, largely IT workers and developers to be fair.
At this point, you cannot really make a blanket statement about who Linux is appropriate for. It is down to individual use cases and preferences.
I have been using Linux for decades and, while I have also used Windows and macOS, other operating systems are frustrating to use due to the many limitations. And I have been several kinds of “working professional” over that time at many different levels of seniority. But I recognize that this is because all my workflows and expectations evolved on Linux.
The “working professionals” you imagine likely have the same issue. It is not that Linux could not work, or even that it is not a better place to start. It is document compatibility and familiarity.
At this point, Linux “being ready” comes down almost completely to a tolerance for learning and change. Nobody says you have to change of course. But working differently does not mean that something else does not work.
There are of course still some software gaps. CAD is not great on Linux (getting there). Print graphics professionals (people with CMYK workflows) will hit real roadblocks. Some debugging tools available on Windows are worth the productivity for certain workflows. Pro audio too I guess though this not my area. And “office document” users may encounter display inconsistencies when sharing documents depending on which features they rely on. Perhaps the latter is what you mean.
As for gaming, it depends on what titles you favour. Some Windows games play better on Linux. Some worse. And of course some not at all.
When choosing software for a company, I consider something that cannot work on the Linux desktop or through the cloud disqualifying. I can think of few cases where that has been the wrong decision.
MIT is a “free license” and software that uses it is Free Software. See the Free Software Foundation website for details.
My only goalpost is accuracy.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
The most interesting chip is the Tenstorrent Ascalon. They are releasing a version on their own Silicon called Atlantis. Ascalon-X is expected to match AMD Zen 5 performance.
https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/tt-ascalon
There is also the Spacemit K3 and a few others. Maybe Qualcomm will surprise us with something.
Now that GIMP has finally released version 3, they seem to be moving faster. I hope they are able to get more positive mind-share.
For example, they are close to releasing 3.2 that already has lots of great stuff in it. It looks like 3.4 could address some really long running deficiencies like native CMYK.
If stuff actually gets released, they may not only attract users but developers which is what they really need.
Lots of nice changes in this release. I see lots of the things people complain about.
I am not a GNOME user myself but since Niri uses XDG-desktop-portal-GNOME, this looks like a release to look forward to.
I realize I oversimplified a complex set of moves and “shared source” is its own can of worms. My post was already too long.
But my core point is that the code (as Valkey) remained available and remains available under the same free software license that it has always been available under.
The only consequence of what Redis did was that they stopped giving away their “new” code to service providers like Amazon. Even Amazon can continue to use what was there before. And the community can continue to collaborate on the same code base that they were collaborating on before. The licence Redis chooses for its “new” code is largely irrelevant.
We talk about permissive licenses like they represent some massive risk. I just do not see it that way. And they have many advantages including often attracting more corporate participation (more free code for me).
I am a very happy user of Clang/LLVM. It is the product of collaboration between Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, academia, and other nerds. I am very happy we have licenses that encourage companies to create quality software for me to use.
I am sure Redis chose BSD to begin with in case they ever had to make a move like they did. If the only option was GPL, they may never have released it as Open Source to begin with. Again, I am glad they did.