afb

joined 1 year ago
[–] afb@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Off the top of my head, it'd be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (11 children)

The key is in the name. Whoever distributes the software to you determines whether it's commercial or community. Where they get it from is irrelevant because they're the ones distributing it to you.

Ubuntu can't be made closed-source because of the licensing of the software they use from upstream. Red Hat is still not closed source, for instance. Everyone who gets it gets access to the source code. But if Ubuntu went away or whatever then downstream distributions would be in a spot of trouble. They could rebase on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based upon), but how hard that would be varies wildly depending on distro. Linux Mint already have a Debian edition, for instance. No problem there. Pop OS would certainly be able to make it work as well; they're a very professional operation. But take, for example, Endeavour OS. It's Arch with a graphical installer and some nice defaults. Without Arch Linux (which is almost certainly not going anywhere and is a community distro) they'd have some real problems. There's no upstream to Arch to rebase on. They'd have to so fundamentally change everything to accomodate a whole new base and packaging system that they'd basically be making a whole new distro.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

The Slackware community has produced about 8 package manager front-ends that handle dependency resolution, so it's not an issue at all and hasn't been for over a decade. The big thing with Slackware is an emphasis on simplicity of design over ease of use and an expectation that the user will make all the decisions regarding how their system is maintained. I love it, use it on my main machine (Void on my laptop, Ubuntu on my server). It's taught me a lot about operating systems in general and Linux in particular, and it lets me do whatever I like. I use sbotools and flatpak for my 3rd party software, the former being a ports-like interface to slackbuilds.org (like the AUR for Slackware, but far smaller and with a lot more quality control). Works great, no surprises, boots fast, rock solid and dependable.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Nice! FreeBSD is cool. Couldn't make it work for me as a regular thing due to poor/outdated WiFi and bluetooth, but if it suits your use case then it's a really solid option.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Nice! FreeBSD is cool. Couldn't make it work for me as a regular thing due to poor/outdated WiFi and bluetooth, but if it suits your use case then it's a really solid option.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I like Snaps on my server, not on my desktop. Flatpaks are fine. I use them for stuff I wouldn't compile myself anyway (mainly proprietary binaries) but I prefer compiling my own packages where I can.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agree entirely. I use newsboat (inside vterm (inside emacs)).

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Slackware 15.0 on my desktop, Void on my laptop. I try other stuff on my laptop from time to time (FreeBSD has been my favourite experiment so far, but the wifi and bluetooth are just too bad for me to be able to use it regularly), but always go back to Void. I don't distro-hop on my main machine.

[–] afb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I'm actually looking for an open source project to get involved in. Started teaching myself Python and Javascript last year, picked up some C and Linux-adjacent skills at some point, now studying CS part time as a mature student. I'd love to get involved with something free and open and I'd be happy to learn a new language to do it. Anyone desperate? 😂

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