Now I don't know if this is because of better Kernels, Omarchy, Arch Linux or just because its the Year of the Linux Desktop™(fr this time guies) but I had to quickly print something and for the first time in my Linux life, I pressed print on my computer and just werks™... well granted the fonts were fucked, but thats never happened to me on Linux, especially when my printer is on a wifi network.
Printing on Linux actually benefitted from
Apple of all companies. I believe it was Apple that created CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System), released it as open-source software, and it basically became bog-standard on everything from OSX to Linux to BSD and even whatever proprietary Unices that still technically exist like AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. USB printing was always seamless for me, even like 14-15 years ago when I first started fiddling with Linux. I never had a network printer until recently, and as far as I could tell, the process was seamless. Printed out test pages just fine, scanner recognised, all that good stuff. I should point out that this was with the aid of GUI tools in MATE, Cinnamon, GNOME Shell, and Plasma 5.
I think on more minimal setups like base Arch, Debian netinstall, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and so on, there's more work to do for wireless printing because you need to properly set up network connectivity, install CUPS, and check if your printer requires drivers that aren't already in the kernel. On any distro with a preconfigured GUI like Mint, Fedora, MX, antiX, even Artix or Omarchy, you don't necessarily need to all of that. The most you'd really need to do is double check that your specific printer model doesn't require additional drivers. I'm sure the technology for wireless printing's existed for longer than I think it does, but I think the capacity for it existed since the early 2010s.
Also your fonts being fucked is fairly normal on minimal distros like Arch or FOSS-forward distros like Fedora. By default, a lot of the most common fonts we see on the internet and IRL are patented or otherwise non-free. You'd need to either manually copy font files over from a Windows installation you have running
or hunt down the MS core fonts package for your distro so that you can at least
pretend that your system ain't totally bonehurt.
It isn’t, to my knowledge nobody serious actually uses blender. It might be a good pice of software but it doesn’t come with a warranty or 24 support and other things professional shops care about. That’s another barrier for FOSS software unfortunately.
Not entirely. There's also the flip side to consider, where libre software forms the basis for commercial non-free software. The norm is to shit on permissive licenses because the MIT license allowed Intel to hijack MINIX and use it as the OS that powers Management Engine, and Andrew Tanenbaum couldn't do jack fucking shit about it. That norm exists for good reason, but we should also consider how not every permissively licensed project would end up like MINIX.
FreeBSD is used by Sony to power the PS4 and PS5's operating systems, WhatsApp uses it on their servers, as does Netflix and many others. These companies not only use FreeBSD, but they also submit their own patches and modifications back upstream that later get integrated. FreeBSD is not "base system + X11/Wayland + KDE/XFCE/whatever + all the shit I use like a normal human being;" it's literally the base system alone. Y'know, that text console you boot into after installing it? Sending bug fixes, patches, modifications, and so on back to FreeBSD doesn't hurt those companies because all the secret sauce is in the upper layers, where the UX lies. The opposite is true; it behooves them to cooperate with upstream.
Also, lest we forget, Wine is free software that's not permissively licensed, but its copyleft is weak enough to allow for integration into proprietary programs. Codeweavers literally has most of the development team on Wine under their payroll, they take the Wine source code, and add some UX tooling and commercial support that they keep behind a proprietary wall. The guys who run pfSense and OPNSense have their own private companies, where they take pfSense/OPNSense, put it onto some network box that they sell on their website, and that network box has proprietary tooling and UX shit that ain't free to the world.
Copyleft is ideal, but we shouldn't let Tanenbaum's misfortunes override pragmatic reality on the ground. Sometimes, a weak copyleft or permissive licensing is a good thing.
Granted for Linux RHEL exists for this exact reason and what our wonderful community fucking despises them for it.
I resent that! I don't despise Red Hat for monetising open source; that's like the biggest good thing they've ever done. I resent Red Hat as a company for embracing, extending, and extinguishing competing software projects in favour of making their own tooling dominant within the Linux ecosystem long before their acquisition by IBM. See all the systemd sperging, how Red Hat actively sabotaged Xorg development to push Wayland, the myriad problems that Freedesktop has, the circumstances that led to XLibre's creation, and so on. Canonical has my ire too, but to that end? I prefer the Englishman from Cape Town over the faceless stooges at Red Hat and their faceless masters at IBM.
