The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[SchizoDaemon]

Ok so this was actually debunked in the 80s
I'll point you to a lecture I think everyone needs to watch about early Unix development and why stallman had to do what he did

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ&pp=ygUYQSBwb2xpdGljYWwgaGlzdG9yeSBvZiB4

Gpl didn't come into existence for no reason, people were either using proprietary licenses like Unix or permissive licenses which were then called copy-center as opposed to copyleft or copyright
The problem with this license people found was nobody wanted to collaborate on projects when businesses want proprietary software licenses. So the Gpl actually did prevent this and companies weren't just flippantly violating Gpl every time they needed gpled code, but they were doing that with permissive licensed software like bsd, and that has been a major problem for them that affects them to this day.

I am not talking directly about OS forks. I am talking about how in spirit it is subverted.

I am talking about what really happens today in the era where much of the software built today is web-based and built on AWS, GCP, Azure and the like.

Google isn't violating GPL if they run their own GPL fork internally on their servers. However, they can serve their own proprietary web applications that lock your data into their platform on that OS. So the freedoms of the GPL are subverted. How is the GPL protecting anyone's freedoms then? It isn't. More people probably use Google products than Microsoft products at this point, and their whole web presence is probably tied to their Google account; their office docs, their files, etc. are all in Google's proprietary cloud.

Furthermore, there are whole proprietary development platforms where the whole development model is to tie you into their platform. They do this by making you dependent on the design, data and how the data structures are stored. Much like web apps like Google Maps.

Jaron Lanier wrote a lot about how the design of systems is more important than the implementation using MIDI as an example in "You Are Not a Gadget" nearly 20 years ago.

The whole GPL vs BSD licence debate is completely moot at this point because large companies lock you into the data and the design of their systems.

It is another example of people fighting a war that was lost at this point over a decade ago.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

I checked out plasma-bigscreen today on my HTPC. It sucks ass and this is the supposedly stable version that is in the repositories yet it managed to crash. By default it doesn't support controller navigation you have to go back to desktop settings, enable a janky setting that allows using your controller as a mouse and keyboard.

I hope it improves since KODI is on its last legs and steam big picture isn't the gretest either since there's no way to configure it so you don't have to dig through the library to get to jellyfin. For now I'm back to using Batocera.

Have you checked out flex-launcher? It's my htpc desktop homescreen. Have quick launchers for Kodi, VacuumTube, Moonlight-QT, and Power. Does everything I need it to do. I just run it with Openbox and it just werks.

Plasma-bigscreen got the shaft once KDE 6 got pushed everywhere. Switched to flex-launcer and openbox ever since and I've been happy.

 

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The setup-alpine install script is generally good, although it will do things like write your wpa_supplicant configuration for your initial network twice into the config file (which doesn't cause any problems) if you Ctrl-C halfway through.

OK, I have been loving using Alpine. Getting five hour battery life out of a old Chromebook that easily charges from a phone charger, hell, it will trickle charge overnight from USB 5V. This feels even better than using ChromeOS.

The one sticking point I had initially had was with networking on a device where I wanted to be able to connect to wireless networks without hassle. There are instructions on the Alpine wiki for switching to networkmanager, but the way that works has never really rubbed me right. Linux networking works so well if you just avoid that sort of shit, I have been simultaneously connected to four different customer VPNs at once on Linux before, something that would NEVER work with official clients on Windows.

Well, I initially tried connman but encountered problems getting that working (in that it was connecting to wireless networks and then immediately disconnecting for no reason and doing that repeatedly until the wifi router flagged it as malicious activity). I will try again, as connman does make it easy to do easy USB and Bluetooth tethering, which are semi-useful. BUT 99.9% of the time you don't need that shit. As it turns out, wpa_supplicant is not just a tool that everything else uses to connect to wireless networks. As long as wpa_supplicant is running as a daemon and wpa_supplicant.conf has something like the following up the top:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

then a tool designed to interact with its sockets interface (not homoBUS) like the nice simple wpa_gui app can just connect to it, view status information, and add and connect to new networks (i.e. 99.9% of the 'networking setup' that anyone needs to do which can't be handled by configuring a single file once for your ethernet interface).