Comment by amlib

Comment by amlib a day ago

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This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything.

Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

baq a day ago

Desktop is still useful, but it doesn’t matter. Everything important to non-techies outside of work life is happening on the smartphone, which has had hardware attestation since forever.

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  • gsf_emergency_4 a day ago

    Those are vital points! Mobile is the battleground. No company now or ever working on classical hardware attestation will understand cryptographic engineering at a basic level..

    Thus FOSS has plenty of time (decades to centuries) to learn from for-profit tech's mistakes

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    • Imustaskforhelp a day ago

      Mobile is the battleground but you are forgetting how damn easy it is on android (atleast right now before google's attestation) it is to install f-droid and then install open source.

      People don't even do that. They don't even search for software on f-droid first and try the UI. Nope they go to play store and search software which is going to advocate for closed software because ads/review buying...

      You really have to expect something from the general populus as well imo. Maybe they don't know about f-droid but people say to me its not about knowledge but rather caring, they don't care and I don't know wtf to say to that.

      It's a very weird chicken and egg problem.

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      • gsf_emergency_4 a day ago

        Within the mobile space there are other possible Schwerpunkte and appstoretech is the most obvious one to work on. It's also one where superior technology could win out over feelings--> why NLNet wants to fund:

        https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/

        >‘decentralized app stores’, a technology that uses the F-Droid app store architecture, for organizations or other entities that wish to distribute their apps to a select user population (e.g. employees), plus an app distribution system that makes it simple and cost-effective for developers to distribute their applications to multiple app stores.

        For mixed approaches, I like to think about why Google et al haven't beaten Apple at the appstore game (outside China)

        You mention chicken and egg which suggests that there's a 2-sided-market type of problem to try to solve here even if one isn't well-versed in marketing

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setopt 20 hours ago

I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on.

I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.

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  • robinsonb5 19 hours ago

    For me, Ubuntu / Gnome 2 came so close to being something tech-savvy people could recommend to non-technical friends and relatives at a time when people who were happy enough with WinXP and Win7 were being corralled into dealing with the Win8 carcrash. And instead of closing that final gap it went scampering off into the far distance again, never to recover.

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  • jezek2 20 hours ago

    That's normal in Linux. It's always about to get really good then everything is made crappy again, then slowly improving to get good but then the cycle repeats. I've lived through several of such cycles, it has slowed down Linux adoption a lot.

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matheusmoreira a day ago

Agreed. It's all about leverage. Without huge numbers of users, we have no leverage. Corporations can afford to just drop us because of our software preferences. That would not be the case if there were more of us.

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