- LeFantomeLinux is pretty much good to go on M1 or even M2 now. No joy on anything newer than that though.
- No argument that there is a lot of bad software.
I am not as much on the bandwagon for “there is no lack of supply for software”.
I think more software is good and the more software there is, the more good software there will be. At least, big picture.
I am ok with there being a lot of bad software I do not use just like I am ok with companies building products with Open Source. I just want more software I can use. And, if I create Open Source myself, I just want it to get used.
- Some in the Free Software community do not believe that making it harder to collaborate will reduce the amount of software created. For them, you are going to get the software and the choice is just “free” or not. And they imagine that permissively license code bases get “taken” and so copyleft licenses result in more code for “the community”.
I happen to believe that barriers to collaboration results in less software for everybody. I look at Clang and GCC and come away thinking that Clang is the better model because it results in more innovation and more software that I can enjoy. Others wonder why I am so naive and say that collaborating on Clang is only for corporate shills and apologists.
You can have whatever opinion you want. I do not care about the politics. I just want more Open Source software. I mean, so do the others guys I imagine but they don’t always seem to fact check their theories. We disagree about which model results in more software I can use.
- Whenever Phoronix runs benchmarks, bcachefs does very poorly. It often gets attributed to the small 512 bytes instead of 4096 other file systems use.
Why is 512 the default and, if 4096 is better, why is this not the default instead?
- Is the on disk format likely to change again. Or can we expect that to remain stable?
- bcachefs was always a module. You don’t want it in your kennel if you are not using it. The difference is that it used to ship in the mainline source code and be built as a module that was already built and on your drive.
If you build bcachefs as a module yourself (via DMKS or directly), it works the same as if you got it with your distro.
If you use bcachefs as root, the danger is booting with a kernel that lacks the module.
I hate that bcachefs is not in the kernel, and my primary distro does not use DKMS. But, if you can get a module built, there is no loss of functionality or performance.
- Hoping systemd will remain optional
- What drives me personally nuts about the CentOS saga is all the “community” hand-waving about creating a bit for bit clone of a distro.
There can be no “community just shipping builds of RHEL code as, by definition, you cannot change anything. That means you cannot contribute. In my view, an Open Source “community” cannot just be people that use things for free. It is supposed to be about collaborating to build things.
At least now we have Alma Linux which strives to be ABI compatible with RHEL but builds it themselves from CentOS Stream. They actually build something. They can actually contribute (and they do). They can innovate. For example, they have continued the x86-64v2 builds even though RHEL has abandoned them. On Alma, you can at least claim to be building a community.
I do not use any of these distros by the way, in case you think I am shilling something.
- I feel like toothbrush UX has improved quite a bit.
- Alpine is more company, not just because of musl but because of busybox.
DSL uses the Debian kernel, Glibc, and the GNU utils.
- DSL uses the latest Debian kernel. It is not any smaller than Ubuntu.
- This is an effort to preserve RAM more than disk while still having software that works.
- That and the fact that everything is 64 bit now. The Linux kernel is certainly much bigger though and probably has many more drivers loaded.
It is not one factor but the size of a single bitmap of the screen is certainly an issue.
- These days, DSL is just Debian with less installed. The 700 MB is a curated list of software chosen to fit on a CD image but you access to the full Debian repos.
- Not an issue anymore
- Not sure why am getting in the middle of this but I need to point out that you are not even correct for Linux.
Linux rather famously has avoided the GPL3 and is distributed under a modified GPL2. This license allows binary blob modules. We are all very familiar with this.
As a result, the kernel that matches your description above that ships in the highest volume is Linux by a massive margin. Can you run a fully open source Linux kernel on your Android phone? Probably not. You do not have the drivers. You may not pass the security checks.
Do companies like Broadcomm “collaborate” on Linux even in the PC or Mac space? Not really.
On the other side, companies that use FreeBSD do actually contribute a lot of code. This includes Netflix most famously but even Sony gives back.
The vast majority of vendors that use Linux embedded never contribute a single line of code (like 80% or more at least - maybe 98%). Very few of them even make the kernel code they use available. I worked in video surveillance where every video recorder and camera in the entire industry is Linux based at this point. Almost none of them distribute source code.
But even the story behind the GPL or not is wrong in the real world.
You get great industry players like Valve that contribute a lot of code. And guess what, a lot of that code is licensed permissively. And a lot of other companies continue to Mesa, Wayland, Xorg, pipewire, and other parts of the stack that are permissively licensed. The level of contribution has nothing to do with the GPL.
How about other important projects? There are more big companies contributing to LLVM/Clang (permissive) than there are to GCC (GPL).
In fact, the GPL often discourages collaboration. Apple is a great example of a company that will not contribute to even the GPL projects that they rely on. But they do contribute a fair bit of Open Source code permisssively. And they are not even one of the “good guys” in Open Source.
This comment is pure ideological mythology.
- Sad that we missed 2024 esepcially since the 2023 guy explicitly asked for it. Second comment predicted 2026 for a next post--missed it by a month!
- This is true in general. That said, in some cities at least, the difference in rate is more than a little material.