Captain Beyond

There are some things that can be described as philosophy of Linux (e.g. “don’t break userspace”, “I only care about the code”), but the idea that “Linux is about [freedom|choice|privacy|openness]” is entirely mythological. It’s just a neat free software operating system kernel that has been used to build operating systems, many of which are free software.

Of course, Linux is “too fragmented” because there isn’t a standard “linux desktop environment” (or package manager, or shell, etc) unless it’s systemd in which case it’s “about choice” and we need “init freedom.”

Is mobian still maintained? I had a quick look a couple days ago and their last blog post was 3+ years ago.

October 2025 by my reckoning.

https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/new-stable-rotating-keys/

Linux, the kernel, is the thing that containers run on top of. The container does not actually contain an instance of Linux, it shares it with the host.

If by Linux you mean “literally everything except Linux” though, then sure. But I prefer to say what I mean and mean what I say

You never needed a VM to run Linux apps on Android. Android can run Linux apps because it is already a Linux operating system. This is like referring to a docker container as “running Linux on Debian” or whatever.

I think he means to say that the works are normally licensed under GPLv3 but there is an additional option to use a Polyform license if for whatever reason the GPL conditions cannot be met. So it’s a dual licensing scheme and is totally ok.

What makes Sailfish OS unique over competitors like GrapheneOS and e/OS is that it’s not based on the Android Open Source Project, but Linux.

Not only are AOSP and its derivatives also based on Linux, they are actually free software unlike Sailfish OS which contains some amount of proprietary code (I know at least the Android compatibility layer - which I’m told isn’t simply the AOSP runtime (as Waydroid uses) but some proprietary thing).

s/Linux/systemd/g

Anyone with an Android device is level 1 by default.

I guess being in this community puts me at least at level 3 by definition. I contributed a package to GNU Guix but I’m not quite a “maintainer” or even a regular contributor to it yet. Maybe I can claim level 5 just by virtue of having contributed to an “advanced” distro.

In “the real world” my mild-mannered alter ego would be level 4 because I use GNU/Linux at my day job.

CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.

Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.

I would say not running Windows is itself a practical benefit. I would also say the four freedoms constitute a very practical benefit (even if the software you’re running on top of the OS is proprietary).

This particular project is under the MIT license, so it is okay

https://github.com/futo-org/fcast/blob/master/LICENSE

ETA: I think it’s open source.

It is: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/blob/master/COPYING

No but you see Linux is good and holy and Google is evil, so anything it touches becomes evil and corrupt. Android and ChromeOS cannot be Real Linux because they are corrupted by evil Google cooties.

This

I go out of my way to look for Linux-libre compatible hardware and everything “just works.” Sure it’s not a gaming rig but I don’t expect it to be. Expecting some random “Linux” to be a drop in replacement for Windows is going to disappoint.

This

I use Guix as my “default” distro because I value software-freedom and reproducibility. It fits my needs very well, and I make sure to buy hardware that works with it instead of expecting it to work with whatever I throw at it. For my Windows gaming machine I use PopOS as the replacement OS instead of trying to beat Guix into serving that purpose, because PopOS is better suited for that role, and I have different expectations for it.

It’s okay if something doesn’t meet your needs, that doesn’t make it bad, just means it’s not the right thing for you. There’s like hundreds of distros for Windows gamers, let us free software zealots have ours too please.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I’m too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.

I don’t use brew but I do use Guix on top of PopOS, for most of the same reasons I use Guix System as a daily driver distro on my other machines. The PopOS install is meant to act as a “Windows replacement” so it has proprietary drivers, Steam, etc. For anything that’s not a system package I get it from Guix if possible, because I prefer Guix’s package management and its commitment to software freedom.

On Windows I use Scoop which has a handful of similarities in terms of user package management.

Guix is currently hosted on FSF infrastructure and, as another commenter pointed out, is in the process of migrating to Codeberg. It has never been on Github.