Its honestly one of the easiest things people can do to reject the messed up corporate dystopia we have. Especially if you do it with both computers and phones.
And not only an easy thing to do, but something that bothers the big tech a lot! If it didn’t bother, they wouldn’t care to invest so much in making it harder for us, and if it bothers them, it means we’re on the right track.
Do I dare say it?
YEAR
Of?
THE
SNAKE 🐍
Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers
DESKTOP! Wait, snake desktop? How’d that get in the script?
Hisssssss
Goodbye
Very nice to see, only worry is that Linux will get enshittified (primarily by the GNOME people).
Very nice to see, only worry is that Linux will get enshittified (primarily by the GNOME people).
You misspelled “systemd”.
Just mentioned SystemD in another post of mine.
The gnome people have no profit motive to encourage enshittification.
Gnome 3 was sluggish when it came out, but it’s perfectly fine nowadays. Just avoid it if you don’t like the workflow.
I don’t and I do. Cinnamon is a better Gnome experience now.
Is it even possible for Linux to get enshitified? Wouldn’t the open source community just go back and fork from before the enshitification began? Surely, enshitified versions could be made but people would simply not use them unless there was some proprietary component they wanted.
If there were a single corporate controlled entry point all these people were funneling into there would be posential for enshittification. Even if a single free vertically integrated project like debian suddenly had the majority of all PC users it would probably be impossible for them to avoid the corruption of money. But the linux ecosystem appears to currently be growing in a manner that preserves its diversity and organic nature and thus seems able to remain quite healthy in doing so
Obviously not blatant money/data harvesting like with big tech companies, but corporate strong-arming has been done on Linux (systemD) and can be done again. Granted it’s much harder on Linux (in the case of my SystemD example there are distros like Void or Artix) but there is still a risk imo.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I would be incredibly weary if someone like Meta, Google, or Microsoft started their own distro. Make a solid distro with lots of bells and whistles few distros have, pre-install it on the hottest gear, poach the best devs away from open-source projects, exert more and more influence over kernel development, wait for a majority to get locked in and then start making parts of the OS proprietary so open-source can’t keep up, and the dominoes fall from there.
Fortunately on Linux you can easily switch to another shit
At work, the windows outage spooked management hard. They noticed that our small amout of Linux servers didn’t go down. So now they are OK with us using Linux more. After many decades of Windows.
What Windows outage?
Maybe the CrowdStrike outage last year
I just wish it could have been longer, and affected my company (it didn’t). A day or two off would have gone down a treat
Yep
That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue. They have borked Linux updates as well. Microsoft has had their far share of bad updates but none of them were outage level assuming companies properly tested updates.
A lot of these large companies are terrible at multiple levels. It is great to pay premium dollar for junk.
Yep, my org had a Falcon sensor outage take out tens of thousands of Linux servers. Fuck Crowdstrike. Also, fuck Windows and fuck Microsoft.
That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue.
From my understanding, it’s true that CrowdStrike wrote the faulty code and submitted it to Microsoft. Microsoft shares blame in that they didn’t properly vet and test the kernel-level patch CrowdStrike had submitted.
Microsoft doesn’t vet the code. All code is required to be signed but that is it.
Not certain what others experienced, but in my company, a bad Windows Update knocked out most of our computers for a full day. It was so bad, you can see it in like monthly financial reports when it happened.
It was one of the motivators for why my job dropped Microsoft.
Nothing about Linux users is quiet.
I use arch btw
But but Phoronix just told me yesterday that Linux users went dramatically down on Steam from 3% to 2.99%! Almost like this weekly/monthly claim of Linux users “crossing” another imaginary threshold line hold as much value as this comment /s
I have found myself deep in the Nix and nixOS ecosystem myself.
NixOS isn’t great for non-programmers, I bet, but for programmers it’s amazing.
I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).
If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.
My condolences
Fun fact: if you have a Steam Deck, Nix (the package manager) is pretty much the only vendor-approved way to safely install extra packages that aren’t otherwise available as a flatpak.
Trying to screw with overlayfs to make pacman usable is/was a thing, and it was a very good way to break the OS install despite it having atomic updates.
Fun fact: SteamOS comes pre-loaded with Distrobox so you can install whatever packages you want.
That’s new. Always good to see them add more ways to customize it.
I think it has been a feature since around 6 months after launch of the Steam Deck but it’s not well known and widely used feature.
Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?
Needs “pac-ostree” or something…
Also, what about distrobox?
I haven’t really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I’m going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).
Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?
Steam Deck has a custom solution involving an A/B partition scheme of immutable btrfs filesystems and overlayfs for layering changes on top of that.
Also, what about distrobox?
If there’s a way to install containerization software with Flatpak, maybe. Docker isn’t available out of the box, though.
I haven’t really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I’m going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).
You can use pacman, but it’s volatile and requires making intentional changes to restore its functionality.
The first option is to disable the read-only flag on the root filesystem, then set pacman back up so it can pull packages. Whenever the root filesystem image is updated, you’ll lose the changes, though.
The second option is to add an overlayfs to persist the changes in a different partition or inside a disk image on the writable storage. There was a tool called “rwfus” that did this, and it worked well enough if you were careful. If you ended up upgrading a package that came installed on the base image, though, it would end up breaking the install when the next update came around.
With all the caveats, when Valve made
/nixavailable as a persistent overlay a couple of years ago, I just bit the bullet and learned how to use Nix to install packages withnix-env -i.Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info
Distrobox works really well in Bazzite, in fact I’m currently typing this comment in LibreWolf in a Fedora toolbox because I was getting a weird lag with the flatpak version. You wouldn’t even know if you didn’t set it up yourself, since it’s just an icon on my launcher like any other program. No noticeable overhead whatsoever either.
SteamOS also ships distrobox OOTB now, so you can use this anywhere.
To be fair, we have to be that way to push back against the field of inveitability that omnipresent corporate marketing creates in our minds.
The extroverted nerdiness is an effective tool to communally deprogram our rheified way of looking at computers so we can envision a different future.
Hi hello, this is partly me. My bad. I’m not moving to Win11 (by force and by choice) so I installed Arch just to start to get the hang of things and, well, now I’m just daily driving it.
I’ve run distributions in the distant past and toyed with recent ones. I think this one is staying though.
Feels good that when my computer is idle, it’s not busy spouting off telemetry to some server somewhere. I can customize way more than before, and with Proton, I can still play the games I want to.
Hi you, this is me too, didn’t want to buy new hardware too just because MS wants me to. i went with Nobara because it liked my Nvidia GPU a lot more than many other distros, and deleted my windows partition after 3 days - i expected it to take a lot longer than that to feel safe doing that, but it just works and i can do more with my PC than i ever could with windows.
We are doing our part :-)
Enjoy linux :)
Enjoy RTFM with arch :)
The arch wiki is shockingly detailed at times. I’m very impressed.
I like Arch, but honestly the Arch wiki is one of the great contributions made to the Linux community, with value exceeding the distro itself.
I am on linux mint on both my laptop and my desktop. I only need my phone to be degoogled and I will be all set.
Check out the supported device lists of Graphene OS, Postmarket OS and Ubuntu Touch.
Yes. I wanted to do that, but when my last phone broke it was a damn emergency. I was distrustful of phone protection because I remember getting a phone that was armored up in a case and had a tempered glass screen but… it once (first time) fell flat from my shirt pocket onto the ground flat on its front screen and it immediately went black. I had it fixed. New screen, new protector, but the protector made it possible to plug it into charge… so I had to remove it in and out of the case to do so, but the screen was broken from the pressing (like fucking how? A new changed screen AND another tempered glass cover and it was still broken just a stronger finger press?) It just kept breaking. I then refused to use protection for years after that.
But the new one I got? I think it is protection that actually works.
I got a Samsung S23. Before I get a new phone I need to remove 2fa from a lot of shit so they dont have my new phone.
I want to ask a hell of a lot more questions about this, but later.
As a long time Ubuntu touch supporter and tester, I unfortunately have to say that it simply isn’t ready for a lot of users at the moment :(
Even if you’re willing to put up with most of its shortcomings, VoLTE device support is extremely limited.
But don’t get me wrong, I REALLY want this stuff to be the future, I think it just needs a bit more time.
My advice is to always go in short steps, proving the ground and getting to know the alternatives. I’d recommend installing f-droid and having fun testing all the free apps you can, removing google stuff one by one, then, after feeling comfortable, trying a custom rom, and when you eventually need a new phone, looking for a model more friendly to degoogling.
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Installed linux for my brother-in-law and for a professor last month. Both liked it and are probably going to use it insted of moving to win11. I’m doing my part.
What distro did you go with?
Linux mint for my brother-in-law, and debian for my professor, because he said he has an aversion to stuff changing in his computer and wanted something that stayed almost the same in 10 or 20 or years from now and didn’t fail him. He seemed enthusiastic with the concept of a distro that focuses on stability and wanted it, even if I said that it’s a bit harder to use and recommended linux mint.
o7
The Quiet Revolution?
is this implying that windows is catholicism and we’re mass secularizing our computers?
cause hell yea
I thought the quiet revolution was a specific thing to Quebec.
Otherwise it’s just Sparkling Nonverbal Civil Disobedience.
What a handsome bovine!
All my extended family has been converted to linux because all they need is a browser, libre office and rustdesk for me to tech support them. The only issue is still printers but tbh they are equally awful on all platforms these days.
I thought Linux had decent printer support compared to windows.
It does, in my experience. At least in Linux Mint.
At home, my old Brother laser is tucked off in a far corner of the house connected to wifi, and my wired home PC as well as my wifi work laptop both see it and can print to it just fine.
At work even those big printers show up and function.
Kubuntu LTS works pretty damn near out-of-the-box as well.
Mint is based on ubuntu so that makes sense to me!
I think they are comparable in that regard honestly?
Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.
Printer support on Linux is provided by CUPS, which is developed by Apple. Apple wants its Mac (and maybe also iPhone and iPad?) customers to have good printer support, so they try their best to make CUPS work well.
Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.
As a guy who’s worked in IT for around 20 years: LOL.
Decent printers yes, some demons from ninth circle of hell somehow are more problematic on anything non-windows.
some demons from ninth circle of hell
What a rude way to invoke cupsd
Depends on the brand really. Some like HP and Epson haven’t worked as good in my own experience compared to Brother.
I did not know about rustdesk. It looks to be very promising, I will give it a try!
I recently wiped my 10yr running windows install that had all manner of shady hacks applied over the years to basically lobotomize it, after a hardware upgrade. As I was wiping I was largely intending to create another “lobotomized” win10 install as the second install on dual boot, but windows on top of everything is known for breaking dual boot. Working around sheer hostility at every level, and for what? Basically just to play pirated games since steam games work on Linux now. I never bothered trying to prop it back up and have been only better off for it
I was dualbooting of two seperate nvme drives for each os. Worked pretty well for almost a year until i distro hopped. But for some reason my windows boot partition was located on my linux drive which i purged entirely while installing the new OS. Because why would be there any windows component on my linux drive, right?
Recreating the windows boot partition on the correct drive was more complicated than anything i ever encountered on linux so far. Took like 5 hours and funnily enough was only doable via a terminal.
Also there isnt a reason left for me to put up with microsofts bullshit. A few weeks ago i got a racing game with VR and wheel support running in an afternoon. The title is even abandonware so i had to grab some repack with a windows only installer.
that’s strange, what filesystem was that? windows cannot handle linux filesystems, by itself.
wasn’t that /boot/efi? if so windows uses that too, it’s a designated fat32 partition for uefi bootables.
Uuh, could have been /boot/efi ? I dont know anymore. It was a few weeks ago and in an adhd induced rush to fix that problem now and now was until 3am.
You can use Lutris to play pirated games on Linux
Penguin wave
Who is using Linux, though? Like, 6% (or 11.3% as others have pointed out) means tens or hundreds of millions of people. But where are they?
How do we know these numbers indicate real people?
I’ve been using it for over 2 decades as a main OS. I loathe using windows now. Their ads, including web results, and privacy issues. It’s just become cumbersome. You have multiple choices of desktop environments in linux. Don’t like your current DE? Switch to another gnome, kde, cinnimon, mint, etc. You need a program? Install it from the package manager. Remote mount a drive? sure, you don’t have to jump through hoops like windows.
I’ve been advocating for Linux for decades. People who have historically just dismissed me have been trying and many have converted.
Also (credit where it’s due) behind the scenes Valve has been greasing the wheels on a transition to Linux gaming … which has quite often been the biggest fiction point in the past.
I’vs seen several content creators outside the traditional Linux bubble try Linux, notably including PewDiePie.
Copilot has shaken many small businesses out of complacency, often into modern self-hosted turn-key Linux solutions.
I have friends on Windows 10 who tell me they will not move to 11 - they’re hoping Microsoft folds, but they’re beginning to build a Linux-shaped parachute.
Who is using Linux, though?
My parents, both of whom are 70+, are using Linux laptops. I installed it for them.
Hi, I’m here. Been using Linux Desktop for years, not solely nor religiously, since I usually have more than one machines at a time. Work, personal, family and such.
Also, does it exactly matter? Hundred of thousands, millions probably, of devices run Windows and they’re not desktop machines. Think info screens, ATMs, Kiosk devices, Industrial Machines and the list goes on.
It doesn’t surprise me that someone (a) on lemmy and (b) in the Linux community would respond with this comment though. But the number of people on lemmy is only a few digits.
It does matter – when I think “Desktop Market Share,” I’m already excluding the type of windows devices you just mentioned.
I use windows and have been since I was a kid in a very computer savvy home. Build my first computer at 8 or 9 years old with surplus 80’s parts, ISO slots and all. First OS install was dos with a shell GUI and have had every major windows iteration starting g with 3.1 and up. Of the more modern ones that followed the windows 95 esthetic, I loved windows 2000 pro, hated xp, then loved 7 pro, hated 8, and accepted windows 8.1. When it came to windows 10 I was already getting frustrated with the excessive bloat and OS level Spyware. Now with eindows 11 BIOS level Spyware and so much bloat even the most modern CPUs lag, this is now a bridge too far for me. I will not be upgrading to 11 and will instead be jumping over to Linux. I played around with Linux in the 2000’s and a bit with server stuff, but never took it seriously as a desktop replacement OS until now.
So who are the ‘real’ people switching over? People like me. I don’t work in IT. 99% of my computer usage is for things I can do through a web browser, office suit, or gaming through steam, all of which is now very accessible through Linux. If this was Linux from 10 or 15 years ago, I don’t think you would have seen the shift happen, but where it is at now is more accessible for the common user than ever before.
I mean you asked. There is nothing special about me, I’m not a basement dweller, I have a job and a family, pay taxes and whatever. I’m not in the US if that matters. And I prefer to use other operating systems than windows or macos.
I know, I know. I appreciate your response. But it’s just an anecdote, not really a broad answer IMO.
My gamer Brother-in-law asked me about Linux gaming. Until a few years ago he was all like “Windows is super!”.
