Linux is a branch of development of the old unix class of systems. Unix is not necessarily open and free. FOSS is what is classified as open and free software. Unix since its inception was deeply linked to specific industrial private interests, let's not forget all this while we examine the use of linux by left minded activists. FOSS is nice and cool, but it is nearly 99.99% run on non-open and non-free hardware. A-political proposals of crowd-funding and diy construction attempts have led to ultra-expensive idealist solutions reserved for the very few and the eccentric affluent experimenters

Linux vs Windows is cool and trendy, is it? Really is it alone containing any political content? If there is such what is it? So let's examine it from the base.

FOSS, People, as small teams or individuals "producing as much as they can and want" offering what they produced to be shared, used, and modified by anyone, or "as much as they need". This is as much of a communist system of production and consumption as we have experienced in the entirety of modern history. No exchange what so ever, collective production according to ability and collective consumption according to need.

BUT we have corporations, some of them mega-corps, multinationals who nearly monopolize sectors of computing markets, creating R&D departments specifically to produce and offer open and free code (or conditionally free). Why? Firstly because other idiots will join their projects and offer further development (labor), contribute to their projects, for "free", but they still retain the leadership and ownership of the project. Somehow, using their code, without asking why they were willing to offer it in the first place, it is cool to use it as long as we can say we are anti/against/ms-win free.

Like false class consciousness we have fan-boys of IBM, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Qt, HP, Intel, AMD, ... products against MS.

Back when unix would only run on enterprise ultra-expensive large scale systems and expensive workstations (remember Dec, Sun, Sgi, .. workstations that were priced similarly to 2 brand new fast sportscars each) and the PC market was restricted to MS or the alternative Apple crap, people tried and tried to port forms of unix into a PC. Some really gifted hacking experts were able to achieve such marvels, but it was so specific to hardware that the examples couldn't be generalized and utilized massively.

Suddenly this genious Finn and his friends devised a kernel that could make most PC hardware available work and unix with a linux kernel could boot and run.

IBM saw eventually a way back into the PC market it lost by handing dos out to the subcontractors (MS), and saw an opportunity to take over and steer this "project" by promoting RedHat. After 2 decades of behind the scenes guidance since the projected outcome was successful in cornering the market, IBM appeared to have bought RH.

Are we all still anti-MS and pro-IBM,google,Oracle,FB,Intel/AMD?

The bait thrown to dumb fish was an automated desktop that looked and behaved just like the latest MS-win edition.

What is the resistance?

Linus Trovalds and a few others who sign the kernel today make 6figure salaries ALL paid by a handful of computing giants that by offering millions to the foundation control what it does. Traps like rust, telemetry, .. and other "options" are shoved daily into the kernel to satisfy the paying clients' demands and wishes.

And we, in the left are fans of a multimilioner's "team" against a "trilioner's" team. This is not football or cricket, or F1. This is your data in the hands of multinationals and their fellow customer/agencies. Don't forget which welfare system maintains the hierarchy of those industries whether the market is rosy or gray. Do I need to spell out the connection?

Beware of multinationals bearing gifts.

Yes there are healthier alternatives requiring a little more work and study to employ, the quick and easy has a "cost" even when it is FOSS.

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Hello

In my free time I like to translate Marxist educational materials to my native language by adding subtitles to lectures, translating infographics and the like. Even though there are not many people who interact with it, It is my preferred way of "bypassing" attention problems and I learn a lot in the process.

I used to host them on YouTube with links to original materials and share them on Reddit, but I think about moving to other platforms. I think it would be good to have my own small website - I have some limited experience with GNU/Linux, HTML, CSS and Javascript, so I don't think that I would need any additional software to make it all from scratch. I think it's a good opportunity to learn some web development and share some notes with recommendations to make it easier to access other authors and resources.

There are few questions that I'd like to ask before I even consider this project. I do not expect answer to all my questions, but any suggestion is welcome.

1. What resources would be useful in learning on how to host a website properly? Could you recommend any services that don't break the bank and let host a small site without ads? Is there some Linux software that you like to use personally to manage that?

2. Is it better to host videos directly to the website or use some other services? If so, what alternatives to YouTube could you recommend?

3. I don't touch books or mainstream materials to avoid copyright claims - all I do, I do with respect for the creators and I provide all original resources. Should I be aware of any potential problems with coprygith claims? If so, it would be a bummer, as I enjoy doing this and I think that knowledge should be shared, but I am ready to reconsider this undertaking and find another way to work for the community.

Cheers

Although its just another OS, linux does have a major learning curve for the common GUI enjoyer like me.

When you all were first learning linux, did you have a specific resource you learned from? Was it more like doing projects and learning on the way through forums?

Chimera is an interesting new Linux distro with no systemd, BSD utils instead of gnu, and other unique design choices.

Reading about it on lobste.rs, the developer (or one of them) commented:

"

why does every other linux distribution exist? most of them provide far less added value compared to the others, yet nobody questions their existence, perhaps because they are fundamentally uninteresting

it’s always a combination of many smaller factors

i just wanted to make a well-rounded and somewhat opinionated system without cruft or sketchy parts, but still featureful and generally usable (no suckless junk), with a low-maintenance but high-correctness package build system and infrastructure, no systemd but taking service management and everything around it seriously (there are exactly 0 other non-systemd distros that do that), easy to bootstrap, architecture-agnostic, and hardened (as much as possible without introducing visible breakage or significant performance loss; the only “linux distro” that really takes this seriously is android, and that’s not general-purpose)

none of the individual choices like userland base or libc or whatever are goals in themselves, they are a means to an end or just the most obvious thing given the circumstances"

I have been using Gentoo exclusively for about two years and really enjoyed it. The customization and package manager is just top-notch. I have been curious about NixOS for some time, just randomly seeing it pop in some discussion, but never really looked into it. One day YouTube recommends this video about flakes for development instead of using Dockerfiles.

It intrigued me because I am not really fan of Dockerfiles. In my experience, it is too easy for something to break and pretty hard to maintain them properly. Plus, it is really annoying to use them for development.

So I started looking into Nix and then NixOS and created a new partition and installed it and so far it is a pretty interesting experience. The system is pretty customizable, and it is nice having the entire system described in configuration files. I could see myself using the same config for my laptop and desktop and just sync them. It is really nice and easy to have your entire system configuration in git repo, much easier than what I used with things like etckeeper.

So far there are only few issues I encountered. Not every package is implemented properly, so some configuration is the same old story of using files in /etc or maybe just specifying a configuration file in your config. I've also read about some issues with Nix not using FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) for example Steam had some issues but so far I didn't encounter them. Also, the documentation is not what I am used to coming from Gentoo, but it is still usable.

The last issue I have is not really an issue. It is pretty time-consuming to make your entire configuration, especially if you want to use flakes. I've been slowly adding more and more but so far only into default configuration.nix and would love to rewrite it completely into flakes, but it takes time.

So far I didn't decide that I would be not going back to Gentoo, but it is fascinating experience. I am especially curious how will this impact my development workflow because it should be much easier to control dependencies per project. Especially with something like Python (always really hated using venvs).

Anyone else trying NixOS or using it already?

Do you guys recommend dual-booting a Linux distro on a secondary drive, or running Linux as a main OS, using Wine for Windows applications?

I've wanted to make the switch for a very long time, just worried about compatibility issues or even performance loss in gaming using Wine.

Interested in hearing everyone's experience using alternative phone OS's. Have you ever used Lineage or Graphene, Pursim, pinephone? Was it good enough to replace your android/iphone?

I was thinking of getting an Odroid N2+ to use as a Jellyfin/Plex server. What other things can it be used for?

I know there is RetroPie but I have no interest in that. Any other suggestions?

I've just been getting up and running with a minimal distro lately and also discovered user-dirs.dirs, so I'm no longer bound by the standard auto-generated Home folders.

Looking to share and learn how other comrades organise their home directories. Any tips appreciated, and also just seeing how other people like to use and organise ~/ :-)

Here's how I've organised ~/ on my new install so far:

* audio/
    * audiobooks/
    * music/
    * podcasts/
* books/
* documents/
* dotfiles/
* downloads/
* images/
    * photos/
    * screenshots/
    * wallpaper/
* opt/
* planner/
* projects/
* scripts/
* videos/
* workspace/

… plus all the hidden cruft that's placed in home by various programs. I do my best to enforce the XDG_CONFIG_HOME standard but I'm still in the process of moving stuff into .config/.

Most of these are self-explanatory. opt/ is for software I build from source or otherwise not available in my package manager. planner/ is a git repo full of plain text and markdown files used to manage productivity and take notes. projects/ is my personal git repos containing stuff like my blog, creative writing etc. scripts/ is part of my $PATH and contains executable helper scripts such as setting a random wallpaper, fetching mail, etc. It's also a git repo. workspace/ is actually the XDG_DESKTOP_DIR but renamed. My window manager doesn't put files/folders on the actual desktop so I use this space for repos I contribute to for my job as well as transient tasks which require a folder structure for getting something done but which will likely be removed later. Basically stuff that's not an actual personal "project" and I'm working on at the moment.

Things I'm thinking about:

• alternative names for downloads/. There are three folders which start do meaning tab-complete only works on the third letter. Not ideal. I've seen some people use incoming/ but I keep flip-flopping on whether I like this or not.
• Possibly renaming dotfiles/ to .dotfiles/ but then, I use it a fair amount at the moment.
• adding an articles folder for academic articles and HTML blog posts I want to keep locally.

Talk about a new micro kernel called Helios, written in a language called Hare

Just showing off my desktop. For those curious, I use the XFCE desktop, and ULauncher tied to the windows key. I'm also experimenting with animated wallpapers using hidimari.

I'm looking to get a straight tablet (not a 360-hinge laptop with a keyboard) that will mostly be used for mobile centric applications like when I'm out and about or when I want to binge shows in bed. Ideally it will be a device that I can exclusive use the touchscreen with for when I'm either too lazy or can't practically prop it up and use it as a proper laptop.

I want to keep at least the software as open source as possible, so my options are either an Android tablet that I can sideload an AOSP de-googled ROM like Lineage OS, or a Windows tablet with an x86 CPU that I'll install a Linux distro on (inb4 "Android is technically Linux").

I currently use KDE Plasma which is my favourite environment when I'm on my desktop, and I quickly found through testing on my touchscreen laptop that it's practically unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Here are some things that I found KDE lacking that I need:

• Integrated onscreen keyboard that automatically pops up when you're in a text field, and/or can easily be brought in and out of frame when needed.

• Smooth swipe-based scrolling. I find that swiping up on many KDE apps just selects text or drags an element, or does nothing, and you have to drag the tiny scroll bar to scroll.

• Pinch to zoom

• A terminal that works well with touch screen, namely one that makes it easy to use special characters and control keys with an onscreen keyboard. Termux on Android is what I consider one of the best implementations of this.

• Active stylus support with palm rejection is a plus, like the Surface when running Windows or the iPad Pro.

I consider myself very knowledgeable with Linux, and I do tinker with my computers a lot, but for this one, I do simply want something that "just works", because I'll either be using it at school/work and can't afford to start diving into conf files and searching up cryptic error messages because something broke, or I'll be in bed just wanting to relax before going to sleep.

Finally, is this futile? If we're considering stock Android as a benchmark for a decent user experience on a tablet, can anything on the non-Android Linux side even compare?

Most of what I want to do on the web is read text, and while I love Firefox it's a bit of a resource hog for quick browsing. I've therefore been using links2 for a while. There is also Lynx, and Elinks and probably many more I'm not aware of.

links2 was somewhat of an arbitrary choice for me, so I was wondering if any comrades used terminal-based browsers and which ones they preferred? I'd value the feature of highlighting and copying text, but maybe that's a concern for the terminal emulator itself? links2 is fine so far but wondering if anyone was particularly passionate about their browser choice on the terminal.

(Note: I'm aware of Kristall, for Gemini/HTTP/Gopher but I'm specifically interested in a terminal-based web browser)

New essay, not directly related to Linux but cool nonetheless.

So the thing is that I use a 1080p display alongside a 4k display, and I only know how to change the global scaling.

At 150% scaling:

• 1080p display everything is too large
• 4k display is good

At 100% scaling:

• 1080p display is good
• 4k display everything is too tiny

Is it possible to have 100% scaling in the 1080p display and 150% in the 4k display at the same time?

I'm using Debian 11 with KDE. I'm willing to switch to another DE or to a window manager.

This is a video talking about Deepin OS, a Chinese made Linux distro based on Debian. Plus it isn't full of cringe like videos about anything related to China tend to be.

Or do you keep a few Windows/Mac PCs lying around?

You know, just in case you need to run an app/game that only works perfectly on Windows/Mac and WINE/Proton wouldn't run it?

Been thinking of Linuxifying my Laptop eversince I enjoyed Linux after defecting to it (from Windows) in my main PC (a Desktop).