this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, NixOS or the many, many other offerings out there.
- Those on Apple Silicon Macs can consult Asahi Linux for available options.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
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The tales of cryptic bugs and stuff are mostly from power-users running Arch or other "advanced" distros, And Arch being continuously updated to always be on the bleeding edge and everything being completely under control of the user means updates (or the user) are gonna break stuff sometimes. But not every distro is that complicated.
Depending on your distro and hardware, the linux experience can range from everything works out of the box and you never have to touch the terminal to you need to enter a series of commends to have basic desktop environement.
My go to is EndeavourOS. Takes a little work to install and setup, especially if you partition it manually like I did, but once it's done you basically (almost) never have you touch the terminal ever again. Almost never had to do any troubleshooting.
Other beginner friendly distros that work out of the box include (non exhaustive list):
Mint. Very windows-like so good for new users comming from windows.
ZorinOS. Also windows-like. Lightweight, there is a version designed to to run on very low spec hardware, if you have any 5-10+ years old machine that are struggling with windows you can give them a new life with this distro.
POP!_os. A "MacOS-like" distro.
Brazzite. A gaming oriented distro. Very easy to install, can run most games out of the box, including old PC games no longer supported by windows.
This is so helpful thank you!