Cory Doctorow has a book, “Walkaway” that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It’s pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn’t overly glamourize any political system the way you’d typically see in political fiction.
There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.
I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.
When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.
In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.
I made a commentary about it here lemmy.ml/post/511377 in the FLOSS vs Closed Source Philosophy section:
The soul and spirit of FLOSS is socialist/communist, in a similar way to piracy. The purpose of it is to serve the greater good. In comparison, the soul and spirit of closed source software, outside rare cases of benevolence, is highly corporate and fascistic, similar to a leech, which in many cases these days may suck money out of your wallets for subscriptions. It may also serve as a leech to suck your data for telemetry and spying purposes.
Several years back, I was 100% Windows based, and only knew Linux from the web hosting scene and running VPS Systems. I landed my current job which uses 100% Linux based OS’s on their customer’s equipment and software, Since then, I’ve gained a mountain of knowledge in the Linux admin and user space to feel comfortable enough to use it full time 100% in my household and administer it.
I think you would be surprised to see Linux more widespread out there, for example, a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian out in the wild mid reboot on signage or other displays, or being part of the brain boxes in industrial machinery. Then of course, - if you have an Android phone - well…that’s a form of Linux as well. :)
I use Linux at the office. I’m the only employee at my company who does.
I haven’t had many issues collaborating with others using libreoffice while they use MS office. I do keep a Windows VM running for those somewhat rare instances where I need Windows for something though. I also needed to invest quite some time to figure out Linux alternatives for everything (how to use company VPN, how to get MS Teams working, how to connect to network drives, etc).
But so far so good. Been 100% Linux at work for maybe ~1.5 years?
So I did miss that Linus is in the article, but the reference to him says he was awarded the title, which makes it sound like an honour rather than a hierarchical system. I don’t believe that he’s ever been anything other than the projects owner/founder but I’m happy to learn if I’m wrong.
Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.
I mean how the community refers to him. I’ve never read a thread where someone called Linus a BDFL, I have with python. If they do, they do. Just haven’t seen it myself.
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
Many times what? Most forks die within a few months. Especially for big and well known projects. For example, io.js was a fork of NodeJs. Didn’t last long and was killed by NodeJs. All the Firefox forks are pretty much dead as well. Linux also had plenty of forks by people who disagreed with Linus and where are they now? I bet you don’t even remember their names.
Forks don’t work unless the original project is dead.
So mass adoption is your answer, and I’d say you’re misguided. The purpose of FOSS isn’t to make a profit, but to satisfy uses and needs. If a few people have a need for a fork and use it, then it’s a success.
You’re judging FOSS software by popularity, rather than use, as though it’s for profit.
Most new businesses fail as well. Maybe we shouldn’t be starting new businesses either? Or perhaps this more about people being unprepared and out of their depth whether it’s starting a new business or forking a code base. And not the individual actions themselves.
This is incorrect. It’s true that most (in fact, I would say almost all) forks go nowhere but that doesn’t mean forking isn’t incredibly valuable. Even the example you cite, “original project is dead” isn’t just incidentally useful, it’s critical to open source. Other examples include:
project’s core team is part of a for profit org that is moving the project in a bad, profit motivated direction:
project’s leader suddenly and dramatically loses respect (maybe he killed his wife or something);
project’s leader dies without leaving a digital will regarding who controls the core repo;
project continues to direct effort into features while falling to address major security concerns;
project is healthy and useful in every way but there is an important use case not being addressed, and the fork would address it.
Even if 99% of forks fail, that’s irrelevant because 99% of original projects fail in the same ways. Forks are critical to open source.
I would say we should just let unjust societies fail so just ones can take their place, but that seems to be the natural course. We’re seeing that right now.
Nextcloud is a FOSS fork of OwnCloud. Both projects are great in their own way, hugely successful and serve a lot of people very well. They just moved in different directions.
This is just one example of many. Ability to fork is super important to ensure that projects stay open source, like in this example.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.
I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
Skilled programmers can see that Linus is an expert. It works in tech. It probably works in any professional environment - anywhere where skilled people are picking someone highly skilled.
For the average person, we have clearly seen average people suck at picking expert leaders, though it works fine in small groups
There’s a word for this, the promotion of leaders based on merit instead of popularity - Technocracy. And it’s not a distinct ideology but a syncretic one that has been adopted by many groups with differing politics. The most prominent example would be the Technocratic faction of the People’s Republic of China, which was opposed to the Maoists back in the 50s and 60s; they argued for society to be led by experts instead of Democratically with a strong emphasis on Peasant participation (the standpoint of the Maoists). China today follows a moderate path taking from both factions.
In the West, however, Technocracy is mostly associated with Liberals; however, I would argue that the modern Liberal view of Technocracy is fundamentally flawed, since it relies on Capitalism distributing wealth meritocratically (which Socialists understand is not the case).
It is related to a mix of actual display resolution vs conversions to virtual resolutions (the scaled resolution), and use of single precision floating point calculations.
Essentially my understanding is what it is doing is storing the value needed to convert your actual resolutions number of pixels (2160p) to a virtual resolution number of pixels (2160/1.75 horizontally) but that gets you fractions of a virtual pixel. So instead of 1.75 it scaled by 1.75182… to get to a whole number of virtual pixels to work with. Then on top of that the figure is slightly altered from what we’d expect by floating point errors.
If you take the actual horizontal resolution 2190 and divide it by the virtual resolution it’s trying to use 1233 pixels, you need a conversion value of 1.75182… to convert to it so you don’t get fractions of a pixel. If you used 1.75 you’d get 1234.2857… pixels. So gnome is storing the fraction that gets you a clean conversion in pixels to about 4 decimal places of a pixel.
Full credit to rakslice at Stack Exchange who also goes into the detail.
I know some schools in my country use their own linux distribution on pair with windows. And my organization has also their own linux distribution but it is barely used really. I dont know anyone who uses it, but I do know it exists.
This isn’t only an app issue, it’s the implementation in Mutter.
On KDE for example, I’ve set 150% fractional scaling, and all apps look sharp.
I was really hyped when the recent update introduced “proper” fractional scaling, and was bummed when I noticed it didn’t work in many of my apps, especially Electron ones.
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