If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.
Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.
What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.
In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.
The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.
While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.
In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).
People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.
The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).
Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.
As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.
If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.
Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.
Something is open source or isn’t. There’s a set, binary definition.
I get the feeling you’re implying a difference/aversion between those two terms which doesn’t exist. This and the combination with a nonsensical statement about amount of GNU packages vs non-GNU packed makes it feel like you’re pushing an agenda here: There’s far more free software than just GNU’s - that’s a success for free software and the GNU project. There’s no connect between the argument you’re obviously implying.
Also HURD never took off - but why should it? The GNU project’s goal is a fully free operating system, with Linux being persuaded to adopt a proper license there’s no real need for HURD. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun project.
Which two terms? Everyone has an agenda but I am not sure what I am being accused of here. Do you mean Free Software vs Open Source? The FSF goes to great lengths to distinguish between those two terms:
The BSD license allows incorporation of BSD code in non-free projects. That was both an advantage for capitalists while simultaneously moving hobbyists away from it’s development. Kind of an important bit of info.
It’s not going anywhere. Debian existed when I was a kid and it’ll probably still exist when I draw my last breath.
I know how to use it, since, once again, I’ve been using it since I was a kid.
It has all the desktop environments.
It fully supports systemd. I do not miss the unreliability, slowness, and complexity of what came before that. (Normally I wouldn’t mention this, but your former distro of choice exists solely for the purpose of not having systemd, so it’s relevant this time.)
I’m currently daily driving Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I didn’t think GNOME would be all my thing, but it’s really intuitive and has just enough options to satisfy all my desires (okay, I needed the gesture improvements extension for some of them).
It’s great to see GNOME focusing on what really matters. I think because they keep it simple to the user, they have more time to focus on important but harder to implement features rather than focusing on heavy customization (I love KDE too, don’t worry) But now I want to switch to Fedora or something bleeding edge, because of GNOME.
Remember to make sure that all the boot configs are updated correctly after the resize. It could happen that your boot manager does not find the partition to unlock after a resize
It would be if it wasn’t for NVIDIA, as usual. On Intel/AMD, you assign the seats, the displays light up and you’re good to go, pretty much works out of the box, especially on Wayland.
But for NVIDIA yeah maybe a VM is less pain since NVIDIA works well with VFIO.
Those are both things that a window manager doesnt really do. I havent used i3 much but ill try to point you in the right directions.
For caffeine, depending on your bar, i believe most of them have modules for that.
Then for locking/shutting down, you’d want to look at i3lock, xautolock, xidlehook, and probably many others. Can’t guide you to the right commands, but this forum thread seems to have a lot of the info you’re looking for: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208699
Thankyou. For locking i have i3lock but i havent got round to customising it yet so i still have the defaults and my bar is polybar which has a has some customisation. Ill see if i can find a caffeine moduke to add to it
Sadly there is no way around it. The mentioned alternatives like regolith have already been mentioned. There is also some smaller distros with prepared twm configs, but I can’t recommend it. Because if you want to customize it, you will have a hard time finding the right ways to do it.
Lspci should list all your pci devices, one of which will be your WiFi adapter. Confirm its make and if it requires a kernel module. I would bet it’s a broadcom
By memory it had a Firefox extension it installed and relied on to make a few things slightly smoother like h264 video, but that was a good decade ago and Mint today doesn’t like you said
I bought a cheap-ass Asus laptop knowing that the installed wifi module was not supported by linux. So I bought a new wifi module that had linux support for like $20 and swapped it in.
Yeah the boot process is a mess! Debian’s noisy GRUB and unsightly boot text is an obvious and unnecessary paint point for a desktop user but very desirable for server installations. You do have some options though!
The great thing about Debian, Linux, and FLOSS is that you can even automate downloading Debian’s source package when it gets updated, applying the silent patch, applying Ubuntu’s compilation options, compiling the deb, and installing the deb! But yeah why can some package maintainer not provide such as an option in the repository! It’s really an annoyance for many and almost makes me feel like I’m not the type of user the Debian community desires. Like, “Wait… what? You like pretty stuff? GTFO!” Maybe its even true? Hopefully you will enjoy using Debian! Its most preferable to Ubuntu in many ways these days!
Very interesting! Will save this. Thanks for mentioning it.
I think there are a lot of unsociable people in the linux community. I should know, I‘m autistic and also pathologically unsociable but even I am shocked at the amount of elitism and RTFMing that happens on a daily basis.
The difference I think is my self image is pretty ok and I dont need to be the greatest and most knowledgeable linux pro on the planet. Thats probably the only thing some folks have to their name.
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