I like the meme but the most hilarious aspect of the saga to me is still that Oracle got out on a stage and with a straight face proclaimed that they are the bastion of openness for freeloading RHEL source code to make Oracle Linux. That shit never gets old.
I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers and then use loopholes to restrict access.
“Lazy clones” are vital to maintaining the interoperability and openness that make RHEL (or any other corporate distro) attractive and keep them accountable for anticonsumer practices, preventing enshittification. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt sales.
If they want a proprietary OS, they can build it themselves. The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt Red Hat’s business.
My university uses Rocky. If it didn’t exist, they would probably just use debian. Because it does exist, hundreds of students will be exposed to and learn to use enterprise linux, and will likely contribute to its corporate user base at companies that require RHEL.
If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.
I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers
So basically all those who used CentOS and did not contribute anything even though CentOS cried for contributions for years until Red Hat eventually bought them? (=Most notably Oracle.)
Red Hat is still the biggest FOSS contributor. (I use openSUSE and SteamOS, btw, so I’m not even a RH product user.)
and then use loopholes to restrict access.
It’s really not a loophole. The GPL spells it out directly that the source code is only mandatory to be offered to those who get the binaries. A loophole is networked execution that was not even thought about when the original GPL was written and then was “closed” by the AGPL and later intended to be left open by the GPLv3.
If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.
Those actions seem to have lead to creating that new OpenELA organization, basically to what CentOS wanted for years but their cries fell on deaf ears. Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.
So basically all those who used CentOS and did not contribute anything even though CentOS cried for contributions for years until Red Hat eventually bought them? (=Most notably Oracle.)
Not contributing is not necessarily freeloaders. Users have no obligation. That’s the point of open source. Only building off of open code and the closing yours off is freeloading.
Oracle and others used the source code and publish their distro’s source. Oracle not contributing is jerky, sure, but for them to be freeloaders they would have to use enterprise linux as a basis for a pay walled proprietary or restricted source OS. Correct me if I’m wrong, but their business model is using Oracle Linux in their cloud offerings.
Red Hat is still the biggest FOSS contributor. (I use openSUSE and SteamOS, btw, so I’m not even a RH product user.)
Hell, I use Fedora, so anything I contribute to is upstream of RHEL. I’m not saying RH socks. There are a lot of great people they employ and their business has been a huge positive for FOSS. But those (great) achievements were and are premised on community collaboration, and it’s more than fair to raise a stink about it.
It’s really not a loophole.
You’re right about GPL. I have nothing against paid software. I was more describing the broader enterprise linux ecosystem. That is to say, RHEL’s success is based on making it an open standard. The greater community can contribute either directly to the upstream or to the application ecosystem, with the understanding their work is applicable to the FOSS community. Closing the downstream is a loophole out of this system where they get to profit. It’s a bait and switch.
Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.
“Ecosystem” wasn’t referring to the existence of clone distros but the development and adoption of enterprise linux they enable(d). The ecosystem is not only those directly contributing to enterprise linux but the developers targeting enterprise linux and the (IT/CS) user base familiarizing itself with enterprise linux. The market for a RHEL clone is not the market for RHEL enterprise solutions. As I said above, free availability of clones gets people into the ecosystem, and on the corporate end, as long as RH’s offerings aren’t enshittified, Red Hat converts these people into customers. It should be a win-win, but short-term profit maximization will hurt its trust and future growth.
Not contributing is not necessarily freeloaders. Users have no obligation. That’s the point of open source. Only building off of open code and the closing yours off is freeloading.
Describes pretty much what Oracle did for years. Now they are contributing to OpenELA, so in a weird turn of events the overall situation got better after a short period of uncertainty.
Hey, we are all freeloaders here. How many of us can say they’ve contributed to every single component of the stack we use everyday to get our cat memes? Like GRUB, the kernel, systemd/whatever you prefer, Mesa, X.Org/Wayland, your DE of choice, Firefox?
I get your point, but this definition applies to all users of FOSS software who do not actively contribute to its development. Purpose is a consideration here; I am freeloading if I use netflix’s service through loopholes or piracy when it is intended for paid customers, but am I freeloading if I, a non developer and a student not in a position to donate, use libreoffice? By this definition, I clearly am a freeloader. But it is clearly intended for use by the general public.
For RHEL, there is more ambiguity, because although they sell it at cost, it is still based in an open source ecosystem. I understand how using rhel binaries without becoming a paying customer could be seen as freeloading, but the crucial difference is the intent of an open ecosystem and standard. RHEL establishes itself as a standard, and that means it’s work will be used, not just contributed to. By closing it off, they are cutting off that standard.
Compare this to standards like USB or audio codecs. A powerful company or consortium may create an open standard and use it in their paid offerings, but others using it aren’t freeloaders, even if they compete with said offerings. They’re intended (or expected) users.
Sorry if I’m not making much sense. I’m only commenting because I find this interesting, not angry keyboard warring.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but their business model is using Oracle Linux in their cloud offerings.
Oracle Linux was created to undermine Red Hat profits to prevent Red Hat from competing with Oracle on acquisitions. They also sell their other products, including proprietary ones like Oracle DB, running on top of Oracle Linux.
But those (great) achievements were and are premised on community collaboration, and it’s more than fair to raise a stink about it.
If you value community collaboration, you should be pissed at the RHEL clones. They contribute extremely little, literally just enough to say that they contribute a non-zero amount. That’s the stink you should be raising. The spirit of open source is collaboration. Taking the RHEL source code and just rebuilding without meaningfully contributing may be allowed by open source licenses, but it damn sure isn’t in the spirit of open source.
That is to say, RHEL’s success is based on making it an open standard.
RHEL’s success is based on using open source as a development model, not a business model. It has nothing to do with other distros claiming that RHEL is the standard they have to follow, instead of actually doing the work to be good distros in their own right.
Closing the downstream is a loophole out of this system where they get to profit.
Everyone can build off (and profit off of) the upstreams, including RHEL’s immediate upstream CentOS. Red Hat has no obligation to allow people to duplicate their product exactly. Having a mature understanding of the separation of products and projects is a big factor in Red Hat’s success.
I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers and then use loopholes to restrict access.
It’s ludicrous to suggest that Red Hat, who funds more open source work than any other company, is “freeloading” just because you don’t like their subscription terms. There are a lot of words to describe how you feel about those terms, but “freeloading” just ain’t it.
“Lazy clones” are vital to maintaining the interoperability and openness that make RHEL (or any other corporate distro) attractive and keep them accountable for anticonsumer practices, preventing enshittification.
RHEL clones are not vital to RHEL interoperability or openness. They’re not even relevant to these things. They may like to tell people they are, but it’s bullshit. RHEL’s interoperability comes from Red Hat’s upstream first policy. Improvement made by Red Hat get pushed upstream, both to software projects (e.g. linux, gcc, httpd, etc.) and to distro projects (e.g. Fedora and CentOS). RHEL’s openness is based on the fact that it is open source. RHEL clones could all disappear tomorrow and it won’t affect these aspects of RHEL.
The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation.
Red Hat’s value proposition isn’t helpdesk style “support me when something breaks” support like you’re suggesting here. It’s not something that only exists during incidents. It’s an ongoing relationship with the vendor that builds the platform that you’re building your business on. It’s being able to request and influence priority of features and bug fixes.
If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.
Clones going away wouldn’t hurt the free on-ramp to RHEL because the free developer subscription exists now. It’s a better on-ramp than a clone ever could be because it’s actual RHEL, and includes additional products. People like students that don’t need the exact product, just something close enough, can still use and learn on CentOS or Fedora. Developers aren’t going to de-prioritize RPM any worse than they already do.
To be fair, he could simply pay 5 bucks for a key and switch to Windows 10 or 11. Linux should be something people choose to try firsthand for a while before moving on.
My only concern is that pipe c is shown as having two different shapes: straight and slightly curved.
Based on the fact that the design requires that a and b be different, there would undoubtedly be the same situation for the four slightly curved c pipes. That is, there would need to be two "c2" pipes and two "c3" pipes in the set rather than just four more of the same c pipe.
That makes me think the diagram at the bottom was made before a decision to cut costs and/or simplify. Four regular c pipes will undoubtedly be cheaper and logistically simpler to manage for both shipping and user construction than having those two extra pipe types.
It was, of course, relabelled to match the supplied parts, but the hints of the original design still remain.
Wow you are too hardcore Linux user for me to grasp what you mean. I suppose pipe is the new sound system though. But why the need for so many?
I wasn’t even aware that level of abstraction was possible when talking about Linux, not even Arch.
Pipewire? It's very new to me and can't say I know much about it, not that I knew much about its predecessors either.
::: spoiler ...
(But putting the silliness hat on...)
:::
The pipes in the diagram are obviouslynamed pipes, but they're not Linux pipes. There seems to be not only multiple types (which is disturbingly Microsoft), but often multiple by the same name (which would confuse most sane OSes, if not the insane ones too.)
It's almost like they're instances of a subroutine object all running in parallel...
In C exit codes are numbers, in the Makefile it says line n° 2014, error 2 probably has some kind of special meaning, you could take a look and search from there.
I don’t get all the Apple hate from the Linux community. Out of the box you have a fully usable *NIX machine — they even switched the default shell to zsh! No advertising in the Start menu, and ssh (client and server) included by default. Install homebrew and boom — tmux, htop, nload, lolcats…most of your favorite tools can be installed easy as on any linux distro.
I use Debian for personal use, and I much prefer it…but basically only because I prefer i3 to the Mac GUI.
Virtually non-repairable hardware I’m especially salty on disks and keyboards. The SMCs have been garbage for years.
Expensive as hell.
Crappy default package management. Crappy heat management. Years of ignoring customers wants (escape key). Their logs are half-assed. Xcode is pretty trashy and they keep doing non backwards compatible upgrades for things. Once* a box reaches a number of years old You can’t get OS updates anymore then you can’t have xcode versions updates anymore.
They’re pretty, They have great battery life, and they’re *nix but the advantages fall apart pretty quickly when you start digging into them.
That makes about as much sense as saying that pip, gem, npm, cargo, or nix should called be the default package manager on Mac OS…
The default package manager is the default because it manages the system’s software. RPM, Deb/apt, pacman, etc. Homebrew is like pip or docker or cargo or snap or whatever else. You can set it up if you’d like but it’s certainly not a default. (Though I’m not trying to dispute that it’s good 😊)
Mac OS doesn’t have a good default package management solution (though they would if they just opened up the app store and added a CLI). It’s ok to admit it, and say that third party folks (who Apple does not support unless I’m missing something) are powering a pretty good third party experience. If only Apple cared about people who wanted a truly free an customizable computer, they could make a great OS :)
Homebrew is fairly different from pip, cargo or npm in that only python developers use pip, only rust developers use cargo, etc. And those are mostly used to manage libraries, rather than executables.
Meanwhile, essentially everyone who uses the console uses homebrew regardless of what programming languages they might or might not use. I was making a joke about how good, useful and basically required homebrew is.
Other people’s software is great, what was asked is why the Apple hate.
Apple doesn’t provide Homebrew, Apple updates *in the past have occasionally broken it horribly. (Looking at you El Capitan)
But while we are taking a look at home brew, If you need a specific version of something you are occasionally up a creek. It’s been a hot few years since I was daily driving OSX *as my primary, but when I needed a certain version of memcache or a certain version of netcat for a feature, It just wasn’t there and then compiling it for the OS was a far bigger pain in the ass than it is on any Linux distro.
EOL support. I have a 11-12 year old System76 laptop. Works perfectly on the latest Ubuntu version.
Their shitty walled garden for both software (iOS) and hardware (soldered components that don’t need to be).
Overpriced.
Fake sense of privacy.
I used Mac OS 6.x through 10.4. When I was in college and couldn’t afford to replace my aging G4, I triple booted Fedora, Mac OS X, and Windows on a hackintosh where I gravitated towards mostly Linux and Windows for a couple games. Owned a couple iPhones but decided to role Android when the nexus 6 came out to save some money when I had my first child on the way and my current phone was dying.
I don’t miss anything I left behind. Had a short stint at work during COVID where I was given a MacBook. While not horrible, I ran into enough nuances I was able to justify to my work using a Linux laptop instead. I just don’t find anything appealing to give them my business.
Agreed. Macs are perfectly fine and capable UNIX machines, really the only problem with them is the price. And yes I get that some people aren’t fans of the UI but it requires no more of a learning curve than, say, GNOME.
But whatever. I’m not even offended by this meme, it’s actually rather factual on the whole, which can’t be said for everything posted in this group.
Mac is proprietary bullshit that’s why. It’s fine for work usage. At home I want to support FOSS.
Also MacBooks are a ripoff. You get 6-8 years of support and then all updates stop. Not worth it when Linux support is indefinite, and even Windows gets you 10+ years.
Is that really a thing? I don’t usually get into discussions about DEs that often, and pretty much never irl. So I haven’t seen any general vibe at all.
Like, my impression of kde vs gnome is that they’re both very geared towards a more general user that’s going to be doing basic things, but with the ability to go more advanced as needed. I kinda assumed they were both going to draw people that are “basic” like the images in the meme for gnome, with cinnamon users also being in that range, where something like xfce would be for folks that want a bit more modularity and “hackiness”.
I’m not being a smartass, I just don’t really know if there’s more to the meme than just a bit of fun or not.
I’ve come to the conclusion that even gnome has too many features for me. It would be fine if they were all perfect, but it’s software, so…
Off the top of my head:
Language doesn’t switch fast enough when I use ibus to type Chinese. The fact that I need to concern myself with my input method because choosing Chinese actually only types in Latin characters by default is lol
Can’t use the file manager to mess with files or folders owned by root. Text editor similarly sucks, I actually sudo gedit because it just works. It is a Gnome issue because vscodium just asks me to put in my password to save the file.
When I alt tab or super key out of a wine game, going back into it will have the alt key pressed down (not sure which key combination, but it’s an issue)
I use KDE plasma because I’m new to Linux but also want something minimal system-wise. I love the programs and the interface. Maybe my opinion would be different if I spent more time with other DE’s or used it as my daily driver, but I’m sold on it now.
GNOME is definitely more user-friendly for someone who is moving over from Windows/Mac. I wouldn’t recommend KDE to someone who is just going to stick to using one-click apps.
The lack of even the most basic customisation of Gnome ia mind-blowing to me. Why do i need to install a gnome shell extension for even the most basic functionality that even MacOs has!?
Needing a GPU might be hyperbole, but no, it’ll still be slow on older hardware. It looks lightweight on neofetch since, at rest, the RAM will appear as low as XFCE’s, but it’s not nearly as snappy.
Actually I tried out KDE Plasma on my grandmother’s budget laptop from about the same time. It was a little too slow with default settings, but once I killed the animations (can be done in Settings app) it ran pretty well. It ran a whole hell of a lot better than the Windows it came with.
I also tested KDE vs XFCE in my old gaming computer, and I actually managed to get slightly less RAM usage in KDE than XFCE, so long as no plugins were used.
Both systems were tested with Debian 12. On the gaming PC, I actually used the XFCE iso, so it was installed first.
So depending on how your distro ships the default KDE Plasma settings or how you set it up, it actually can be a lightweight option compared with XFCE.
It’s all relative. Ubuntu desktop is minimal compared to Windows, and I’ve found KDE to run much better than default Ubuntu. It’s lightweight for how much it offers.
In my experience, it strongly depends. In my team at work, the biggest Linux nerd is on GNOME, basically because he doesn’t care where his TMUX session runs.
And I’m the guy with the most elaborate desktop workflow (tiling and 40+ virtual desktops among other aspects) and I wouldn’t want to use anything but KDE, because nothing else has as many features + customizability to support me in that workflow.
But yeah, both of us started out on such mainstream desktops, then spent multiple years checking out all other desktops and eventually found different paths back to the mainstream.
The philosophies of the two DEs are diametrically opposed. For example KDE will let you customize everything, they’d even let you customize their mothers of they could, while GNOME won’t let you customize anything, at least not without extensions that break every time GNOME updates.
KDE devs are also a lot less opinionated than GNOME devs. If they could, GNOME devs would question the use case of your clothes, conclude they’re useless and then strip you naked. KDE devs will be fine with whatever you’re wearing.
Now as you may have gathered I definitely prefer one over the other, but I do recognize some people may like GNOME for its simplicity, looks, flow and I even heard some like the lack of customization because it prevents them from getting distracted with tinkering. All in all use case depends on what you want to do with it, tho hopefully Cosmic DE beats the shit outta GNOME devs those damn pricks.
Don’t quote me on it, but I think they just scale to match the panel height, so I’d you shrink the panel the icons should shrink as well. I’ve used the xp style taskbar instead for a long time tho, so I’m not certain…
No you're right, it's mostly stereotypes that don't have any real world importance. From my intermediate POV, it comes down to GNOME being a resource hog which the 1337 H4X0Rz don't like. But with most modern systems having more than enough resources to spare, you're not likely to notice unless you're the sort to always have one eye on the system monitor pegged to your desktop. It's an argument for the sake of an argument. I use KDE btw.
It’s a different philosophy. KDE gives you a default setting, and all the options you need to fuck it up customize it.
Gnome gives you the default and an API for extensions to customize it. Install one of the big ones like V-Shell and you’ll have more options than you know what to do with.
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