Yeah, I had sound and printing break on Windows, too. And my mom’s Windows PC breaks every year and a half. I’d say go for linux if you’re comfortable with that, it’s pretty robust. Or MacOS that also seems not to break.
(Of course something like Arch or EndeavourOS is more complicated and may break. Fedora, Debian, Mint … will be a better choice for stability. My Debian install runs without mayor issues for 5 years now. If you don’t do silly stuff an mess with the system, they’ll outperform windows.)
Most people choose an OS because they’re used to that specific workflow and know the quirks and how to get around. That’s why many peoole use Microsoft, not because it’s better. School/College/University is a good time to try something. After that you’re pretty much stuck.
The X font server has been deprecated like 10 years ago. I doubt you’ll find it as an option in a modern distribution. Nowadays fonts are rendered by the client (application) with something like the Cairo library (if I’m not mistaken).
I’m not sure. The benefit of open source is that you can just take it and use it. And even incorporate it into your own projects. And it’s super easy, all you have to do is make the source available if it’s copyleft.
Now people want to add money to the mix, define valid use-cases, have me file paperwork to become a non-profit etc… Especially adding money to the mix could turn out bad in my eyes. Currently people are incentivised by other things. Software development and usage is a level playing field and you get gifted awesome programs. I’m really not sure if more capitalism helps. (But yes, I also think it’s annoying that companies like IBM, Amazon and Google make big money and often don’t contribute. And maybe handling money is unavoidable, for example since nowadays many projects need to pay for infrastructure, or do automated builds / tests / CI and that also costs money unless Github helps you out.)
I already dislike the growing amount of Source-Available software, and software that contains the commons clause. Can I now share this with my friends? Can they invite some more people to the instance? Do I need a lawyer and do proper accounting if they contribute paying for the server? What if the software relies on other software (libraries/databases) that aren’t free anymore?
That’s right. To add a few things: X11 isn’t bad. It’s just a big and complex piece of software that has grown for multiple decades. And nobody wants to do big changes or add new things anymore.
Wayland is the modern and “fresh” new approach. I’ve had some issues with my NVidia graphics card. But that wasn’t Waylands fault, but the NVidia drivers. I have a laptop with just Intel graphics and both X11 and Wayland run excellently on that machine.
With Linux we often get many choices, and have several alternatives available to do the same / a similar job. That is a bit complicated for someone new. But we should embrace it, be glad that we can pick whatever suits our individual needs. Wayland still has some issues on a few specific setups, but eventually it will replace X11 as the default.
With GStreamer you can build a pipeline you like, you don’t need to use RDP, you can send uncompressed frames plain over network like in the video. I’m not an expert on graphics processing. SLI or NVLink are (I think) proprietary parallel processing interconnects. But NVidia didn’t invent parallel processing. I’m sure there are other solutions available. Though, I somehow doubt those will help you because they’re generally tailored to other (HPC/datacenter/simulation) purposes and not for gaming. And I think they use something like Infiniband for that and not thunderbolt.
With the speed, mind the first article is 5 years old. And I’m not sure how the hardware in the second one compares to what Linus uses or if it’s even the same generation of Thunderbolt. It’s probably gotten way faster since. I can’t try because only 1 device I own supports thunderbolt at all.
I think transferring files over thunderbolt networking or low latency video is nothing new. It can be easily replicated. And setting up 2 gstreamer pipelines is just two (lengthy) commands. Replicating NVlink is another thing, though. We probably need an expert on graphics drivers to tell if that already exists or how difficult that would be to implement. Most people will probably just fit 2 graphics cards into one computer or buy one faster GPU because that is both cheaper and way faster than connecting them in 2 separate computers with added latency.
(MPI would be an example of an open standard to do parallel computing with arbitrary interconnects.)
Forget the pinephone as a daily driver. It is nice to play around with and having linux on your phone is awesome. But you can’t really use it as a daily driver. You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects. Trust me, I own a pinephone and I know other people who do.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Just like 50 mild annoyances with anything you’re trying to do with it and on top it’s super slow, compared to any other smartphone.
As I read, the phone by Purism isn’t much better and it’s really expensive.
I’m sure there is a way to make signing the CLA part of the pull request process on Github. I’ve been asked to do it. Not sure how Github works nowadays, maybe it was part of Github or an external bot.
And I don’t agree with the other people here. I think having complete copyright makes some things easier. And if you do an open project, maintain it for years, do 99% of the work… You’re allowed being paid with the contributions.
Mind there are other licenses than just the GPL. You could just pick a MIT license / Apache / BSD instead and maybe you don’t need the contributors to sign over their copyright anymore, because these licenses cover pretty much everything and transfer it to everyone, including you.
Try it with a Live USB stick. And maybe don’t listen to the people recommending Ubuntu. It’s somewhat okay, but they regularly do annoying business decisions that affect their users. I’d rather start with Mint or something.
There are many other websites dedicated to this question:
But how do you think you install software on Windows? You download a random installer from the internet and double-click it. The installer is an executable file and runs some code on your computer to set up the software. I’d argue it’s exactly the same.
In the one instance you copy and paste code and run it. In the other instance you execute an installer that also contains the random code. And you can’t even have a look what happens.
The real issue is: You have to trust the vendor. If you don’t trust Mullvad, don’t run their 5 lines of code. But you then also shouldn’t install their software and not run their windows installer. I don’t see a way around this ‘trust’ issue.
The proper way of course would be a standardised process that also confines the software into containers with minimal permissions. Something like Android Apps. In theory you could add a default update process so the vendor just needs to define an update server in the (apk) installer file. Google didn’t do this, but they want people to use their Play Store. And I don’t think we have a permission system that is actively used on any of the major desktop operating systems, anyways.
Not necessarily. There are other operating systems and frameworks for embedded devices. Especially for commercial products. It doesn’t have to be something like Linux and GPL code.
This is a list of many other choices with many of them having non-copyleft licenses. And a thermostat is a comparatively simple device. They could also have implemented most things themselves and just taken a network-stack to connect it to the outside world. (I think network is something that is very complex and companies just buy a solution instead of writing all of that code.)
Yes. Running anything as root is potentially dangerous. And a browser is a complex and big piece of software with many security issues that can be (potentially) triggered remotely. So it’s bad because of two reasons.
Btw a desktop environment also is a complex and big piece of software with potential issues. Running the whole desktop as root is another thing you wouldn’t do for extra security.
The proper way is to just create a user account and run the desktop and browser as a user. Open a terminal and ‘su’ or ‘sudo’ to limit root rights to the operations that actually need those permissions.
Just running everything as root certainly works. But you do away with all the extra layers of security and end up with something as secure as MS-DOS or a Windows in the 90s or early 2000s.