The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.

plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.

It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”

If you don’t want to touch anything, you could boot from a live USB image and try it?

I wonder how much work would be needed to make a “FreeDesktop Linux” complete OS, with the runtime + whatever it needs beyond that. Then when you install a flatpak, it’s just like installing, uh, I didn’t think this through tbh.

Maybe Debian with a wm? I like cwm, but there are many to choose from. You can add pretty much any cool feature on top.

Which features are you looking for beyond what can be done on Debian?

There’s a difference between stability and reliability. Stable means that functionality is the same over a period of time, no major changes to how it works. Reliable means that it doesn’t crash all the time. If something crashes the same way for the same reason, it’s stable but not reliable. If something changes a lot but doesn’t crash, it’s reliable but not stable.
In practice what it comes down to is a choice if you want outdated but known bugs or new surprise bugs.

thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it’s not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.

Ubuntu (2007) >> Arch (2009) >> Debian (2014) >> Fedora (2024)
Plus now and then installing OpenBSD for fun for a couple of months at a time.

You are more than welcome to remove the need for any passwords at all on the linux systems you admin. Good thing about free software is that you decide how you want it, hack up or put up.

Hm, not that I remember. My memory isn’t the best though.

On my laptop with nvidia (msi, debian 12), if I unplug the charger the screen orientation goes from landscape to portrait, everything is tilted 90 degrees. I hate this laptop, so I rarely use it.

Ah, I see. It seems like you’re not the only one wanting this behavior, there is a workaround that might work: https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2085#issuecomment-487007720

Are you using Caja file manager? If there’s no setting, it could be that the authors of that file manager just wanted it that way. You can try other file managers like thunar and see if they are different?

Things you can do in finland: tango, fight with knives, computer stuff.

Back in the day, find required that you added “-print” to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But… following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.