this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR
, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
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Is there a fork or alternative to linux?
The short answer is "no".
A longer answer is that there is nothing stopping you from freezing the kernel here or the most recent LTS release and running it for eternity, but without the contributions of Valve, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and IBM, it will just be a scuffed and increasingly insecure version of linux.
There doesn't seem to be much momentum behind schisming the kernel from here, and without dedicated devs, any fork is just a website.
There is FreeBSD whose guts are robust enough that is was used as the base for the PS4 OS. However, MIT licensing means that short of a Sony Hack or bankruptcy that code is never seeing the light of day. It's mostly functional for everything except gaming in a typical use case.
I second this on using FreeBSD. With some tweaks, it can be used with Steam/Proton for gaming on PC. See this video for more info: https://youtu.be/vQpI7SU921A
The video maker is using a FreeBSD variant called NomadBSD which is a live USB that has automatic hardware detection - https://nomadbsd.org/
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: