libre

9859 readers

1 users here now

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.

libretion

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

Artwork

Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Linux users, which distro do you use? (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

105 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Guix, but it's not for linux newbies I think. Although it's completely libre, too much in fact, it didn't have some drivers I need for my laptop so I needed to non-libre it a bit...

Debian is very beginner friendly and very stable, but stable means the software is pretty old compared to other distros. Security updates are timely and everything no trouble on that front, but often I wondered why some app didn't have some feature only to find out it does, for over a year in fact, but the version implementing it hadn't made it through Debians QA yet.

I think it's a really good place to start, but if you find it "lacking" you may want to look into alternatives.

Also remember you can multi-boot, so you can try different distros, or set up a virtual machine to testdrive some distro. It's not terribly difficult but does require some time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Guix has a very small but dedicated community, I respect the maintainers not giving nonfree software upstream support since it's hard enough maintaining the free software in the repo anyway.

I'd argue that Debian's slow release cycle is more a liability than a strength nowadays. GNOME+KDE gets a new release every 6 months or so and COSMIC will get one every year, this means that while using Debian you're missing out on a lot of features during those 2 years (Debian is still on Plasma 5.27 while upstream is on 6.2). Wayland+Pipewire+Portals (not as easy to say compared to just "Xorg" lol) is moving really quickly compared to the last decade or so.

If Debian switched to a yearly release cycle then I could see most of these problems be less of an issue but 2 years is an epoch in modern Linux time.