Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don’t think it’s a pipe dream, I think it’s a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.
I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors. If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation’s technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain assuming wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects.
Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.
Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.
Absolutely, and I’m glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! “Public money == public code”.
When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has “just worked” on every computer I have tried it on.
Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.
If you want a distro that “just works” I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.
DietPi! It’s one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It’s ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.
I highly recommend Framework laptops for Linux. I have not used the Framework 16, but I can attest that Linux support for the Framework 13 (intel 11th & 12th gen) is excellent. I have used Fedora on the Intel 11th gen and Intel 12th gen, everything worked immediately on a fresh install without any workarounds or issues. Other distros might require a few package installs, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu derivatives should work out-of-the-box without any additional configuration. The Arch Wiki article for the Framework covers pretty much everything you might need to know to have an optimized Linux experience with any distro.
Aside from Framework’s excellent Linux support, I really have to stress how cool and unique it is as a laptop for developers and tinkerers. This thing is literally designed to be opened up, repaired, and modded. All of the internal components are clearly labeled and easily accessible, there’s even a little spot inside the laptop chassis just for spare screws in case a screw ever gets lost! Another awesome obscure feature of this laptop is the ability to use a Storage Expansion Card for dual booting. I just plug in the expansion card to boot into Windows, then unplug it and I’m back in Linux. It is absolute bliss compared to Windows and Linux sharing a bootloader.
I know I’m rambling, but I really could keep going on and on about Frameworks. They truly are unlike any other laptop, in all the right ways.
I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.
When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.
Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.
I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.
Karl Marx was a philosopher and economist. He wanted to understand class relations and social conflict, so he developed theories to explain why things are the way they are. A Marxist uses Marx’s theories to understand why the world is the way it is.
Marx had a lot of theories, such as historical materialism - that all history was primarily motivated by socio-economic forces, not supernatural forces or grand conspiracy. Marx wrote that the dominate socio-economic system running the world in his time was capitalism/imperialism which fueled capital accumulation through exploitation and alienation, and used technology to further this process with imperialist wars for resources etc… He also focused on class struggle between those with the most resources, and those with the fewest resources - the bourgeoisie (capitalists) vs. the proletariat (workers/peasants).
Marx went further than trying to explain why the world is the way it is, he also theorized on how humanity could replace the dominate socio-economic system, and what a non-exploitative non-alienating socio-economic system might look like. “Marxist” refers to anyone who believes Marx’s theories are valid and uses them to understand the way things are.
Gnome provides a more consistent user experience because Gnome apps usually have fewer features and don’t offer many customization options by default. KDE apps usually have a lot of settings and customization options, but the user interface might be a little less intuitive or you may have to search in a settings menu to find what you’re looking for.
In my experience Gnome is pretty, intuitive, and well integrated, but I tend to settle on KDE Plasma because KDE apps often have more advanced functionality and more options for configuration. If you’re the type who likes to explore device/app settings to configure things exactly how you want, then consider KDE Plasma. If you’d rather have a minimal but consistent experience out-of-the-box without any tinkering then Gnome is probably the better choice for you.
Take a look at OpenSCAD for modeling, if you have any programming/webdev experience you’ll be making simple parts in <5min. It’s the best for making & sharing designs that are easy to modify. Just yesterday I was going to print a phone stand that was a little too narrow, and by changing a single number variable it fit perfectly.
The immutable Fedora releases, like Kinoite, have been the best development distros for me. Immutable Fedora releases come with Toolbox for making per-project containers, so you can have separate de-cluttered dev environments for each project. Toolbox containers are not isolated environments like virtual machines, so performance is on-par with bare-metal as well.
I don’t know if Sliverblue or Kinoite is the right choice for your exact workflow, but if you’re looking for a Linux host that “just works” out of the box, has a trivial learning curve, and provides serious quality of life improvements then definitely look into Fedora Kinoite.
I haven’t played in over a year, but I really spent some hours in Veloren the last time I picked it up!
+1 for the Framework laptop from https://frame.work/ . It’s my favorite laptop I’ve ever owned and the Linux support is excellent. There’s a healthy Linux community surrounding this laptop and the Arch wiki even has an entire aricle dedicated to it.
I know your struggle. It’s not uncommon to experience issues with the Windows installer if the install medium is not created using Microsoft’s official Windows installation media creation tool (Use the middle option to download mediacreationtool.exe).
Coming from Linux, I tried writing the Windows .iso directly to a USB drive using dd, this absolutely would not work on any machine for me. Sometimes the install medium would boot, sometimes it wouldn’t, but even if it did the installer wouldn’t recognize any storage mediums or would fail part way through installing. Using the official media creation tool resolved all the issues I was having.
I do not know why the Windows .iso images do not work on any of my machines, but it sounds like you are experiencing the same issues that I was. Give the official media creation tool a try, hopefully that resolves the issue.
The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is “scheduled to replace” the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says “There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage”. The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it’s impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.
Here’s a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.
Police spend most of their time on routine traffic stops, and routine traffic stops could be eliminated by transit and walkable infrastructure. It’s almost like it’s a racket…
Just chiming in to reaffirm what everyone else has said: KDE Neon is specifically built be the best KDE distro. The development branch is what KDE devs use to build & test all their software, so no distro is designed to work better with KDE software than KDE Neon.
I expect to see further erosion of Net Neutrality if big tech firms are required to pay for internet infrastructure. I have no love for big tech, but if they are required to pay for infrastructure, then how long until smaller companies and hosts are required to pay? The Biden administration seems to agree: “[it] is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality.” I have no love for ISPs either - ISPs should be run as public utilities, not as for-profit private corporate conglomerates.
As others have already pointed out the US government (and Comcast, Verizon, & Century Link customers) have been defrauded by the major telecom companies for nearly 30 years worth at least $400 billion dollars (data from 2014, the current total is likely over $700 billion). They’ve been pocketing obscene amounts of money instead of investing in infrastructure for decades, at this point additional infrastructure should be publicly funded, owned & operated and the telecommunications companies should be forced to sell the internet infrastructure to local public utilities.
The Irregulators are a group of experts who have been fighting this fraud since 1999, and they have a couple books about this:
Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn’t clearly express what I was thinking, and didn’t address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.
If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.
I definitely don’t believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.