Caretaker of DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any
Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.
Why not also recognize systemd, or musl, or kde or gnome or any of the other millions of non GNU packages that are needed to make up a complete OS.
Unironically there might be some value in recognizing “systemd/Linux” as a subfamily of Linux operating systems.
And these days GNU makes up less and less of the core packages that most distros run anymore.
Linux makes up exactly one package on a so-called Linux system.
Apple intentionally makes iPhone-Android interoperability crap in order to sell iPhones. That’s not conspiracy theorizing, Tim Apple blatantly admitted to it.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility
I feel like there’s a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it’s purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it’s done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it’s a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, “security peoples’” favored “alternatives” (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don’t either have a viable solution to offer or that they don’t really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.
Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.
Icedove (Thunderbird) works well enough for me. Maybe the reason it’s “old fashioned” is because it works well enough that it doesn’t need to be changed that often.
In the proprietary software world we’re used to UI’s being redesigned on a regular basis for no user benefit.
For me LineageOS is a good baseline. I don’t have anything against “privacy” OS’s but they’re not really for me. I just use F-Droid to get apps and don’t care about compatibility with proprietary stuff so neither microG nor the GrapheneOS sandboxed Play services are of interest to me. I don’t use GrapheneOS because I don’t have or want a Pixel phone.
LineageOS significantly increases the lifespan of devices it supports and that’s important to me. Planned obsolescence is cancer.
My ideal mobile OS would be something like Mobian (or even better, a GNU Guix based distribution) but it should be noted that AOSP is also a Linux based operating system and thus anything derived from that is a Linux mobile OS.
Microsoft is about as bad as any other proprietary software company. They do some good things for the open source economy, but they also mistreat their users.
I think it’s a mistake to look at the free software movement as being a reaction against Microsoft or Google. It’s against the proprietary software world in general.
Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big
To be clear, the difference between Linux and Android is about the same as the difference between Linux and Fedora, in that they are both Linuxes. That’s why this works, and why the reverse (running GNU/Linux apps and even entire systems on Android) is possible as well.
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”
Traditional GNU/Linux distributions (as well as F-Droid) are not “app stores” even though they are superficially similar. Traditional distributions are maintained and curated by the community, and serve the interests of users first and software developers second, whereas an “app store” has minimal curation and serves the needs of software developers first and users second.
I point this out because there’s an annoying meme that traditional distributions are obsoleted by the “app store” model. I don’t think that’s the case. “Verification” is essential for an app store but pointless for a distribution.
I dont have a better one though.
I just say non-Android Linux systems. GNU/Linux if I’m talking about that type of system, but there are some like postmarketOS that are strictly not in that group (it’s based on Alpine)
I had hopes we could rise above reddit brain, but you can’t take the reddit out of the redditor so easily.
“Android isn’t Linux,” of course. This is a very obviously false myth that is debunked very easily by simply looking at any Android device or the source code. It is not a myth spread by people who are technologically literate. Yet, this easily verifiable fact upsets Linux fans so much they resort to downvotes and ugly language (I have my ideas why, but it’s probably a waste of time to elaborate in this thread).
Of course, the more savvy among the Linux fandom will admit that Android “contains Linux, but isn’t real Linux” - but “real Linux” is yet another myth; that is, the myth that there is more to Linux than an operating system kernel, a myth that leads to further myths such as the myth of fragmentation, or the myth that distributions are worthless and we need a “unified app store.” It’s a myth that clouds history and assigns the wrong motives to the wrong people and meanings to things that don’t need or deserve them (the misunderstanding that that “Linux” is “about openness” or “against corporations” for example, when large companies are the main contributors to and users of the Linux project). Linus Torvalds himself says he only cares about code, not about freedom or openness or any of that stuff (that’s Richard Stallman’s thing)
The fact that this myth is widely believed is not relevant. We don’t live in a world where a falsehood becomes true if it is widely believed; people used to believe the sun revolved around the earth, for example. Also, a falsehood being widely believed doesn’t mean it deserves to stay unchallenged.
The point of reminding Linux fans that Android is based on their beloved kernel isn’t meant to be a well-actually or anything. It’s a reminder that much of what a so called “Linux phone” can do is already possible without having to switch to an operating system that in many respects is not ready for general use. For example, you can run xfce in Termux - I hope this is enough to disabuse one of the silly notion of “not real Linux.” For some reason. people looking for so-called “Linux phones” desire Android compatibility, and it turns out that because Android itself is Linux, it is far easier for Android to run so-called “Linux apps” than it is for so-called “mobile Linux” to run Android apps.
Android is Linux and that’s a good thing. I should point out that it’s not my preferred Linux operating system - I was a Pinephone early adopter and used to daily drive Mobian, I would prefer that or GNU Guix over Android. Still, not only is it a Linux based operating system, it also has its own rich free software ecosystem backed by F-Droid. It’s very usable once you cut out the Google crap and stick to free software only (or as much as possible).
I wrote more on the “real Linux” myth here in case anyone’s interested in more reading material.
It is repeated in every single damn “Linux phone” thread
Good. The more people pushing back against falsehoods, the better.
I think GNU Guix System scratches all my itches:
guix shell as its interpreter listing all the packages it requires).Previously I used Ubuntu from 2008 to 2009, Trisquel from 2009 to 2014, and Debian from 2014 to 2019.
Software freedom is about what you, the user, run on your own hardware. Different concerns apply to server software. The client side is what matters as that’s what you run on your hardware, but if the server side is free as well then you are not tied to the service provider and can use a different service provider or run your own instance.
With server software, the main concern is “Service as a Software Substitute” - doing your computing on “cloud” (someone else’s computer). See Who does that server really serve?.
Android is Linux.
This should be repeated in every “Linux phone” thread.
It’s also possible to install a full GNU userland using Termux, and nowadays a graphical interface is even possible with Termux.
You don’t need windows. Remove all your windows and adopt a gnu and a penguin. They’ll keep you safe and private.
Not an endorsement of ExpressVPN, I’ve learned to avoid companies that sponsor on youtube. However, I believe you don’t need the proprietary app to use the service, you could use a free software OpenVPN client such as this one.
They do offer support for OpenVPN although, unsurprisingly, they heavily push their proprietary client as the preferred way to use the service. This alone would be enough to discourage me from using it or recommending it.
I don’t know if grouping disparate projects under the “community” label has any worthwhile benefit. Given the label is meant to classify related operating systems, the label should provide an accurate description of the basis of the system. A simpler solution would be to just say GNU/Linux is a subcategory of Linux (and maybe even sub-sub-categorize by package manager or init system or whatever makes the most sense). Similarly, I think Android and its derivatives are worthy of being its own classification of Linux operating system (as long as you don’t try to claim “it’s not real Linux” or whatever).
With regards to software compatibility, I think it’s rather the other way around - software written for “Linux” usually works on any POSIX operating system, and sometimes even Windows. Unless you’re talking about binary compatibility, which is meaningless in the Linux space anyway.