Yes I know that Cuba, the DPRK, and China have their own distros, but they’re pretty specific to the language and networks of those countries. I use linux because it’s free and open source but I use one of those distros that is privately owned and I’m thinking of upgrading to something that is truly communally owned but also has good compatibility with software, especially scientific software. Any good recs please?

Thanks!

    • puff [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 months ago

      Any experience with Fedora? I ask because apparently it’s the one Torvalds uses and because there are a few science-based Fedora variants.

      • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I use the atomic/immutable community variants of Fedora. Bazzite if you’re a gamer, Bluefin or Aurora if not. Immutable is a whole other workflow, mainly in how you install packages (using flatpaks/brew or distrobox), but the system itself is essentially 0 maintenance because updates are automated and the OS rebuilt on reboot (while keeping your programs and user files). So its more stable than Arch nd you don’t have packages that are 2 years out of date like on Debian. The only downside is updates take a lot of bandwidth if thats a problem for you. But they’re the only distros I recommend to anybody now outside of Debian for servers.

        https://universal-blue.org/

      • tombruzzo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        The makers of Fedora, Red Hat, were acquired by IBM. So whilst there may be nothing wrong with the distro, they are part of your typical evil corpo. And I say this as a Fedora user

      • bumpusoot [any]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I can’t contradict the fact that Fedora is owned by IBM and used as an upstream for their Red Hat software, it is slightly concerning but not inherently problematic. I’ll at least say I personally have yet to experience any negatives for that fact, and I’ll also add that it does like Debian, and defaults to a “free” software repository, you have to manually enable the non-free ones.

        It probably isn’t the “most socialist”, but it’s open source, absolutely prioritises open source fundamentally, and consequently it’s controllable by the people the second a corp fucks it over (like most Linux distros). I don’t think it’s turned in service of evil (yet).

        • puff [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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          3 months ago

          Do you consider Ubuntu evil, and why? I know it’s owned by a private company (ugh) but searching around apparently it’s still open source

          • bumpusoot [any]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            I don’t think I consider any open-source Linux to be evil. As I say, by being fully and properly open-source, it’s copyable at a moment’s notice. So any of them are inherently held to a much higher standard than any closed ecosystem. It’s like giving people the ability to seize the means of OSing with the click of a button.

        • puff [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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          3 months ago

          I mentioned Torvalds using Fedora not because I idolize him but as the dude who invented the damn thing he’s probably not using a piece of shit distro that doesn’t work well for anything. The DPRK, China, Cuba, and Venezuela for example each have their own Linux distros (Red Star OS, Kylin, Nova, Canaima) so when you say “these software movements would ever be possible in environments like North Korea [sic] or China” that’s demonstrably not correct. Thank you for the Trisquel recommendation though.

            • puff [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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              3 months ago

              I didn’t say Red Star OS was developed entirely in the DPRK, that’s a straw man argument, and you don’t understand the difference between personal property and private property. That the Cuban OS is partially closed source is unsurprising for national security reasons (not for making profit, which is the issue). There’s nothing morally wrong with building off the work of a privately owned company, in fact stealing back from private companies is an incredibly good practice since the labour they use is stolen in the first place. China is currently doing precisely this by allowing foreign capital to access their enormous labour pool in exchange for development of their productive forces (factories, machines, computers, other technology). It’s not a great system but Chinese workers are getting the better end of the deal, and it sets up a future in which more of the economy can be communally owned again. Idk why you’re on hexbear if you disagree with all of this. Hexbear is not a liberal website.

        • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have their way none of this flies because software must never be profitable,

          That’s literally not what he says: (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling)

          “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

          We want to invite everyone to use the GNU system, including businesses and their workers. That requires allowing commercial use. We hope that free replacement programs will supplant comparable proprietary programs, but they can’t do that if businesses are forbidden to use them. We want commercial products that contain software to include the GNU system, and that would constitute commercial distribution for a price. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.

          Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.

          Stop lying. You don’t understand what socialism means and you clearly don’t care to learn anything about AES countries judging from this and your other comment. Get your reactionary views away from this site before you misinform more people about free software. You wandered into the wrong part of lemmy with your bs.