alt Hacker NewsIf you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
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And chains of Linux have links that break when you update them, or sometimes they just aren't compatible with random metals: "galvanized chains are planned in a future release, please donate"
I don't know if I would say this as much anymore except for Linux distributions steering away from Red Hat/IBM or Canonical attempts at replacing traditional methods, or the BSDs that aren't necessarily in agreement with more recent developments either.
I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.
Is Linux where it's at?
Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.
But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.
We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.
I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.
Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.
The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.
To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.