Marxism and FLOSS.
Marxism and FLOSS.
I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
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Segueing off your arch recommendation, RebornOS is a really good beginner friendly Arch based repo.
Way back when I was using it, I believe Manjaro and Antergos were the 2 biggies with GUI installers. I had heard that Antergos was stopped and just looked up RebornOS and damn it if it isn't Antergos lol. That's pretty cool.
I keep fence sitting on possibly switching to Arch-based full time because of the AUR or over to proper Debian. Might end up looking at Reborn in the near future. It wasn't even on my radar.
When you say arch-based, is there like a tree of distros? Where a popular distro will then be redesigned by separate devs? Or are they different at a deeper level? I assume they're all Unix-based at heart?
yes, the vast majority of distros are based on another distro (which may be based on another, and ...)
Linux is not Unix-based in the sense that it's a fork of Unix (the latter is proprietary), but it's certainly based on Unix's design, just like the various BSDs
That makes sense.
I didn't realise Unix was proprietary. It's amazing what you can't find out when you don't realise that an assumption is even open to challenge. I never thought to question this but now i looked into it a little, things are clearer. This article was useful: https://www.howtogeek.com/182649/htg-explains-what-is-unix/.
Thanks for the info.
The common bases of linux distros are:
Debian: known for stability but not fully up to date, uses apt-get as a package manager.
Ubuntu: Based on debian, but more up to date, and supports more proprietary hardware and software (not that debian can't do what ubuntu does with a little tweaking).
Arch: Bleeding edge up to date, can theoretically be unstable. uses pacman as a package manager.
After the base some people differentiate from the base os by changing the default programs installed (often this is including or excluding proprietary software), desktop environment (gnome, KDE, cinnamon, xfce), have different programs in the repository, or have a different installation experience.
This is all very helpful, thanks.
Is there a strong reason why someone would move away from a 'beginner-friendly' distro? Is it mainly wanderlust?
I'm in debian because it uses less ram.
I've played with alpine linux for the wonderlust of seeing if I can work with all of the alternative smaller code bases for the theoretical stability it provides.
Why use bash when you can use ash?
Why use the unauthorized escalation bugs of sudo, when you can use doas?
Why use all of the gnu tools of stallman when you can use the smaller version of those tools with busybox?
Why use the garganuan sprawling systemd when openrc has a much smaller codebase and fewer vulnerabilities?
I have to say I'm a fan of light (lite?) software.
I can't tell you how pissed off I was when browsers switched to infinite ram. One day they were capped at using ~4gb ram and the next, I need a new machine.
In general, I just prefer the idea of only using enough resources to do what I need a program to do. Options are great, but e.g. with a word processor all I need is stability, footnotes, a few tags, grammar/spell check, and track changes. A few other features are nice to have but almost all the rest is unnecessary bloat and bugs, for me.
I was able to run LMDE (linux mint deiban edition) on a 3 gb Imac with libreoffice installed by default, I don't know if I'd still reccomend that but it would freeze if I had too many tabs open