LeFantome

This is exactly what people mean when they say GNU/Linux. They are trying to say that it is “the GNU Operating Syatem” with the Linux kernel.

This nonesense though. Please ignore them.

Linux Mint is an operating system. It uses the Linux kernel. The fact that it includes a handful of GNU packages in no way justifies co-opting the branding. Linux Mint includes A LOT of software from many sources. Are you going to try to list them all in the name?

Actually that is a common misconception by people who have read political blogs from the 90’s.

The OS that you are calling GNU/Linux is usually less than 2% GNU these days as the GNU Project is only responsible for about a hundred packages. Most Linux distros have between 3,000 and 80,000 packages depending on the distribution.

In fact, if we are talking about software licenses, calling it MIT/Linux would be more appropriate. If we are talking about attribution, Red Hat contributes more code than anybody so perhaps Red Hat/Linux is more up-to-date. That may cause confusion with Red Hat Enterprise Linux though so perhaps IBM/Linux is the best term to use as IBM owns Red Hat these days and is therefore the top contributor to most Linux distros.

Of course, most people just call it Linux because everything above is ridiculous ( including GNU / Linux ).

All that said, teaching people about the FSF, copyleft, and Free Software more generally is super important. The GNU Project itself is more of a historical artifact at this point ( in my view ) but there is no denying its extreme historical importance. It would be great if people knew more about it. Much like BSD.

Teaching people to say GNU / Linux is not only not important but is downright political and factually incorrect. Not a fan.

They would go bankrupt.

No matter how anti-capitalism you are, I hope you can see how broken the argument being made here is. The absolute reality is that, without protections, things like pharmaceuticals would never exist at the scale that we enjoy them.

Of course examples of things that require years of research would exist. However, there would be far fewer of them than there is today.

Patents and copyrights have become corrupted. They need reform. We have to remember though that when they were created, it was to improve the world that existed ( the world that this commenter thinks would be better ).

Patents and copyrights were not invented because making companies richer was a goal. They were invented to better society. They were created with the recognition that, if we wanted companies to invest in innovation, and if we wanted individuals to commit to a long, intensive creative process, that they needed protection. The downside of capitalism at the time was that evil corporations and unscrupulous entrepreneurs could steal your hard work. Patents and copyrights were created to right that wrong and to promote a culture of creativity, invention, and innovation. And it worked wonderfully. We all benefit.

Now, things have of course been corrupted. The idea of “intellectual property” has emerged and we get nonsense like calling copyright violations “piracy”. The protections have been extended far. The penalties have become too great. The idea of public benefit has taken a backseat to profit protection. All this is bad. Throwing out the baby with the bath water is not the answer.

I re-wrote my Tesla firmware in Rust. It is faster and more secure. Self-driving is no problem when you use a safe language.

Honestly, why are we even selling cars to people who do not take these basic steps?

Have you tried that?

The creator here buys hardware designed to run Linux ( from Tuxedo ) and uses the distro designed to run on that hardware. So no big surprise he thought all hardware problems were solved.

Probably a similar issue with office apps. He is not trying to share an Outlook calendars with coworkers or deal with complex spreadsheets sent from colleagues. He is probably not sending many PowerPoints to his boss.

Good on him for reaching out to his community to ensure his opinions are backed by evidence.

First you say they are right and then you provide evidence to contradict them?

He says Mint is for Boomers so use OpenSuse or Fedora. You agree with him by saying that “old people” are happy with OpenSuse and Fedora.

Did you think he was saying Mint was for Boomers and the other distros were for people older than that? I mean, you might be right. So what do the young people run? Garuda? Nobara? Bazzite?

Ok Boomer.

Mint is literally the youngest distro on your list. OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and certainly Debian were all around for years when the very first release of Mint came out. With so many new distros to choose from, how did you manage to list only the old ones. Forgot the /s?

Mint is actually based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.

Debian was a teen-ager when Mint was born. If Debian was a person, kids would be calling it a Boomer.

Funny stuff.

Doesn’t MPV run natively on Wayland?

If you want to run a single Wayland application, use Cage: https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

I would expect cage to be smaller than an X11 server.

MPV should work fine with Wayland and Pipewire.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/desktop-linux/1357040-mpv-0-35-media-player-released-with-pipewire-backend-wayland-dma-buf-support

Other than his choice of video player not supporting Wayland yet, why is this perfect for X11?

If he is only going to run one app, he can use Cage.

https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

On a machine with 2 GB of RAM, what is going to make the biggest difference is using a 32 bit distro. Everything, not just the desktop environment but also all the apps, is going to take about half as much RAM. At 2 GB, that takes your system from functionally useless to quite useful ( especially if you plan to open a web browser ).

There is an option you did not list that impressed me recently. Trinity is a desktop environment that is essentially modern KDE 3.

The 32!bit edition of Q4OS makes it easy to install Trinity. It is basically Debian under the hood so you get access to all those packages ( at least the ones available on 32 but ).