LeFantome

The political downvoting in this thread is a turn off for me. However, I completely agree with your statement / question.

You are right that the tone was a little insulting.

That said, who is the “us” that you are referring to?

A lot of Open Source software is written by people that would not see the use of non-free components for testing as a problem. A lot of Open Source software is written by people that believe in the superiority of collaborative software development but do not have strong opinions on user freedom. The may ever value developer freedom in ways that is incompatible with the most extreme or idealist views of user freedom.

Are you demanding recognition to “us” for all that software?

The post you are replying to was unnecessarily combative. Your is no better and is supported by no better moral high-ground.

Not even necessary for newer cards:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

NVIDIA has improved a lot over the past year.

Explicit sync support in Wayland now.

Even the closed drivers use Open Source components in the kernel now. For newer cards, that is the default.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

That likely has more to do with the culture of KDE vs GNOME. You can make pretty much the same UI with either toolkit.

They are C++ already. If they deigned the application well, a UI toolkit change should not be too bad. Not trivial but manageable.

I always hate to see apps move off GTK but their first point is about cross-platform and there is just no denying that Qt has a vastly better cross-platform story than GTK does.

The “ran Linux on a 4004” through emulation. The 4004 was actually running a MIPS emulator ( that emulated an MMU ) and Linux run on the emulator.

They( Code Weavers ) do a lot of the work on Proton. I believe that Valve pays them.

None of the departures seem related to ARC

GNU / Linux is an overstep. It is inaccurate and misleading.

“Linux” as the majority of people that know the term use it refers to a family of operating system “distributions” that share a large number of common traits ( including the Linux kernel ).

GNU / Linux is a poor name for the majority of these distributions. It would be an ok name for a specific distribution from the Free Software Foundation.

Not all Linux distributions use Glibc. You mentioned Alpine Linux. There are others. This does not make Alpine less of a Linux. ( this is a tangent but saying “most” software does not work on MUSL is wildly inaccurate ).

Not all Linux distributions use the GNU utils. Check out Chimera Linux sometime. If I sat a Linux user down at Chimera, they would be perfectly at home. They can of course even install Flatpaks or use Docker or Podman. Because it is Linux even with no GNU.

Not all distros use GCC. I have listed one already.

Saying Linux was “never completed” is wildly inaccurate. Linux has been completed in many different ways and it continues to expand and evolve.

Even on the most popular Linux distros, GNU represents only a tiny fraction of the software installed. In most distro repos, the most popular license is MIT. So even if we pretend that GPL means GNU ( itself a totally inaccurate overreach ) a GNU label for the entire system makes no sense.

As above, there is more MIT licensed software in most distros. Should it be MIT / Linux? Red Hat probably contributes more code than anybody ( including to Glibc and GCC ). Should all Linux be Red Hat / Linux? Both those are bonkers but, fair attribution wise, they make more sense than GNU / Linux does.

Yes, Richard Stallman has asked all the Linux distros to call themselves GNU. He should not have. He should stop. There is no problem to solve other than he has not stopped asking.

GNU is a massively important project historically. The GPL is a vital piece do the Free Software landscape. These need to be celebrated and acknowledged. This is not the way to do it.

But let’s take another look at history. First, of course Linux would likely not have caught such early momentum without GNU utils and certainly not with GCC. Linux had its own libc but Glibc was better. Sure.

Did you know that the author of GNU HURD originally wanted to use the BSD kernel? That would have been an interesting alternate history. GNU may have truly emerged as an OS alternative. It could have filled the space now occupied by Linux. We would all be using the GNU OS.

In 1992, GNU / Linux may have been a decent description of what Linux was at the time ( though that is a bit of a slap to XFree86 ).

FreeBSD was a complete OS before anybody ( anybody free ). However, they got caught in a lawsuit around whether they were allowed to be free. Linux appeared in the space left by BSD and, it was while BSD was under a legal cloud that Linux filled its sails with wind. By the time that was settled, BSD was way behind. Not as far behind as GNU without Linux would have been though.

If there had been no Linux kernel, the BSD lawsuit would have ended and the world would have had a free UNIX while GNU was still a collection of utilities with no kernel.

If Linux had not appeared and FreeBSD had taken off, few of us would probably ever have heard of the GNU Project. Many GNU fans totally underestimate how important Linux has been to them.

Finally, how is GNU a desktop OS ( especially in 2024 )?

Here is the full list of GNJ projects. “All GNU packages” straight from the horses mouth:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html#allgnupkgs

First, many people will be surprised how short that list is. My distro offers 70,000 packages. Fewer than 500 are GNU. That is what I was saying above.

But where is the display server? Where is the sound server? Where is the desktop environment? How may GUI applications are there?

You can say that that GNU kernel is “unfinished”. If GNU still wants to be a desktop, it would be better described as “unstarted”.

It is not 1992 anymore. GNU is not a desktop OS.

Of course a GNU desktop could use X11, Wayland, and Mesa. Those are all Free Software but they are are not GNU. In fact, all those are MIT licensed and not even GPL.

None of the desktop environments are GNU. There is GNUstep but its homepage says explicitly that it is “not a desktop”.

Anyway, GNU is a massively important project. Let’s educate people on why it did and does matter. But let’s not destroy its legacy and goodwill by abusing its name and misrepresent its role today.

I don’t think that Sneaky or Secret are good descriptions for this. A better word might be “plumbing”.

When you realize that your house use full of hidden pipes and wires, it would be a strange take indeed to conclude that anybody is being “sneaky” about these “secret” features.

Windows does this as well. No doubt the same for macOS.