Free Software

1. I think it's a great movement. Deprivatizing and opening technology (hardware and software) is the best way to make sure it stays free (as in freedom), open to all, uncensored and safe. As a side note: This is why it is important that there are never such things as Internet fast lanes/toll lanes, for the sake of freedom of information, free speech and privacy.

2. I have used a couple linux distros, mainly Debian and Ubuntu and I still use Debian. I also use some free/open source software such as the torrent client Transmission.

3. Yes. My home server/NAS (Network Attached Storage) runs a distro (called Open Media Vault) based on Debian. I have Transmission installed on it to download torrents.

4. I haven't tried a tonne of distros, but I like Debian very much for servers because it isn't too hard to use, there are a lot of docs and tutorials online and it works very well.

5. Yes and no. I think the free/open source software movement will get bigger and bigger, even attracting big companies currently producing closed source software, such as Microsoft, which has expressed an interest in open source. But I don't think proprietary software will be completely obsolete, because I think some companies will keep on releasing their software as closed source and they will still have clients as long as there is demand for their products. But I think that proprietary/closed source software will be a lot less major or important.

 

Because of the circumstances i live in, all software is free to me. So therefore, i find your question somewhat weird.

Linux was fun, before they tried making it "more like windows/iOS" *looking at you Ubuntu*.

Free software has it's uses, but in most cases can't compare to "premium" stuff. Speaking purely about editors etc...

 

I like the idea of free software. However, I feel like desktop Linux is slowly killing itself. It took years for desktop environments to actually work at a decent level (looking at you KDE) and now it's like "fuck it lets do shit all over again" (oh my god I still remember KDE 4.0). Also, WHYYYYY is Ubuntu always reinventing the wheel (looking at you, Unity)?

I feel like every single time a decent project comes up people will abandon it a few months later for the "next big thing" or start forks because the developers are all entitled bitchy special snowflakes who can't take any criticism.

The only ones trying to create/keep a decent USER experience are the GNOME project, but sadly they're also the ones getting the most hate (except for maybe pulseaudio and systemd).

Yes, I have tried it, was obsessed with Gentoo for many years.

No, I don't use Linux on a daily basis anymore because nowadays I want my stuff to just work. Linux keeps breaking on a regular level, like even if it works today I can't rely on it not breaking a few weeks later which may be exactly the moment I need it to not break - it's just too risky.

Maybe I'll try again when Wayland is stable and mostly replaced Xorg.

ArchLinux, because it's a rolling release like Gentoo without the hassle of having to compile anything. Also very vanilla (looking at you, Ubuntu) and bleeding edge and it's easy to create custom packages.

I used to like Ubuntu when it was a new distribution, it was like stable-but-up-to-date debian without having to spend hours/days on setting it up. Was all excited like "AT LAST! The day of Linux conquering the Desktop has finally come!", probably laughing like a true freetard maniac. Guess I was wrong :icon_sad:

 

1.What do you think about free software (gnu linux)?
I think free software (free as in "freedom") is absolutely necessary. It's a challenge to proprietary software creators who would like to restrict users from using their own equipment that they've purchased for whatever reason they chose. It's funny that people buy a "license" to use software they have purchased rather than buying a copy of it for themselves. I think free software is also necessary considering the amount of privacy degradation that is common in modern operating systems like Microsoft Windows. It's necessary for other reasons as well. I think we've all heard about the government issuing orders to some major companies like Google to track and keep information about users. Also, gag orders. If we don't have the ability to review the source code that is in our computers, we have no idea whether our own systems are being used against us.
2.Have you tried it?
Of course. I started using Linux when I was a kid when I saw a version of Redhat in Office Depot. I pointed it out to my grandmother who decided to buy it for me. I think I was around 12 at the time. I started using Gentoo at 18, and currently I use Fedora 20.
3. Do you use it on a daily basis?
Yes I do. GNU/Linux is currently the only operating system on my computer.
4. Which is your favourite distribution and why?
My favorite distribution is currently Fedora. I like it because it has a binary-based package manager, the ability to install repositories for me to download pretty much any program I want, a lot of automated stuff, simplicity, and a bleeding-edge mindset that I appreciate.
5. Do you believe that free software will turn propietary software obsolete someday?
I don't believe so. There will always be people around who will want to pay someone to create private software for them.

 

1.What do you think about free software (gnu linux)?

I believe that free computing derives from the human right to freedom of thought. In order to fully realize that right, one must have full control over their hardware, which includes knowing (or in principle, being able to know) what the software running on it does. I want to have the ability to write a free program, allow others to use it and change it, but not make it proprietary so that others can't change it.

If I release any software, it will be under the GPL Version 3+ license.

What I don't agree with is Richard Stallman's stance, which is that software has to be free or you can't use it. I tried to go "fully free" Linux on a few occasions (most recently with Parabola/GNU, which is a "fully free" version of Arch), and it's been a complete pain in the ass. LibreJS (which "protects your freedom" by blocking non-free Javascript, which is virtually all Javascript) made Empty Closets login completely impossible.

It's always going to be a reality that free software is going to have to talk to and play nice with non-free software. Until we can ban Adobe Flash on the internet altogether (not everyone's moving to HTML5 like YouTube), we can't reasonably expect people to do without proprietary plugins and codecs.

How does the Linux community complain about adoption rates as long as it doesn't collectively bitchslap the Stallmanites?

2.Have you tried it?

I'm writing to you from GNU userland right now.

3. Do you use it on a daily basis?

Yes, I have used GNU/Linux off and on since college (seven years ago), but I now use it every day.

4. Which is your favourite distribution and why?

Code:

Linux chivalry 3.17.4-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 21 21:14:42 CET 2014 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I'm an Arch girl. <3 It gives me a lot of control over my system. I have to make a lot more manual edits than a Debian (or Debian derivative) user might, but I also get access to very recent software. Including, quite excitingly, GnuPG 2.1. I could get this out of, say, Gentoo, and I haven't tried it, but I have heard it was painful. Having used all the Ubuntu flavors since 7.10, Fedora 20 and 21, Suse, and Arch, I've decided Arch is my favorite of all time. The package manager is very easy to understand, and systemd is wonderful. I want Lennart Poettering's babies.

5. Do you believe that free software will turn propietary software obsolete someday?

No. There are a couple of things constraining this from happening. The first is non-cooperation from hardware manufacturers. Neither nVidia nor AMD play very nice with the open source community. They have proprietary drivers, and that's created a support problem, and it's also created a problem for people who want to go "fully free" (I would if I could, but as I mentioned earlier, it's very painful). Every time a new piece of hardware comes out, especially if it's some completely new gadget, what inevitably happens is they write a Windows driver, and maybe an Apple driver. Unfortunately, they don't support Linux, so it's always been up to the GNU/Linux community to reverse engineer shit and generally write worse drivers than if hardware companies would cooperate. (And they wouldn't even have to put any time into helping the open source community either; they could just release information about the hardware internals.) Due to this non-cooperation, drivers are sometimes not just subpar, but completely awful, like nouveau. (If you are guaranteed to freeze the Ubuntu installer on a system with a GTX 580, you're a terribly written driver. End of story.)

The second problem is networking effects and the adoption of closed standards. The very wide adoption of Direct3D and Flash are the two biggest barriers to people making the switch to GNU/Linux. Despite YouTube supporting HTML5 video, many other widely used sites (such as TwitchTV and all the other game FPVOD streaming services). Game developers unfortunately continue to write AAA titles on Windows API and DirectX. I happen to think it would be more rational for them to write everything on OpenGL 4.4 across the board, since many studios already support Apple clients, and Apple has been on OpenGL for a very long time.

 

Well OpenGL was a major pain in the ass because of all the extensions, weird shaders and like 10 different ways to do the same thing. Maybe it's just old habits?

Also there's quite a few websites with html5 video support now, was quite surprised because OS X Yosemite doesn't come with flash and I didn't even notice until yesterday.

 

What? When I was in college, I wrote using OpenGL 4.1, and while I didn't get hired to any game development companies or whatever, I feel like I know my way around the API. It's entirely possible you wrote more code than I did, but how are the shaders weird? And how are there many ways to do the same thing?

That's a great trend that I welcome; however, it doesn't cover all my use cases. So unfortunately, I don't get to shitcan Flash like I want to.

 

That's an open ended question, I think it's fine for hobbyists and technicians but for the layman it's not a great thing to have.

Yes, many times.

No.

Debian.

No, never.

 

1.What do you think about free software (gnu linux)?
I believe free software is necessary in this day and age. It gives the end user the ability to control what is running on their system, has the ability to audited for back-doors or vulnerabilities, has a pretty high level of transparency, and most importantly gives you the ability to take something and make it better for you, and a whole lot of other people.

2.Have you tried it?
Yes, I first started using it 9 years ago. And I still am using to this day.

3. Do you use it on a daily basis?
You bet. I have been using Linux non-stop for the 8 years, because I quite frankly go sick of the Windows problems.

4. Which is your favourite distribution and why?
I have used a fair few distributions over the years. I used CentOS, then I went to Debian, then Slackware, then OpenSUSE, then Fedora, then Arch and finally settled on Gentoo. Gentoo has got to be my most favourite, because it gives me complete control over what features/functionality are enabled in software, it gives me so much choice (like what init system I can use, devtmpfs manager I can use), there are multiple profiles you can use, there are multiple choices of C libraries one can choose from. I myself have ditched udev in favour of mdev, I am using the hardened profile, when musl libc on Gentoo becomes usable I will be ditching glibc, and I am working on replacing most of the GNU userland with much nicer alternatives.

5. Do you believe that free software will turn proprietary software obsolete someday?
I'll get back to you on this one.

 

Uhh last time I used OpenGL was 2.x and I'm not sure how much has changed, so please take this with a grain of salt.

First, shaders were vendor extensions which were complicated to use and you had to create the same shader for several extensions/vendors (like ATI and NVIDIA), when DirectX had just one standard. Then ARB followed up with low-level ARB shaders which were like assembler code, so still kinda complicated to use. Followed by high-level GLSL (and hardware ARB vertex buffers, yay). Also NVIDIA did it's own high-level shading language called CG. So you kinda had the choice between several different shader languages.

Now the weird part was that there were vendor and ARB fixed-function extensions doing some of the stuff you usually had to use shaders for, so in addition to several different ways of doing shaders there were some extensions doing stuff making shaders unneccessary, adding to the confusion.

As for doing stuff in many ways, I was refering to things like drawing things with GL_BEGIN and passing single vertices, or calling lists, or just using a vertex buffer object if the extension was supported.

Extensions itself were weird because they were complicated to setup/initialize (in my opinion), but GLEW took care of that.

note: I was just a dumb kid using OpenGL to make hardware-accelerated 2D engines with cool/smooth effects and not hardcore 3D-stuff as I didn't have any knowledge of advanced mathematics at that time, so in case I said something wrong please go easy on me (*hug*) Maybe it all made sense in a weird way after all? I quit graphics programming right after because all this shader and math stuff was too complicated for me :icon_redf

 

All of what you're describing, while true, doesn't really apply since OpenGL major version 3. To be honest, OpenGL 2.x is really old, and people shouldn't be writing in it anymore. Major version 3 introduced a deprecation model for all the fixed-functionality stuff. Also, stuff like glBegin() glEnd(), glVertex3f(), and so on were deprecated. What developers are now supposed to do is write the shaders they want to use, compile link and run them on the card, passing data to it using glVertexAttribPointer, drawing with glDrawArrays/glDrawElements.

Is the API harder to use than OpenGL 1.x and 2.x? Undoubtedly. But it's also more powerful. Direct3D is, I would argue, just as hard, and the paradigm is pretty much the same: you have to write all the code the graphics card is going to use, load them as shaders, pass data to the shaders, and run the rendering commands on buffers rather than by passing the vertices, normals, and texture coordinates one-by-one.

To program 3D graphics, you have to like linear algebra and computational geometry. I ended up liking computer security much more, so I didn't stick with it.

I'm just saying, we shouldn't be too hard on the OpenGL people. They've done very nice things with the API in the past couple of years.

 

Depends on the software in question, the point in history, specific needs, etc, etc, etc.

In general...

On practical grounds, I like paying $0.

Philosophically, I do appreciate the idea of "freedom" to do what one wants.

Yes.

Yes, and it's been that way since about 2006. In 2006, Linux was a secondary OS. Use increased dramatically in 2007, and then again maybe 2010/2011. Currently, I don't use Windows on my own computers, and the only other OS I have is the Classic MacOS, which seldom gets used these days.

My favorite is whatever works for my current circumstances.

Over the years, this has been as mainstream as Ubuntu and Linux Mint, and as obscure as Mint PPC (for Apple PowerPC computers).

Right now, I'm on Linux Mint, which seems faster than Ubuntu on the same computer. I like some features, like the way text looks on screen (some distros had poor font rendering the last I saw, which drove me crazy).

Anything is possible.

But...I honestly don't see it happening. At least, I don't see it happening for 100% of users 100% of the time in the near future. Linux meets my needs just fine, but I am aware that there are users out there who are acquainted with it, but choose to use something else for at least part of their computer needs.

 

I think this is very true. I remember first playing with Linux on an old Pentium 1 in late 2005. Red Hat 6, from the back of a library book CD, was about the only thing that would run. It was not an impressive experience. Frankly, during the Red Hat 6 days, I think you'd have to have a strong, compelling interest in running it. Yes, it probably had advantages over Windows, but I think "normal" users would have been much better off with Windows 2000 (some say the best Windows ever...although that's admittedly not saying much). Even Windows 98--which was a huge pain in the butt during my limited use--would probably work better for normal people.

But I was interested enough to buy a Gateway PIII, and tried then-more current distros. And what a huge step forward it wa!. Red Hat 8 (again, from the back of a library book :lol was only 2 versions higher than I'd used previously, but it was so evolved it was almost unrecognizable. In the end, I ended with SuSE 9.x--it worked the best on the Gateway. Installation was easy, and it ran fuss free from that point. That was when I started using Linux as a secondary OS. And I'd have probably made it my primary, except I was less than happy with word processing software choices. The only good thing about OpenOffice.org were:

• It was $0
• It cost $0
• It had MS Office document support, albeit flawed
• Oh, and it cost $0.

Due to the word processor issue, I kept using an older Macintosh as well for a long time as a writing machine. But as time went by, application software evolved on Linux. Finally it reached a point where I found yes, this isn't as good in some ways, but it's good enough for me and what I need right now.

It's probably more than fear. People are in a rut, used to Windows. And there is the factor that computers usually come with Windows, and users just use what is there. And, of course, there is the argument that a lot of software is Windows-only. While I get to the point where I want to bang my head against the wall repeatedly when I hear the "need" for MS Office just because all the other sheeple use it, there are times when a Windows application may be a good choice--and sometimes the only choice.

That said...I find it encouraging how well Android is doing, and it appears that ChromeOS isn't going away. Yes, some will argue that Google is evil, blah, blah, blah. But I think it's a positive move. If nothing else, people are learning that gee, I can have a laptop that doesn't run Windows! and live to tell the tale.

That has astounded me as well.

I ran Linux Mint (older LTS version) on a Pentium 4 that had only 3/4 gigabyte of memory. It probably would have liked more memory, but in use it didn't seem like memory was a problem. I don't know Windows very well, but by the accounts I've heard by those who use it, even Windows XP would not have been happy with the available memory, and forget about Vista (well, everyone--including Microsoft--would like to forget Vista) and 7.

 

16 GB are required to work on Excel files and send emails. I'm always hitting the swap partition when I try to browse the web too.

 

Oh please, OpenOffice/LibreOffice is fine and dandy, but have you actually used modern Microsoft Office (or iWorks for that matter)? It's really pleasant and easy to use and looks beautiful, well worth the 60-80€ spent (that's like a day of work on a small student's pay, now think about how much time you have to spent on messing around with OpenOffice/LibreOffice).

Calling people 'sheeple' for using good products is just stupid. Also, I don't see why open source and proprietary software have to be mutually exclusive.

And who even cares about memory anymore, it's so dirt cheap I bought coffee more expensive than 8 GB ram dimms. That's exactly why modern software tries to use so much of it, because it is a cheap resource, an easy way to speed up performance and makes life easier for software developers.

I'm all for open source but people really need to stop being this fanatic about it (and stop the Windows bashing, it's actually a fine operating system and so is Linux).

 

I haven't ever seriously used Microsoft Office. That said, I've played with it (and had some light use on other's computers) from time to time. It's been a while since I saw anything recent, but I'm sure that if I played with Office today I could probably find at least one thing to say something nice about...

And I'm aware there are people who have specifically chosen Office because--after careful consideration--they conclude it is the best choice for their needs.

At the same time, however, it's not a product that really seems to fit what I need or want. For that matter, LibreOffice doesn't fit 100% either, but I find it easier to tolerate that given the much lower price. :lol:

There may be a commercial word processor out there that I'd be willing to actually--shudder!--pay money for. Years back, I saw various commercial word processors (mostly on OS X) that impressed me one way or another. Although there is no telling how I'd feel about the current versions of those programs. Plus, of course, I'd need a Macintosh just a little newer than my Power Macintosh 7600... and an OS slightly newer than System 7. :lol:

Most of the battles I've had with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice have been when I've had to deal with supporting a Microsoft Office document. At one point, I gave up, and just used Microsoft Office 97, run with WINE. Things, I'm glad to say, have improved. Actually, more than improved--LibreOffice now can open files reliably created on my first computer. Those files are 25 years old now. And LibreOffice can also apparently open Word documents that (I'm told) modern versions of Word don't support. Otherwise, battles have been few. Even OpenOffice.org. 1.x worked. I didn't like using it, but it worked, and had it been the only word processor I could use, I probably would have survived...

Meanwhile, people have paid for MS Office, and had battles with it...

Also the price of MS Office is not precisely pocket change. Some might find value. Some won't. And some plain can't afford the price.

I wouldn't call people "sheeple" for using Office. I might call them sheeple if they use Office only because it's what everyone else uses.

They don't. Some, of course, are strongly biased one way or another. But I--and many others--do use a mix. I have even been known to go outside a Linux distro's eco-system to separately install Opera (which was the best web browser for my needs at the time).

Memory has gotten a lot cheaper than it once was. But, again, for some people every dollar counts...

 

BMC77,

I really appreciate your kind and down to earth answer, actually expected to be insulted and called a brainwashed sheep or something. It was wrong to call you an open source fanatic.

(*hug*)