The line between helpful tech and quiet surveillance is blurring — and our devices no longer feel fully under our control.

  • Rothe@piefed.social
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    14 hours ago

    Sigh. This kind of nonsense is why so many people get scared away from even trying linux. Who cares which distro you use, as long as it is linux it is a step in the right direction, and a whole lot of people (including myself) have taken that step very recently, despite some arrogant linux bros doing their best to gatekeep us away from even trying.

      • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        Yes. Kinda.

        How do you think Linux devs get paid? The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.

        As Linus himself said plenty of times - GPL2 was the correct choice. Roku, Tizen, Chromebooks and Amazon garbage are absolutely within what the developers intended, and the devs are doing the work after all.

        From a consumer standpoint, I absolutely agree with you, open everything is wonderful. However - commercial interests currently fund most OSS development. Without those funds, development stops and developers must take other paying jobs (probably closed source). Would be nice to change this, but then we need to completely pivot our funding model. You need to pay devs, either directly or indirectly (taxes, foundations, etc).

        So far, the open source community hasn’t been very good at figuring out funding models for consumer products. It usually ends with the development team needing to put food on the table, so they add a subscription and close down parts of the project. About two seconds later, the project has ten forks and the original author can’t buy groceries.

        ”Buy me a beer” simply isn’t s viable mechanism to fund open source. How should we do it?

        Personal preference: Slowly move the public sector towards open source, and require them to provide financial aid to products they use. Not perfect, but something that could happen gradually, without shocking the system.

        tl;dr: yes, but also no.

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Do you think anyone, anywhere think of roku and amazon fire when they hear “you should try linux”?

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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          2 hours ago

          read this thread again, please, because you completely missed the point. but you know what, I’ll help:

          grue said:

          We need more real Linux – GNU/Linux, with compliant copyleft licensing – not Tivoized crap like they put on TVs.

          Roku OS, Amazon Fire OS, Tizen (Samsung TV OS), etc. – all technically Linux, but you wouldn’t know it because they’ve systematically butchered them to destroy everything that made Linux good (the users’ freedom).

          Rothe said:

          … Who cares which distro you use, as long as it is linux it is a step in the right direction, …

          roku, amazon fire, tizen and co are all “linux based” operating systems. the topic was not about people recommending linux to each other, but about corporations misusing the foundations of it to further their greed. point being, something runs linux does not make it good. and that’s where grue’s call for real linux on these devices gets relevant.

      • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        No they arnt, but also using terminology like rape is a huge problem. He’s entirely right, the avg vocal Linux user is fucking insane. And a big reason there’s still much misinformation and fud around Linux for your avg user.

        The worse thing for Linux is unironically it’s fucking vocal users.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Sure, because caring about users’ rights is “insane.” Because caring about societal effects of (lack of) antitrust and consumer protection law is “insane.” Because having an ounce of goddamn self-respect and not wanting to be abused is “insane.”

          No, I don’t think I’m insane at all, actually. I think the people incomprehensibly arguing against me in this thread can fuck all the way off with their corporatist simping!

          • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works
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            1 hour ago

            I agree with your morals and your end goal.

            How do you want to fund the development of Open Source? Because currently most of it is funded by corporations, in turn funded by ”corporatist simping”. The expectations of the average user simply can’t be fulfilled by hobbyist developers, and then we need funding. How do we get the Windows user ”John Smith” to personally fork over money to the correct developers?

            Proton/Wine/KDE would not be in their current state unless they got that sweet proprietary Valve money. In our current world we need to use corporate money to further open source, not fight it. Follow the stream and steer the flow. Given time, we can diversify funding and control.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      What the fuck? I said I don’t even actually care if the kernel is Linux or NT (or anything else) as long as it’s genuinely open so the user can modify it, and you somehow try to twist that as quibbling over distros?! Way to miss the point by a goddamn mile!