If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.
Maybe it should say, “If the world went open source, and capitalism went away.”
Even fantasy should have some limits folks c'mon now
Which is more fantastical? Unlimited profits and line going up forever in a finite world? Or capitalism actually ending so all lives can live free from subjugation?
If windows didn't exist, linux would dominate with the problems you describe, and we'd still see this meme, but advocating for FreeBSD instead.
That being said, I like them both. It's been a while since I last used bsd, so I think it's about time I give it another spin.
I'm unsure. I switch between MacOS and Linux regularly.
I'd reckon Apple's OS would dominate the "user friendly" space(not saying Linux is bad, just what everyone memes).
Linux is already dominant on just about everything except the desktop, and it has yet to suffer significant enshittification.
Edit: Well, a bunch of Linux distributions have suffered enshittification, if that counts.
Does this also apply to Android?
I'm not sure. I've only ever used the stock operating system on my phones.
If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.
This is a very Desktop/workstation-centric view of the situation and you're completely neglecting 3/4ths of the story. Linux is alreadyhilariously dominant on the on-prem server and Cloud side of things. Like, it's not even close. Pretty much any website you visit, the odds are overwhelming that it's running Linux. Even Microsoft runs most of the underlying infrastructure for Azure and Github on Linux. Android is the #1 mobile phone platform in the world, which runs on, you guessed it, Linux.
And it's already monetized to the gills. Red Hat has multi-billion earnings per quarter, every quarter, and Canonical is almost certainly going to IPO this year.
It's already dominant in pretty much every space it touches and it has been for a very long time. Desktop/workstation is pretty much the singular exception to that.
Yeah man it’s more of what you might call an allegory for how capitalism works. Language is my thing, looks like Linux is yours. I’m sure this information will be very helpful for anyone who might read my post and mistake me for an expert. Thanks for your service.
At least it would be GPL tho.
Who, exactly, do you think would "sell out for money", and why would they have the power to do so? Linux is huge, and the pressure to monetize is there now. Plenty of people have been trying to monetize Linux - and in many cases, succeeding - for decades now. Why do you think being dominant would change that?
I don’t see anyone outside so it checks out.
They are all learning how to use the terminal.
They are inside trying to compile the software thst opens the automatic doors.
They will die there, because they need a slightly older version of some minor library for compatibility, and nobody cared enough to continue hosting it.
Sudo apt install sliding-doors if that doesn't work check the snap store, best I can do 🤣
Real
Not really. Having heterogeneity among operating systems is better than pure homogeneity. Say, if everyone ran Linux, and some massive security flaw was discovered, we would all be screwed at the same time. However, if we ran different stuff, and some massive security hole was found for just one operating system, then only a small portion of the world is vulnerable at once. Besides, more operating systems can lead to more innovation, as long as there is good competition between them.
If the whole world focused and used just 1 OS for every system for a long enough time line, I think it would evolve fast enough to reach a point of perfection, where there are no security holes or flaws of any kind. I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it. Eventually the best way to do everything an OS needs to do would be found; it would be faster if there was only 1 OS to work with to reach that point.
where there are no security holes or flaws of any kind
this in itself is straight up impossible to know or prove. when can you say your program has no vulnerabilities? ever hear of zerodays? finding the best way to do everything in software will never be found or stay constant either.
I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it.
I've been writing code in one form or another for some 30 years now, and my observation so far has been the exact opposite: there are many problems in programming for which there is no one clearly superior solution, even in theory. Just like life in general, programming is full of trade-offs, compromises, and diminishing returns.
I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it.
Language has many ways of expressing the same thing, is there an objectively best way to do it?
Is that sentence the best way to ask that question?
Must be nice to be so ignorant....
The problem is capitalism, not which kernel everything runs. And the reason FOSS isn't universal is also capitalism.
It's more complicated to make money producing FOSS, capitalism or not. Lots of reasonable developers would still choose closed source even without capitalism.
Making money is a capitalist adjacent idea. The premise that we need money to figure out how to allocate resources is foolish
I'm still waiting for someone to propose in detail an alternative.
Yeah, that's the problem. We don't have the requisite technology to build a Star Trek utopia. If only we did…
Well, if everything ran Linux...
The premise that we need money to figure out how to allocate resources is foolish
Money not necessarily, we need to calculate costs (and minimize it) in distributed fashion.
And the only reasonably successful way we've found so far for doing so is...money.
There's a bunch of ways to allocate resources but ideas like money have an advantage of allowing people to choose how they live.
A good example would be that not every person would be satisfied living in an apartment in the city. Some prefer living more rural for any number of reasons. Some want to be inside playing video games and others outside biking on a mountain. Some want to be able to do both. Giving them the ability to choose small apartment in the city or bigger house in the woods is important for happiness.
The biggest issue is the discrepancy of resource allocation between individuals not the method that allocation is done on paper.
Dirty secret is that FOSS is a product of capitalism and nothing else.
A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production created personal computers while the central planners in both communist countries and big companies both thought it was a dumb idea. A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production meant that someone could decide to release their product free with source code. Private ownership of intellectual property such as source code allowed people to release their privately owned code under a license specifying that changes must be made public.
From there, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. How many FOSS projects do you use, and who made them?
Aren’t the majority of computers already on Linux? Unless you mean desktops
Majority... yeah, Android smartphone and servers would be a really really big number.
No, you missed the homeless encampments, forest fires and car centric cities.
There's no apt install utopia.
Because you have forgotten sudo
No, because everyone would be sitting around jacking each other off about using linux, if current trends are to be believed.
There's a weird secretive compound on the edge of town. If you go up to the gate and try to talk to them they just reply "I use Arch BTW".
No place for bazaar. Looks more like corporations wet dream.
I mean, you could put one inside a building, I guess. It's really just a very downscale mall.
Would expect the architecture to be a bit more on the brutalist side of things
The world runs on KDE (or gnome)
So you mean we would have weird useless concrete structures everywhere? I doubt it
Linux kernel
Nah bro, chrome OS is fucking ridiculous not to mention android too.
We need the other linux not just kernel.
Until the moment someone finds a privilage escalation bug.
:D
Come to think of it that's kind of how society works no?
Well not completly, but yes most of the servers run linux
It does run on Linux 😁😁😁
No, firewalls should use openBSD
Why?
I've tried to Google this, but it's such a general statement I can't find anything about it.
Is it more mature in that regard? Sane/sensible/safe defaults for networking? More tools as part of the distribution for networking?
Did FreeBSD (or it's predecessor/upstream/whatever) define the standards, so the implementation is more correct?
Or is it just that so many firewall applications run on top of FreeBSD (or a BSD flavour) eg opnSense, pfSense, openWRT (is openWRT actually BSD, idk)?
So, kinda a historical/momentum thing. With the benefits of wide spread specific use
OpenBSD is focused on being incredibly secure, and they generally succeed. Firewalls need good security.
Everything needs good security. Firewall devices only cover a specific, limited portion of the attack surface of machines behind them. One successful browser exploit or attack on an exposed port, and the firewall may as well be a paperweight.
True, but it's hard to get end users to use OpenBSD. It's really easy to make a firewall based on OpenBSD.
FreeBSD this focused on making a general use operating system
Open BSD is focusing on security the developer insists on regular audits.
Under most circumstances I wouldn't really care, we're getting a long well enough on Microsoft and Android with security updates all the time. That firewall man, it's sitting out there with its ass hanging in the wind, The only thing between you and a billion hastily written scripts.
Is that image supposed to represent an utopia?
Its urban hell, but a few more trees
Ahh.... It's Gentoo
Probably done in jest, but this reads like the 100,000,000th “agree?” bullshit post on LinkedIn.
> every building by zaha hadid
> still not a walkable City
I would not agree
If everyone used Linux I would use BSD
“But if we put all the world’s shares into Linux, the other Kernel Patron Units would be incapacitated!”
… I doubt anyone will get this reference.
Nah, industrial and infrastructure should mostly use BSD. And "Never see a command line" consumer OS's should generally be forks from Linux or other FOSS. Most Linux distros have come a long way and are ready for gaming prime time, but fail the "80 year old grandma who wants to digitise her record collection but is a bit unclear on double-clicking" test.
but GNU?
It's just that nobody gnu
All monocultures suck.
No, because that would make me stupid.
Competition and choice is good, it keeps the ecosystem healthy and resilient.
how easy is linux? i see so many memes now and i wanna switch but I'm not confident in it
Linux Mint is easier to use than Windows
Seconding that, made the switch and nothing broke since(almost 2 months now, ^o^) . Can't say that for windows tho, where not only auto updates meant I had to wait half an hour to use my PC half of the time or disable them and not be up to date with security, but the OS itself was riddled with problems, sometimes just opening Firefox with a few tabs (like 4 or so) would bsod (and I have 16 gigs of ddr4 ram, so it wasn't a ram problem) not to mention now that I'm on Mint everything is faster, I didn't have to pay a license key and I know my OS isn't trying to fight me for my data.
It's pretty easy imo if you start with a Debian distro
You can easily try it out by booting from usb.
Start by exploring Linux Mint or ZorinOS.. Both are optimized to feel like Windows.. You can watch YouTube videos about them to understand what I mean
At the risk of analysis paralysing you.. But if you have an Nvidia video card, I would start with Pop!_OS
I recently tried pop os but gnome did not seem reasonable for me on multiple monitors.
Thanks for your addition! It is working fine for me, but I may have changed the config a bit from the default, don't remember everything. I have default tiling now and that works really well.
One of the things that is a must for me is 1 panel that shows the windows and apps per monitor. I can't work any other way, I'm not looking to drastically change my workflow more so than Linux alone already is. My quick Google search said that it wasn't possible on Gnome 44 and I gave up.
That said, KDE is laggy and unresponsive. It's also fairly unusable. Everything else besides those 2 is like going back 20 years to desktop environments of the olden days. I just want something modern that works with my workflow.
If you have an NVIDIA video card, I would start with buying AMD or Intel instead. Attempting to use NVIDIA with Linux will result in misery.
Linux itself does nothing for desktop computing, you also need GNU and the rest of the free software suit to better the world
It was all fun and games until the wifi driver didn't compile...
If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.
Maybe it should say, “If the world went open source, and capitalism went away.”
Even fantasy should have some limits folks c'mon now
Which is more fantastical? Unlimited profits and line going up forever in a finite world? Or capitalism actually ending so all lives can live free from subjugation?
If windows didn't exist, linux would dominate with the problems you describe, and we'd still see this meme, but advocating for FreeBSD instead.
That being said, I like them both. It's been a while since I last used bsd, so I think it's about time I give it another spin.
I'm unsure. I switch between MacOS and Linux regularly.
I'd reckon Apple's OS would dominate the "user friendly" space(not saying Linux is bad, just what everyone memes).
Linux is already dominant on just about everything except the desktop, and it has yet to suffer significant enshittification.
Edit: Well, a bunch of Linux distributions have suffered enshittification, if that counts.
Does this also apply to Android?
I'm not sure. I've only ever used the stock operating system on my phones.
This is a very Desktop/workstation-centric view of the situation and you're completely neglecting 3/4ths of the story. Linux is already hilariously dominant on the on-prem server and Cloud side of things. Like, it's not even close. Pretty much any website you visit, the odds are overwhelming that it's running Linux. Even Microsoft runs most of the underlying infrastructure for Azure and Github on Linux. Android is the #1 mobile phone platform in the world, which runs on, you guessed it, Linux.
And it's already monetized to the gills. Red Hat has multi-billion earnings per quarter, every quarter, and Canonical is almost certainly going to IPO this year.
It's already dominant in pretty much every space it touches and it has been for a very long time. Desktop/workstation is pretty much the singular exception to that.
Yeah man it’s more of what you might call an allegory for how capitalism works. Language is my thing, looks like Linux is yours. I’m sure this information will be very helpful for anyone who might read my post and mistake me for an expert. Thanks for your service.
At least it would be GPL tho.
Who, exactly, do you think would "sell out for money", and why would they have the power to do so? Linux is huge, and the pressure to monetize is there now. Plenty of people have been trying to monetize Linux - and in many cases, succeeding - for decades now. Why do you think being dominant would change that?
I don’t see anyone outside so it checks out.
They are all learning how to use the terminal.
They are inside trying to compile the software thst opens the automatic doors.
They will die there, because they need a slightly older version of some minor library for compatibility, and nobody cared enough to continue hosting it.
Sudo apt install sliding-doors if that doesn't work check the snap store, best I can do 🤣
Real
Not really. Having heterogeneity among operating systems is better than pure homogeneity. Say, if everyone ran Linux, and some massive security flaw was discovered, we would all be screwed at the same time. However, if we ran different stuff, and some massive security hole was found for just one operating system, then only a small portion of the world is vulnerable at once. Besides, more operating systems can lead to more innovation, as long as there is good competition between them.
If the whole world focused and used just 1 OS for every system for a long enough time line, I think it would evolve fast enough to reach a point of perfection, where there are no security holes or flaws of any kind. I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it. Eventually the best way to do everything an OS needs to do would be found; it would be faster if there was only 1 OS to work with to reach that point.
this in itself is straight up impossible to know or prove. when can you say your program has no vulnerabilities? ever hear of zerodays? finding the best way to do everything in software will never be found or stay constant either.
I've been writing code in one form or another for some 30 years now, and my observation so far has been the exact opposite: there are many problems in programming for which there is no one clearly superior solution, even in theory. Just like life in general, programming is full of trade-offs, compromises, and diminishing returns.
Language has many ways of expressing the same thing, is there an objectively best way to do it?
Is that sentence the best way to ask that question?
Must be nice to be so ignorant....
The problem is capitalism, not which kernel everything runs. And the reason FOSS isn't universal is also capitalism.
It's more complicated to make money producing FOSS, capitalism or not. Lots of reasonable developers would still choose closed source even without capitalism.
Making money is a capitalist adjacent idea. The premise that we need money to figure out how to allocate resources is foolish
I'm still waiting for someone to propose in detail an alternative.
Yeah, that's the problem. We don't have the requisite technology to build a Star Trek utopia. If only we did…
Well, if everything ran Linux...
Money not necessarily, we need to calculate costs (and minimize it) in distributed fashion.
And the only reasonably successful way we've found so far for doing so is...money.
There's a bunch of ways to allocate resources but ideas like money have an advantage of allowing people to choose how they live.
A good example would be that not every person would be satisfied living in an apartment in the city. Some prefer living more rural for any number of reasons. Some want to be inside playing video games and others outside biking on a mountain. Some want to be able to do both. Giving them the ability to choose small apartment in the city or bigger house in the woods is important for happiness.
The biggest issue is the discrepancy of resource allocation between individuals not the method that allocation is done on paper.
Dirty secret is that FOSS is a product of capitalism and nothing else.
A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production created personal computers while the central planners in both communist countries and big companies both thought it was a dumb idea. A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production meant that someone could decide to release their product free with source code. Private ownership of intellectual property such as source code allowed people to release their privately owned code under a license specifying that changes must be made public.
From there, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. How many FOSS projects do you use, and who made them?
Aren’t the majority of computers already on Linux? Unless you mean desktops
Majority... yeah, Android smartphone and servers would be a really really big number.
Most computers in the world are not desktops
No because as others have already said, why would 1 thing dominating everything be good?
Its not dominating everything but we can make foss our own. I.e. Linux don't dominate over us but "we are using linux the way we want"
Because Linux isn’t really one thing. If the kernel developers do something bad, just fork the kernel and remove it.
they miss the statue of Linus Torvalds
No, you missed the homeless encampments, forest fires and car centric cities.
There's no
apt install utopia.Because you have forgotten sudo
No, because everyone would be sitting around jacking each other off about using linux, if current trends are to be believed.
There's a weird secretive compound on the edge of town. If you go up to the gate and try to talk to them they just reply "I use Arch BTW".
No place for bazaar. Looks more like corporations wet dream.
I mean, you could put one inside a building, I guess. It's really just a very downscale mall.
Would expect the architecture to be a bit more on the brutalist side of things
The world runs on KDE (or gnome)
So you mean we would have weird useless concrete structures everywhere? I doubt it
Nah bro, chrome OS is fucking ridiculous not to mention android too.
We need the other linux not just kernel.
Until the moment someone finds a privilage escalation bug.
:D
Come to think of it that's kind of how society works no?
Well not completly, but yes most of the servers run linux
It does run on Linux 😁😁😁
No, firewalls should use openBSD
Why?
I've tried to Google this, but it's such a general statement I can't find anything about it.
Is it more mature in that regard? Sane/sensible/safe defaults for networking? More tools as part of the distribution for networking?
Did FreeBSD (or it's predecessor/upstream/whatever) define the standards, so the implementation is more correct?
Or is it just that so many firewall applications run on top of FreeBSD (or a BSD flavour) eg opnSense, pfSense, openWRT (is openWRT actually BSD, idk)?
So, kinda a historical/momentum thing. With the benefits of wide spread specific use
I personally don't have a lot of experience with this, but here's a writeup about OpenBSD: https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_every_it_person_needs_to_know_about_openbsd.html
OpenBSD is focused on being incredibly secure, and they generally succeed. Firewalls need good security.
Everything needs good security. Firewall devices only cover a specific, limited portion of the attack surface of machines behind them. One successful browser exploit or attack on an exposed port, and the firewall may as well be a paperweight.
True, but it's hard to get end users to use OpenBSD. It's really easy to make a firewall based on OpenBSD.
FreeBSD this focused on making a general use operating system
Open BSD is focusing on security the developer insists on regular audits.
Under most circumstances I wouldn't really care, we're getting a long well enough on Microsoft and Android with security updates all the time. That firewall man, it's sitting out there with its ass hanging in the wind, The only thing between you and a billion hastily written scripts.
Is that image supposed to represent an utopia?
Its urban hell, but a few more trees
Ahh.... It's Gentoo
Probably done in jest, but this reads like the 100,000,000th “agree?” bullshit post on LinkedIn.
> every building by zaha hadid
> still not a walkable City
I would not agree
If everyone used Linux I would use BSD
“But if we put all the world’s shares into Linux, the other Kernel Patron Units would be incapacitated!”
… I doubt anyone will get this reference.
Nah, industrial and infrastructure should mostly use BSD. And "Never see a command line" consumer OS's should generally be forks from Linux or other FOSS. Most Linux distros have come a long way and are ready for gaming prime time, but fail the "80 year old grandma who wants to digitise her record collection but is a bit unclear on double-clicking" test.
but GNU?
It's just that nobody gnu
All monocultures suck.
No, because that would make me stupid.
Competition and choice is good, it keeps the ecosystem healthy and resilient.
how easy is linux? i see so many memes now and i wanna switch but I'm not confident in it
Linux Mint is easier to use than Windows
Seconding that, made the switch and nothing broke since(almost 2 months now, ^o^) . Can't say that for windows tho, where not only auto updates meant I had to wait half an hour to use my PC half of the time or disable them and not be up to date with security, but the OS itself was riddled with problems, sometimes just opening Firefox with a few tabs (like 4 or so) would bsod (and I have 16 gigs of ddr4 ram, so it wasn't a ram problem) not to mention now that I'm on Mint everything is faster, I didn't have to pay a license key and I know my OS isn't trying to fight me for my data.
It's pretty easy imo if you start with a Debian distro
You can easily try it out by booting from usb.
Start by exploring Linux Mint or ZorinOS.. Both are optimized to feel like Windows.. You can watch YouTube videos about them to understand what I mean
At the risk of analysis paralysing you.. But if you have an Nvidia video card, I would start with Pop!_OS
I recently tried pop os but gnome did not seem reasonable for me on multiple monitors.
Thanks for your addition! It is working fine for me, but I may have changed the config a bit from the default, don't remember everything. I have default tiling now and that works really well.
One of the things that is a must for me is 1 panel that shows the windows and apps per monitor. I can't work any other way, I'm not looking to drastically change my workflow more so than Linux alone already is. My quick Google search said that it wasn't possible on Gnome 44 and I gave up.
That said, KDE is laggy and unresponsive. It's also fairly unusable. Everything else besides those 2 is like going back 20 years to desktop environments of the olden days. I just want something modern that works with my workflow.
If you have an NVIDIA video card, I would start with buying AMD or Intel instead. Attempting to use NVIDIA with Linux will result in misery.
Linux itself does nothing for desktop computing, you also need GNU and the rest of the free software suit to better the world
It was all fun and games until the wifi driver didn't compile...
No esthetics wise it would be worse than the USSR
No way. Plasma is beautiful.