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by cupofjoakim 197 days ago
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
3 comments

>"Linux" does not force anything on you right?

>It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow

well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .

It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
"Linux" is mostly controlled by a few corporations and their interests. It's been a loooooooooong time since it was a grass roots movement.

I don't know about you, but corporate dictates always leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835

The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)

For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.

But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.

(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)

I disagree. The freedom loving hippie hackers of the 90s you can mostly find in the BSD communities, in my not so humble opinion.
Do you have anything to argue that with? I'm all ears, would be neat to see.

I already mentioned quite an array of projects that I find inspiring. I can't say I know of anything in particular coming from BSD land. ZFS has adherents for sure but there doesn't seem like there's any innovation or creation or downstream net new coming out of that.

"Linux" is a kernel, mostly controlled by one old curmudgeonly guy. Corporations can offer him code, but he can reject it.

The Linux software environment is more broadly controlled by corporations, but that goes for every single mainstream operating system.

Actually it did, well technically it was userland.

Pulseaudio was forced on me because Firefox and a few others need it.

PAM was forced on me because some applications needing it, I believe that was due to kde.

Until v15, slackware had no need for pam or pulseaudio

Now many of us are waiting until systemd is forced on us :(