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  • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    20 hours ago

    The core principal of GNU from which every other principal is derived is “I shouldn’t need an ancient unmaintained printer driver that only works on windows 95 to use my god damned printer. I should have the source code so I can adapt it to work with my smart toaster”

    If an app is open source then I’ve almost never encountered a situation where I can’t build a working version. Its happened to me once that I remember. A synthesia clone called linthesia. Would not compile for love nor money and the provided binary was built for ubuntu 12 or something.

    Linux was probably ready for the 64-bit appocalypse even before Apple for this exact reason. Anything open source will just run, on anything, because some hobbiest has wanted to use it on their favourite platform at some point. And if not, you’d be surprised how not hard it is to checkout the sourcecode from github and make your own port. Difficult, but far from impossible.

    Steam games do not distribute source code, which means they break, and when they break the community can’t fix them. They can’t statically link glibc because that would put them in violation of the GPL (as far as I’m aware anyway). They are fundamentally second class citizens on linux because they refuse to embrace its culture. FOSS apps basically never die while there’s someone to maintain them.

    Its like when American companies come to Europe and realise the workers have rights and then get a reputation as scuzzballs for trying to rules lawyer those rights.

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 hours ago

      This shit is the exact reason Linux doesn’t just have ridiculously bad backwards compatibility but has also alienated literally everyone who isn’t a developer, and why the most stable ABI on Linux is god damn Win32 through Wine. Hell, for the same reason fundamentally important things like accessibility tools keep breaking, something where the only correct answer to is this blogpost. FOSS is awesome and all, but not if it demands from you to become a developer and continuesly invest hundreds of hours just so things won’t break. We should be able to habe both, free software AND good compatibility.

      What you describe is in no way a strength, it’s Linux’ core problem. Something we have to overcome ASAP.

      • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        It isn’t a core problem, it’s a filter, and a damn good one. Keeps the bad behavior out of Linux. Thats why people keep turning to it for lack of enshittification. Stable ABIs are what lead to corpo-capital interests infecting every single piece of technology and chaining us to their systems via vendor lock-in.

        I wish the Windows users who are sick of Windows would stop moving to Linux and trying to change it into Windows. Yes, move to Linux if you want, but use Linux.