What @Eden said....i have no words for that non free part.....it was shocking to read that you think like that. I just want that to be out in the open.
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Spins IMO do not count as distros.
When I say distros, I am talking about major projects with their own maintained repository or added technology.
And the other side of your argument is that plenty of distros have also died due to lack of interest.
How many distros are literally nothing more than a fork of gnome shell. How long will it be before there are enough gnome shell extensions to replicate linux mint or elementary OS. And when that happens, what will drive them to continue development of their DE and by extension their whole distro?
Out of the hundreds of distros out there, there are only about 10-15 that are true distros. Everything else is some splinter project that will likely die out and be rolled into something else.
Even then, the major distros are starting to die out too. Mandriva is dead. Slackware is still kicking around but I doubt that will go anywhere.
Yeah, I made a later post.
My first two were made in a rush and I just posted shit without thinking how it would read or sound.
I realize my wishes are selfish, impossible, and potentially detrimental to the quality of linux, but IMO it HAS to be done.
At some point some major linux company needs to think about the longevity of linux on the desktop. Right now I think linux broke 2% of the desktop market share. The only way up from here is commercial software and non free codecs.
Company's already doing that. Google and Steam, but right now its new ground since Linux never had to deal with it before. Also the only way its not. Educating people even tho its the hardest way is also a way up for Linux.
but sadly nobody knows what the future holds and how it will grow :p
maybe in a year we all using Hurd and Linux is dying :p
ubuntu does if you select "third-party addons" during the install.
not out of the box but better than most
Educating people is fine and dandy, but the fact of the matter is that if I get a .docx file from my boss that uses any sort of special formatting, libre office will fuck that document into oblivion.
Same thing in reverse. If I format a document in libre office (save it as .doc(x) ) and send it off to someone, the formatting just mangles the document.
What do you tell someone when they really can't make a word document with much confidence? Are you really going to tell an average joe that he should run office under wine?
I want to see opensource software succeed, but for that to happen we really need to start thinking about the larger picture of usability. If that means we need to get our hands dirty with some non free code until such a point where we can replace it with free code, then so be it.
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Well if you know. More and more people make documents on IOS and Android. So that just mater of time till that is fixed.
Open source has the entire document market coverd.....
You don't need Docx nobody needs Docx...
And here everyone here knows that if you use Apple or Google stuff and you use docx that it gets bad template. So if we can do it here correct then you guys should be fine too....This issue exist for already 16 years!!
I really dont see the issue. Just march trough and tell you're boss he can stick his docx where the sun doesn't shine and that he can save money by using some fine open source.
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You do actually. My mom is a professor and even .doc files from office 2003 on a windows machine does not play nicely with the office 2016 machines at the school.
Office 2016 has made a huge mess of things.
i mean i don't see the issue if you just move to Open office or Libre office or those other forks...
Yeah, you can convince a few people to switch to libreoffice (openoffice I believe is dead), but good luck trying to get the school, all the students, and the governing bodies that fund the school to switch to open office.
See that is the problem. You can't just have people switch and call it a victory for opensource software, there HAS to be a whole ecosystem in place so that everyone can play in the same sand box.
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Here in Europe our goverment is already going over to Linux and our schools also...
Sooo why the good luck?
Well google maps is saying that I live 7.7 miles from microsoft headquarters and I assume you can imagine how much money they invest into schools and the amount of influence they have in general.
A lot if we all just simply give up and let them influence us.
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The beauty of open source is, that nobody's opinion counts except the opinion of the people that are working on the distro of their dreams. You don't get to decide, nor does Microsoft, nor does anyone with money or bribes or marketing departments or patents... it's freedom baby, deal with it... why would you think freedom is bad? Why would you force developers to develop for someone else instead of for themselves, when everybody has access to the same pool of open source code and knowledge? I don't get why you're even trying to think of arguments against that, lol, because since ESR's books, that ship has sailed... it's clear to everyone that there is no better alternative than free open source development to cater for everyone's needs.
Google and Steam and Apple and RedHat and many many others all build upon the economy of open source... literally nobody builds upon the old systems of closed source and software patents any more... software patents are also a dying breed, except for the US, where they are on the brink of being abolished, software patents are not recognized in pretty much the entire world. Why would you think that going back to the old failed ways is a good thing?
Distros die and many new distros are born. Mandriva was a company that split up and the code was forked into 4 different projects, two of which are major distros, Mageia and ROSA... Mandriva itself was a fork of Mandrake, an original distro from the 90's. Slackware is nowhere near dead, Puppy Linux, Vector linux, an incredible lot of embedded linux systems, are all directly based on Slackware upstream. In your logic, they all don't count as separate distros right? Well Puppy Linux people probably beg to differ lol, and they make several distros themselves, Puppy Wary and Puppy Racy, completely different distros to cater for completely different needs. With separate repositories for every distro and every branch thereof, that's why they're counted as separate distros, often with separate maintainers and even separate developer communities. Kubuntu or Ubuntu-Mate are not maintained by Canonical, which maintains Ubuntu, etc...
How can a distro be a fork of a DE? That doesn't make sense. SuSE and RedHat were never this big, and they are still growing every day. I hate to say this, but you have a wrong impression on what open source software and linux is and how it sits in the market place. Open source software is a better economic concept, that brings higher pay checks, better bottom lines, less overhead, more profit for everyone involved, from customers to service level providers.
+1
Microsoft is very weak in the "cloud", they completely missed the boat because they wouldn't connect with open source software. That bites them in the arse now.
Gradually, big corporations, that were never running Microsoft products in the first place, but rather Lotus Notes or Novell solutions (the former operators of SuSE), are switching to Kolab and similar solutions, entirely open source. Smaller enterprises without their own servers are buying cloud solutions from Kolab or NextCloud, and - in the US - are using Google cloud services, none are using Microsoft document formats. Chromebooks are the most sold PC's. Android (linux) devices are sold exponentially more than PC's, and entire continents and generations use them as main computing devices.
Microsoft is actually the biggest vendor of SuSE SLA's in the world, even though they charge 50% more. That premium they charge, partly flows back into OpenSuSE development. Microsoft has to do this, or they would lose customer base even faster. SuSE is literally helping Microsoft stay in the game longer.
People that need to save in Microsoft's docx format for some reason, can do that through KOffice, or for full newest compatibility with the MS-Office 365 crap, through the gratis but not free WPS Office, the Chinese Office Suite, formerly known as Kingsoft Office, that has been around for 15 years or so, and is better and more stable than MS-Office in every aspect. WPS Office has always been free for personal use and paid for enterprise use... MS-Office has gone down so much in market share, that Microsoft has to do the same for Office 365, mind you, back in 2003, these same licenses would cost over 500 bucks a pop... it's pretty clear who's on the winning end and needs to adapt to the other side lol...
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This is a news thread, can we not bring this petty distribution war/arguments in here? You guys have completely hijacked this thread.
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It's about Linux and OP explicitly said he was anticipating discussion. He could have stopped Tjj226_Angel if he wanted to, but I think the OP and others are hoping that Tjj226_Angel might learn something from it, and to have that in the public eye is maybe not that bad, because there are definitely a lot of others that are in the sphere of traditional desinformation by the big traditional software companies like that user. If it gets out of hand, OP can stop it whenever he wants to, Eden is forum mod.
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Distro Wars are more than than suitable for such a thread. And such disagreements are anything but petty. I am not sure why people see the act of people arguing about the tools they are using so negatively. This is not an argument about gaming consoles that does not really make any difference. It is about complex tools that have a multitude of options to explore. You need heated and passionate discussion by people that actually use the stuff. It is one of the best ways to get useful information.
It just doesn't seem like a fit for this thread. I'm sure OP intended discussion about the topics posted.
Since apparently that's wrong I'll give my 2¢.
People hate on proprietary software, but honestly certain solutions are far better than FOSS.
Adobe CC Suite is by far the best creative solution out there, anyone who says a FOSS program has even half of the functionality has definitely never tried to do anything more than the basics. I rely on CC heavily and it is amazing. Yeah it crashes sometimes but I've tried Kdenlive, Krita, gimp, and a slew of others and nothing comes close. I would pay extra each month to have CC on Linux, and for them it would be relative easy especially since the Nvidia driver already supports CUDA acceleration on Linux.
Nvidia drivers are by far the best as well. Game ready drivers for Windows and Linux within hours of a release, and more importantly great Linux support overall.
I love FOSS but you have to pick the right tool for the job.
And I'm not all Nvidia, if AMD had no hassle Linux drivers and a comparable GPU to the 1070 then I would definitely pick one up. Same deal with picking the right tool for the job.