this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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No, there's one Linux and its versions. And various ways you can use it, build it, package it.
What I meant is that the codebase is mostly one.
It's sort of like with Bible.
No, those people will still use code contributed by RedHat, and the OS whose development has been influenced by RedHat.
NixOS is a distribution. Somehow in this quote you admit that said compromise can come in various ways, so controversy arises from that board member themselves just being there.
But with enormous companies making the actual software you ignore it.
Also replacing nixOS with Gentoo or Void is not quite equal. I've been trying to move to GuixSD from Void (because Nix gives me anxiety, Guile doesn't, and the whole GNU spirit is nice), but I'm always too lazy to wait for actual Guix installation to finish, so I interrupt it and forget it for a while.
Too complex. When you need a more vague explanation than the obvious, cynical, common sense one, it's likely wrong.
People building stuff out of passion alone do much more idea-centered and specific things. Which are much smaller. They don't make consumer operating systems or web browsers or office suites or device drivers.
You can probably attribute things like Emacs and, ahem, Guix and a few other GNU projects permanently in alpha, like GNUNet, to this. And plenty of interesting obscure stuff.
But not things that make money. In that domain everything is done to in order make money by people paid for their work and in the way that doesn't hurt moneymaking.
No, that is probably fine, except btrfs still doesn't react well to power loss, probably cause Facebook and Oracle think more about servers with UPSes. And that's typical, other people make their own project goals, the results may work for you too, but you'd have something better if you paid for it directly.
Haiku is not about paranoia, but speaking about volunteers and passion - it's a system made that way.
If you want to get that deep into it even your tomato choices are controlled by a large company (hybrid seed, chemical starter, distribution, preestablished deals with vendors) but you can still grow your own.
Nothing stopping anyone from being the next Linus and deciding to start something new.
Nothing stopping anyone from forking an old kernel and doing something different with it and stripping out the big corp stuff you don't like.
Right.
Linus made a Unix clone. One can say, started with the wrong premise.
It's a lot of work. I honestly think what Emacs developers are doing - assume that the underlying OS won't ever be good enough, and just put all your ideology into particular environment you're making, - is the right approach. I'm not even sure if what I'd want to do requires anything but Emacs, I think I'll get busy with learning elisp.
Yeah, he created an OS from scratch to avoid corporate greed of what they charged for Unix.
It is a lot of work, and the TempleOS guy building his system is a huge accomplishment also...as quirky as it is.
I guess I don't see us being stuck with anything other than our own complacency.
To be honest nobody has given me a good view of what emacs actually does...so I'm all ears