I buy TPLink gear, but only because I check to make sure it can be flashed with OpenWRT beforehand. I may not actually do that (my router is running it, but my PoE access points aren’t yet), but I make damn sure I can.

(Also, I almost bought Kasa smart plugs, then checked to see whether they could run ESPHome or Tasmota and picked a different brand instead. You always have to check, every single time!)

There’s also Ubuntu (which is even less cool than Mint, i guess, but nevertheless exists).

The kernel is copyleft (100% of it).

Technically, sort of, but GPLv2 isn’t good enough. Stuff has to be GPLv3 (or AGPLv3) to fulfill the intent of protecting the end user’s right to control their machine. That’s the essential thing people are looking for when they choose “Linux” — if it’s a tyrant device like a smart TV that’s subverted to work against the user by showing ads or whatever, nobody gives a shit if it’s running a Linux kernel because that fact doesn’t actually help them usurp the manufacturer’s control.

Usurpation of control is what “GNU/Linux” implies. The fine details of which software has what license isn’t the point; whether the system as a whole delivers on the promise of user freedom is.

See, this shit is why insisting on “GNU/Linux” is actually important. It’s the copyleft and the end user freedom it provides that matters, not the kernel.

Sabotaged Linuxes like Android just don’t cut it and shouldn’t count.

And more to the point, your work computer should be provided by your employer. If you’re buying that shit yourself, you’re a chump who’s being taken advantage of.

Ah, TIL. I just figured it was the KDE-est general-purpose distro.

But still, shouldn’t it at least have a development version of Plasma Login Manager sooner than any others, for testing?

Fedora will be the first distro? Adopting it even faster than KDE Neon, a distro made by KDE itself?

At least the AI-related videos of his I’ve seen were about running models locally, and for relatively legitimate use cases (training text-to-speech voices and commanding Home Assistant), so it could be worse.

The last several places I worked gave me a choice between Windows and Mac OS, so I picked Mac OS.

Self-respect. I’m not going to tolerate my property being sabotaged against me in service of some other entity, and I don’t understand why anybody else would either.

As soon as Windows 10 “telemetry” (read: spyware) started getting backported into Windows 7 almost a decade ago, I was gone.

Windows users in 2025 are nothing but cucks and simps for corporate abuse. They don’t “just buy, have, and use a computer;” they are part of the problem.

Uh… you do know that people don’t literally save a bunch of Linux ISOs, right? It’s a euphemism for collecting less legit things, like pirated media or porn.

By the time you want to install the same distro again, it’s likely that a new version will be out and you’ll want to re-download it anyway.

Edit: okay, okay, some of y’all really do collect Linux ISOs. That’s fine; I won’t kink-shame.

For any machines that are too inefficient to be worth continuing to compute with, you could at least save the power supplies for electronics projects. I’ve got some 12V addressable RGB Christmas lights being powered by an old ATX power supply, for example.

Is metasearch really the best we can do? What about YaCy, or something else more like that?

It’s proprietary shit. If it’s being left behind, blame the megacorp that makes it, not Linux devs.

The point is, nobody gives a shit about Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc. anymore and your argument is stupid.

Every Unix or Unix-like OS that matters in 2025 is either switching from X11 to Wayland or never used X11 to begin with.

I still have almost no idea what PulseAudio and PipeWire even do, aside from them being two of five(!) different audio-related subsystems that any given sound problem might be related to. (The others being OSS, ALSA, and JACK, which I also don’t understand.)

Inb4 “Awesome²”

“Most Unices” haven’t been relevant for a decade or more. At this point it’s really just Linux, OS X, Android (to the extent it counts as a Unix), and BSD as an also-ran. Obviously OS X and Android don’t care about Wayland or X11 to begin with, so all you’re really saying is that BSD is getting left behind.

Those work fine in Wayland for me.

Meanwhile, my OS switched to Wayland while updating at some point and I didn’t even notice.