Free Software Thread - Because there is never enough freedom.

[Jared™]

For the normies among us, think of free software as open source software as the terms are used interchangeably or if you got time to read this article and this one, for the full indepth explanation.

The thread could either go on by trying to promote the ideas of the free software movement, talking about any recommendations for various software one might want and why one would use such as an altenative or replacement to the proprietary counterparts or, because we don't live in a dystopia where everyone is forced to comply to a forced positivity narrative, trash on proprietary software as the fedora tipping GNUtards do with Windows and the neckbearded BSD virgins do to Linux.

In short if it relates somewhat to the topic, then it should be fine.

 

[Basil II]

 

[sasazuka]

My opinions based on my experience with open source software is that Open Office Writer functions nearly identically to Microsoft Word (so much so that I can't think of any big differences) while Gimphoto (GIMP with a Photoshop-like interface) is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop but you have to learn how to do things in an alternate way if you're already used to Photoshop and it has quite a learning curve if you're editing or processing images beyond filters, auto white adjustment, and basic curves and sliders.

 

[Jared™]

My opinions based on my experience with open source software is that Open Office Writer functions nearly identically to Microsoft Word (so much so that I can't think of any big differences) while Gimphoto (GIMP with a Photoshop-like interface) is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop but you have to learn how to do things in an alternate way if you're already used to Photoshop and it has quite a learning curve if you're editing or processing images beyond filters, auto white adjustment, and basic curves and sliders.

Unfotunately Open Office rarely receive any updates anymore, ever since LibreOffice became the dominant office suite.

 

[IbnTaymiyyah]

Pragmatism > idealism, which is why the free software movement is now a breeding ground for lolcows. Quite a shame too because the idea of a machine running 100% auditable software at the firmware or microcode level (forgot the proper nomenclature, forgive me) is an amazing thing to strive for. I don't even care if the GPL itself is generally infeasible to use for commercial projects; if the code is of amazing quality and the program itself is a real game-changer, keeping it open for the community is arguably a great thing.

The big problem I have with free software projects is that there's more emphasis on broad idealism rather than producing quality code. The big irony is that anything from the FSF's sponsored projects is of laughably poor quality compared to the more pragmatic BSD projects like Free/Net/OpenBSD, PFSense, and so on. Unlike utter chaos that Linux thrives in, the BSD projects are properly engineered, unified operating systems. I don't need to worry about the next glibc update borking my system because the BSDs fucking test their shit. Spinoff projects like PFSense also provide robust feature sets, consistent support, and the performance over time is fucking legendary. The only major difference between BSD land and Linux land is ideology; the BSD Projects only care if their code is being used at all, which is why it's licensed so permissively. It's mind boggling how one little difference like that can change the culture of an entire ecosystem.

Speaking of which, there's so much fragmentation going on in the free software community over the stupidest bullshit. Why the fuck should I use GNU IceCat if Mozilla Firefox is more easily accessible and is under the same fucking license? Why the fuck should I one of the many boneless Ubuntu/Debian spinoffs if I can just use vanilla Ubuntu/Debian, or one of its good clones like Linux Mint or MX? Hell, why the fuck should I run a boneless CyanogenMod clone like Replicant when I can just run regular AOSP ROMs or LineageOS itself? So many projects that try to abide by the "strict" standards set by the FSF are also liable to go dormant due to a lack of desire among its maintainers to keep it updated. Why should I bother maintaining a fork of fucking Fedora if the Fedora Project itself already adheres closely to the principles of software freedom, barring binary firmware in the kernel? That's exactly what happened to GNU Gnash, Musix, Blag, Dragora, and countless other FSF-endorsed projects.

Even the projects that I am interested in, like libreboot, are fucking awful. Not because of the concept, mind you. Rather, it's because the project itself devolved into a political troon manifesto because libreleah, the project's maintainer, decided to bitch about their life story as opposed to making worthwhile commits to the git tree. That's another thing that pisses me off about the free software "community," - it's no fucking different than the repressed, hypercorporate PC cultures of Silicon Valley. Sure, my data's not liable to get sold to some Chinese marketing firm but the price I pay for my ideals is substandard software maintained by a lunatic who thinks their life story is more important than quality code.

At a tl;dr level - I still believe that free software is something worth fighting for, but maybe a BSD approach would be better for everyone in the long run. At least companies like Sony, Netflix, and Yahoo share the patches they make with the FreeBSD project.

 

[sasazuka]

Unfotunately Open Office rarely receive any updates anymore, ever since LibreOffice became the dominant office suite.

Word processing software isn't the sort of thing that needs frequent updates anyway. I'd still use the version of Word from the CD-ROM that came "free" with the computer I got 20 years ago if I didn't have to run backwards compatibility mode in Windows 7 just to be able to get it to work.

 

[Jared™]

Pragmatism > idealism, which is why the free software movement is now a breeding ground for lolcows. Quite a shame too because the idea of a machine running 100% auditable software at the firmware or microcode level (forgot the proper nomenclature, forgive me) is an amazing thing to strive for. I don't even care if the GPL itself is generally infeasible to use for commercial projects; if the code is of amazing quality and the program itself is a real game-changer, keeping it open for the community is arguably a great thing.

The big problem I have with free software projects is that there's more emphasis on broad idealism rather than producing quality code. The big irony is that anything from the FSF's sponsored projects is of laughably poor quality compared to the more pragmatic BSD projects like Free/Net/OpenBSD, PFSense, and so on. Unlike utter chaos that Linux thrives in, the BSD projects are properly engineered, unified operating systems. I don't need to worry about the next glibc update borking my system because the BSDs fucking test their shit. Spinoff projects like PFSense also provide robust feature sets, consistent support, and the performance over time is fucking legendary. The only major difference between BSD land and Linux land is ideology; the BSD Projects only care if their code is being used at all, which is why it's licensed so permissively. It's mind boggling how one little difference like that can change the culture of an entire ecosystem.

Speaking of which, there's so much fragmentation going on in the free software community over the stupidest bullshit. Why the fuck should I use GNU IceCat if Mozilla Firefox is more easily accessible and is under the same fucking license? Why the fuck should I one of the many boneless Ubuntu/Debian spinoffs if I can just use vanilla Ubuntu/Debian, or one of its good clones like Linux Mint or MX? Hell, why the fuck should I run a boneless CyanogenMod clone like Replicant when I can just run regular AOSP ROMs or LineageOS itself? So many projects that try to abide by the "strict" standards set by the FSF are also liable to go dormant due to a lack of desire among its maintainers to keep it updated. Why should I bother maintaining a fork of fucking Fedora if the Fedora Project itself already adheres closely to the principles of software freedom, barring binary firmware in the kernel? That's exactly what happened to GNU Gnash, Musix, Blag, Dragora, and countless other FSF-endorsed projects.

Even the projects that I am interested in, like libreboot, are fucking awful. Not because of the concept, mind you. Rather, it's because the project itself devolved into a political troon manifesto because libreleah, the project's maintainer, decided to bitch about their life story as opposed to making worthwhile commits to the git tree. That's another thing that pisses me off about the free software "community," - it's no fucking different than the repressed, hypercorporate PC cultures of Silicon Valley. Sure, my data's not liable to get sold to some Chinese marketing firm but the price I pay for my ideals is substandard software maintained by a lunatic who thinks their life story is more important than quality code.

At a tl;dr level - I still believe that free software is something worth fighting for, but maybe a BSD approach would be better for everyone in the long run. At least companies like Sony, Netflix, and Yahoo share the patches they make with the FreeBSD project.

BSD Licenses are free software/open source licenses. Linux comprises of the kernel while BSD comprises of the kernel and userspaces. Not to mention different distributions of Linux have different ways of handling and modifying the kernel. Linux tend to be more widly used in the desktop, servers, supercomputers, etc than that of BSDS and hence having a larger codebase Each BSD project has their own vision. BSD derivatives such as OpenBSD focusing more on security than performance even to the point of disabling the Linux compatibility layer and TRIM support, FreeBSD is more focused on software availability. Though I never had glibc break my system, if you don't like that C library, why not use a distribution that uses musl like Gentoo or Void. Doesn't PfSense have a particular function to fulfill and basically use most of its code from its FreeBSD base.

GNU IceCat is a fork of Firefox with no binary blobs or spyware included. It's not aimed for the wide general audience but towards its niche nor does it aims to replace Firefox.

Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, and was created to ease new users and to have more up to date software. Linux Mint was created to be easier than Ubuntu and during the early days was the only way to easily get codecs installed onto your system. Different distributions and forks have different functions and niches. It's the choice that counts Even FreeBSD is having its own distributions such as GhostBSD, NomadBSD, HardenedBSD and FuryBSD. NetBSD has OS108. Sometimes the main project does not want to support a main directionsp whether it be better security, user friendliness or being able to boot into a live environment.

As for the BSD license, it does allow companies such as Sony and Netflix to essentially fork an open source project and make it proprietary. You are still unable to watch Netflix on FreeBSD or do any substantial gaming due to driver support.

BSDs are great, don't get me wrong, but like Linux, they aren't perfect.

 

[Jared™]

Word processing software isn't the sort of thing that needs frequent updates anyway. I'd still use the version of Word from the CD-ROM that came "free" with the computer I got 20 years ago if I didn't have to run backwards compatibility mode in Windows 7 just to be able to get it to work.

It does need security updates, in case any vulnerability is found.

 

[sasazuka]

It does need security updates, in case any vulnerability is found.

I solve that problem by never opening Word documents (or any other kind of document) from spam e-mails.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I solve that problem by never opening Word documents (or any other kind of document) from spam e-mails.

Be sure you also don't open any documents from anyone who opens spam emails, or documents from anyone who got them from anyone who opens spam emails, or...

 

[sasazuka]

Be sure you also don't open any documents from anyone who opens spam emails, or documents from anyone who got them from anyone who opens spam emails, or...

I generally don't even open other people's documents in word processors, I just read them in Hotmail (well, Outlook now)/Gmail.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I solve that problem by never opening Word documents (or any other kind of document) from spam e-mails.

Only open the Word documents I send and be sure to read the instructions on how to turn on macros, I've got a cool thing going that you have to see.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

Spoiler

I'm slowly considering building a black and white ATMega system or something to do all my computing on so I can be 100% botnet free.

 

[Basil II]

Spoiler

I'm slowly considering building a black and white ATMega system or something to do all my computing on so I can be 100% botnet free.

Just install Gentoo

 

[Sage In All Fields]

Just install Gentoo

I had a friend who mained Gentoo, put me off it for life. Teacher told us to install Inkscape and he ended up spending the rest of class compiling.

 

[Basil II]

I had a friend who mained Gentoo, put me off it for life. Teacher told us to install Inkscape and he ended up spending the rest of class compiling.

Yeah but his inkscape will perform 1% better.

 

[Never Scored]

Despite the fact that I'm more than a little worried about trannies infiltrating Linux, at home I use a combination of free software and piracy for everything. I don't buy shit, and if somehow encryption gets cracked to the point where I can't pirate shit, I'll just watch OTA TV, listen to the radio and play Open Source games until the end of time. It's not about politics for me. I just don't like paying for shit if I don't have to, and I don't like to have my computer taken over so microsoft can try to railroad me into some fancy new version of their browser.

I have a desktop running Manjaro loaded with terabytes of pirated shit that streams to a couple of Raspberry Pi's running Libreelec hooked up to my TV using a simple SMB share. Functionally it's like a private Netflix on my home network. I have an Android tablet that couldn't be rooted, but I disabled/blocked all Google's shit at a Network level and installed F-Droid. My main computer for browsing/shitposting is a Macbook running Mint.

Favourite software:

Pale Moon- Great no frills browser based on old Firefox code.
New Pipe- Best mobile Youtube Client.
Librecad- Designed my quail hutch & shed in it before I built them, designing a future small cabin now.
Thunderbird- Piece of software I use the most by far. Great for RSS, Email and Usenet.
Chocolate Doom/Hexen- Self Explanatory
Sabnzbd- Cross platform Usenet binary downloader made in Python.
Kstars- Pretty good free starmap. Useful for stargazing.

*Edit*
Forgot a couple

VLC- Good barebones media player that will play almost anything you throw at it. Good for streaming radio.
Gpodder- Good podcast manager. Syncs to any device that can be mounted as mass storage.

 

[cecograph]

I've played a few open source computer games, one of which is the fucking superb "Battle for Wesnoth." I'm mostly crap at games, but I liked that I could go into the code and change bits of the game logic to suit me better.

I basically want to know that I, or others, can do that for pretty much anything on my computer, all for potentially making the software better for me personally.

 

[NumberingYourState]

Bromite Browser for Android.

It's based on ungoogled Chromium, yes, but has its own system webview package as well as built in ad blockers.

If you want something that actually works like a default browser with all the stuff that matters and none of the crap you don't use anyways, get Bromite, often updated and optimized as well as most bugs that may pop up being ironed. Great support.

 

[Aidan]

I wish the trannies would fuck off or at least cease the infiltration and do their own thing but otherwise I'm cautiously optimistic that more people are opening up to FOSS being viable for personal use.

I think most people just don't realize FOSS is a thing and even if they find out about it they don't even know where to begin. It's like a whole new world and most people are set in their ways.
LibreOffice is great and there are enough powerful FOSS tools for just about everything, I don't really see a reason not to use them at this point. Getting friends who use Windows to even try replacing stuff with FOSS is a major pain and I've given up for most of them.
Will vouch for thunderbird, its nice. I worry about firefox's future, however.