Marxism and FLOSS.
Marxism and FLOSS.
I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
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Depending on your level of tech knowledge, my rec is Arch or Linux Mint. Linux Mint is practically good to go OOtB. Pop!_OS is another one that has gained popularity over the last few years. NixOS I think is the new distro that is getting a lot of buzz right now but I'm gonna wait to see where it goes and how it matures before looking at it. I've settled on Mint and have been using it for about 5 years as my daily driver now.
Segueing off your arch recommendation, RebornOS is a really good beginner friendly Arch based repo.
Way back when I was using it, I believe Manjaro and Antergos were the 2 biggies with GUI installers. I had heard that Antergos was stopped and just looked up RebornOS and damn it if it isn't Antergos lol. That's pretty cool.
I keep fence sitting on possibly switching to Arch-based full time because of the AUR or over to proper Debian. Might end up looking at Reborn in the near future. It wasn't even on my radar.
When you say arch-based, is there like a tree of distros? Where a popular distro will then be redesigned by separate devs? Or are they different at a deeper level? I assume they're all Unix-based at heart?
The common bases of linux distros are:
Debian: known for stability but not fully up to date, uses apt-get as a package manager.
Ubuntu: Based on debian, but more up to date, and supports more proprietary hardware and software (not that debian can't do what ubuntu does with a little tweaking).
Arch: Bleeding edge up to date, can theoretically be unstable. uses pacman as a package manager.
After the base some people differentiate from the base os by changing the default programs installed (often this is including or excluding proprietary software), desktop environment (gnome, KDE, cinnamon, xfce), have different programs in the repository, or have a different installation experience.
This is all very helpful, thanks.
yes, the vast majority of distros are based on another distro (which may be based on another, and ...)
Linux is not Unix-based in the sense that it's a fork of Unix (the latter is proprietary), but it's certainly based on Unix's design, just like the various BSDs
That makes sense.
I didn't realise Unix was proprietary. It's amazing what you can't find out when you don't realise that an assumption is even open to challenge. I never thought to question this but now i looked into it a little, things are clearer. This article was useful: https://www.howtogeek.com/182649/htg-explains-what-is-unix/.
Thanks for the info.
Is there a strong reason why someone would move away from a 'beginner-friendly' distro? Is it mainly wanderlust?
I'm in debian because it uses less ram.
I've played with alpine linux for the wonderlust of seeing if I can work with all of the alternative smaller code bases for the theoretical stability it provides.
Why use bash when you can use ash?
Why use the unauthorized escalation bugs of sudo, when you can use doas?
Why use all of the gnu tools of stallman when you can use the smaller version of those tools with busybox?
Why use the garganuan sprawling systemd when openrc has a much smaller codebase and fewer vulnerabilities?
I have to say I'm a fan of light (lite?) software.
I can't tell you how pissed off I was when browsers switched to infinite ram. One day they were capped at using ~4gb ram and the next, I need a new machine.
In general, I just prefer the idea of only using enough resources to do what I need a program to do. Options are great, but e.g. with a word processor all I need is stability, footnotes, a few tags, grammar/spell check, and track changes. A few other features are nice to have but almost all the rest is unnecessary bloat and bugs, for me.
I was able to run LMDE (linux mint deiban edition) on a 3 gb Imac with libreoffice installed by default, I don't know if I'd still reccomend that but it would freeze if I had too many tabs open
I think my old laptop has 8gb ram. This is all assuming it turns on after five or six years!
right now I have a 32 GB ram tower computer playing a small game, a crazy looking terminal emulator, a spreadsheet program and a browser and it's still using less than 2 GB of ram. Debian cinnamon is good for me.
Impressive. Do you need a lot of ram nowadays to play games? Or do you have so much so you can play games at the same time as having other programs open?
Depends on the game. I like playing 0ad and that never seems to use that many resources, but I haven't checked much. Some steam games can be a bit more intense but 8gb should be fine for most games. Steam proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton offers a compatibility layer to play steam games as if they were in wine and works pretty good. I'm trying to game less so I stick to open source versions of pacman and tetris. I was playing rimworld but that shit was like cocaine to me. Rimworld runs fine on linux as well as windows. One thing I like to do is use "yt-dlp -f" to download playlists audio only from various sites, save them in a particular folder, then "cd" into that folder, then "mpv *" to play all of the audio files in that in the background. You can play minetest with the mineclone mod (to be similar to minecraft) while listening to various audiobooks podcasts and lectures that way.
8gb should be fine unless you are playing a AAA game, but if you already bought the games, you can try it out.
Thanks.
Oh, so with Linux, you can run a command that downloads files from websites? That's handy!
I've not bought any games for a good while and I usually buy older games. Although I do have my eye on three games that keep getting mentioned around here: Hearts of Iron 4, Victoria 3(?), and Disco Elysium. One day, maybe – part of it is finding the time!
NixOS is really great, I would say that something like it is probably a future of Linux. But I would not recommend it to someone who isn't already familiar with Linux, it is not beginner-friendly.
I'm hearing lots of support for mint. Does it get updated still? I remember looking into one distro and then learned that it was no longer being maintained – one of the reasons why I didn't look back into it till now.
My tech knowledge is fair, I'd say. I'm not too scared of breaking things, using terminal commands, or looking through the settings. It's just that I've not needed to do much for a long time other than open word and a browser.
Mint is very much still being maintanied. And it's a great distro, especially for beginners. You get the benefits of Debian (one of the oldest still maintained, very used, many programs are packaged for it), Ubuntu (one of the most used on the desktop/laptop, large company behind it, most (proprietary) software is written with it in mind), with great tools out of the box for a lot of stuff that makes it more beginner friendly and actually somewhat better on the desktop.
Ah, so some distros, like Ubuntu, are big enough that software companies, like Adobe but not necessarily Adobe, make compatible software? Any chance this includes Word, or is LibreOffice the go to word processor for Linux?
I think Mint has LibreOffice included already.
If not, you have the Software Center app on Ubuntu and Mint. It's like the Windows Microsoft Store: a GUI to browse for installable software.
3rd option is to install it from the command line
No, it's just than when/if some company makes software for "Linux", some of the time Ubuntu is actually the only one they support.
Last I checked, still no Word (except in the browser), so LibreOffice is still the go to.
Ah, that's clearer, thanks.
Well, detest word so I'll be glad to use something else.