What they are aiming for (not agreeing, just explaining) is a language that you can use to ask AI to do things for you.

The idea is that you do not have to do the nuts and bolts programming (the AI will do that) but at the same time you have more deterministic control over what the AI does.

So “higher level” than our highest level languages now.

They need to call it COBOL. A language regular business people can use!

I think that Red Hat porting a Red Hat tool is likely to be remembered. Clearly the intent is to ship and migrate to the new tool (in Fedora and in RHEL) and probably to stop shipping the old tool at the same time.

I fail to see how it is going to be forgotten.

Fork server - eliminates the need to restart and reduces memory per new process

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1609882

I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).

Well, Niri is a dynamic and scrolling tiling compositor. So it offers that.

Well, and Niri supports Wayland.

I use Plasma 6 on Wayland on devices as old as 2009 and as new as 2020. Apple laptops to Intel desktops with GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.

Wayland is better than Xorg on every machine I run.

I can absolutely deny that Wayland has stability issues. Plasma 6 under Wayland is the most stable desktop I have used.

In any Wayland discussion, I think people using Debian or older NVIDIA drivers (pre-555 for sure) need to identify themselves. They seem to be the ones most convinced that Wayland does not work yet (because they are still experiencing what it was like years ago).

As for “support”, that is desktop environment dependent as it mostly depends on protocol and XDG desktop portal maturity. KDE has the most complete support (not a bias-just a fact), then GNOME, then Hyprland and the Wlroots based environments, with MATE and Cinnamon not quite there yet, and XFCE totally trailing.

The original code remains available under the original.

Any proprietary code would have to be code that was added on top of that.

You always have the ability to keep using the Own Source code. That is a freedom you have.

If you decide that proprietary version is “better” and choose to use that, well that is a freedom you have. But now you have accepted a proprietary license. Your choice.

So, you had to choose between the code that was still Open Source and the code that was now proprietary.

If you stick with the Open Source, what you describe does not happen.

If you moved to the proprietary, well, there you are. You clearly decided that the new features were more important than it being Open Source.

Remember, it is only the new features. All the old code remains as open as it ever was.

What could be the possible incentive to:

1. move core utils to a closed license if you are a company

2. for a Linux distro to choose that version over the already existing Open Source version

Remember companies cannot take Open Source code bases closed. They can fork an Open Source project and close their fork. But all that means is that their “future” changes are not Open Source

The original Open Source code still exists and we can all keep using it.

For a real world example of companies not closing their userland, Apple still releases the source to their userland even though the BSD license does not require it.

For a real world example of the community continuing on with the Open Source code and ignoring the closed fork, look at Valkey and Reddis.

GNU is completely dominated by Red Hat. The alternatives, like uutils, are far LESS corporate.

Fear and feelings over facts.

Any information generated or collected by government should only be stored in open file formats. That is the biggest issue right there.

Any software that citizens are required to use MUST be Open Source is the next biggest one.

Third is that any software created with public funds must be Open Source.

Finally, Open Source should be the preference in all government procurement. Exceptions where viable Open Source options do not exist should be allowed.

All government data needs to be stored in-country if possible and at least on continent if not. Suppliers bound in their home country by laws which could threaten the data sovereignty of their customers should be excluded from government contracts (so all US based companies).

You also use the portal helper from another DE though.

For example, the Niri Wayland compositor, written in Rust with Smithay, uses xdg-desktop-portal-gnome (which I imagine is written in C).

Me too. I am already enjoying the discounted Intel laptops. They will really come down when macOS 27 comes out and OpenCore Legacy Patcher stops working on them.

There should certainly be some good desktop deals this Christmas for sure.

Do you have a spare SSD? Throw Linux on it and try it out for a while. You can always go back.

Who told you that?

How do you propose to do that?

Let’s say there are 2 billion desktop computers in the world and that Linux is installed on 3% of them.

That is 60 million Linux desktop users.

That is more than enough to sustain a vibrant ecosystem. Linux does not really need more market share to keep being an excellent option.

What happened to the Internet? Reasonable people everywhere.

Yes, I think that the skepticism towards systemd was deserved even if we have to acknowledge that it also brought improvements in some areas.

I also concede that actively supporting a distro like Debian is important for the role they play in the ecosystem, regardless of the software overlap with other distros.

I too was oversimplifying obviously.

Thank you for the reply.

First off, while we may disagree on some stuff, let me just say how awesome it is to have a reasonable conversation on the Internet. Thank you for that (and your thoughts).

I look forward to leaning more about the software you are working on. Keep us posted.