Laurel Raven

Webkit is the engine used by Safari (among a few others) and, though I think the project is controlled by Apple, it’s licensed LGPLv2.1 and BSD 2-Clause

According to the wiki, it’s also used in PlayStation, Kindle, Nintendo devices, and the Tizen mobile OS… Additionally, it’s apparently the rendering engine used by the default browsers provided by both the KDE and Gnome projects

Honestly, though, I want to see something that’s not part of the Mosaic or KHTML families be made and gain at least some foothold…I hate having the Internet basically controlled by one or two mega corporations.

I still wish Opera hadn’t abandoned Presto…

Honestly, I would be fine with Blink being default if Google would divest it from themselves and make it an independent open source project that they just contribute to instead of control. They have far too much power with that one bit of tech to shape the Internet as we know it, along with a large chunk of computing that happens offline thanks to the growing ubiquity of node.js/Electron

And they’re actively using that control to restrict what we can even do with our own machines right now

That, right there, is something that’s said right before someone learns the definition of “defenestration” the hard way

That means he fired himself too, right?

… Right?

Are there some open source Teams alternatives you’d recommend?

This. Any time paying customers get treated worse than pirates, they’re only incentivised to pirate next time. It absolutely blows my mind that corpos seem incapable of figuring that out.

Heavy emphasis on maybe

Thanks! I’ve not been having many problems, but if it’s causing a performance loss it would be good to take care of it, I’ll check that out

I’m not familiar with these vulkan packages, what should I look for?

That’s not true, the placebo effect is very real

I’ve not heard of OpenSnitch before, that looks really interesting and I’ll have to check it out!

Honestly, I feel the exact opposite when a for profit company does that, because inevitably they ask themselves the question “how can I squeeze every last dollar out of this possible?”, which is never, ever, good for the product.

Capitalist hyperfocus on short term quarter-over-quarter gains is toxic and destroys pretty much everything it touches, if not entirely then at least in quality. While I appreciate the amount of development those companies bring to the table, the moment they’re in control of the project they’ll try to find ways to profit from it at the expense of the community, and it almost always results in a poorer product.

Debian vs Mint for server, I’d agree with you, but for desktop, Mint is trying to do something Debian never really set their sights on: making it easy to use, particularly for people switching from Windows. Hell, they even have a version directly based on Debian instead of Ubuntu just in case something happens to make it so they can’t run downstream of Ubuntu with a reasonable amount of work.

I think a better model for FLOSS in general is community owned and operated foundations that get backing from companies that benefit from those projects, but which do not let those companies gain sole or majority control.

*Just to stress, everything here is just my opinions and I don’t pretend to have all the answers, just observations of the world and the impact for profit companies have had on it… For that, I pretty much never trust a for profit company to act in good faith for the benefit of anyone outside of themselves. They may do so for a time, but eventually most of them will become too focused on profit to behave as good citizens.

Not sure why you’d think it would go away next year since it’s been around for 18 years and adoption seems to be going up rather than down, and a lot of people have switched to recommending it for new converts rather than Ubuntu

I don’t think that many normies have heard of Mint, but I don’t think that many have heard of Ubuntu either.

Fragmentation is a concern but it’s an unavoidable side effect of an open community with many people and opinions

For server, there’s Debian. I really don’t see any reason to use something else, unless you need RedHat comparability, then you’ve got Alma and Rocky.

Or OpenSuSE, if you really like that.

Ubuntu for server, though? Yeah, that’s a no for me. For the reasons I listed above if nothing else, especially their shitty attitude when they were asked to remove that unnecessary package that calls home and does nothing for non subscribers from the minimal image.

But in any event, if you looked at the context, I was not talking about server use anyway.

Fantastic for servers

As far as the software app goes, I like how Mint handles it: it clearly marks what’s a system install and what’s a Flatpak, and if both are available it makes it easy to select which one you want. At no point does it try to hide or obfuscate it.

Ubuntu really isn’t the only candidate though… Mint may not have quite as much name recognition, but I don’t think it’s that far off, and it has pretty much all of the benefits of Ubuntu without the issues.

Mint just works.

And I absolutely think it’s justified to call Canonical out for things like quietly redirecting apt to install snaps instead or throwing up scare messages to make people think they’re insecure if they don’t pay for a subscription or adding unnecessary packages to the minimal install image that’re only useful for paid subscribers but call home regardless

Canonical has been toxic and getting worse, not calling them out is basically telling them it’s okay for them to treat the community the way they have.

I legit kind of want to make a print of it for my office

The extension pack does cost and is licensed differently from the core product

I did try that tact, more or less, but the fact is they kept harassing our licensing people and it just wasn’t worth it so we removed every copy of it and used something else

And the truth is, Oracle can throw an ungodly amount of legal hassle at people if they want, right or wrong… Just because you’re in the right and should win doesn’t mean there’ll be anything left of you on the other side, and they won’t have felt a thing while destroying you out of capriciousness

They’re pure evil and even their fully open source products should be avoided like the plague that they are. Hopefully someone will fork them at some point so we don’t have to be tied to that shitty company, but until then, better to just leave them alone, because it’s just not worth the hassle.