Thanks Microsoft for spotting that, and thanks to Google and CloudFlare for blocking or redirecting Polifyll.io network traffic.

Credit where credit is due.

Namaste.

This is what corporate speech control looks like, kids. Not even once.

TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

This - is what we need.

The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

I await your ire.

And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.

The sponsor of this war is VODKA! Here in Russia, we feed it to babies, to make new orcs!

Moving me tf away from the part of town I was being raised in… or, alternatively: not having a distant father. You can’t teach a boy what they need over just one weekend. FFS.

don’t just jump to another company

*follows the alternative search engine list*

…it’s mostly frontends for Bing, but yeah, I use DDG.

Laugh all you want, but you know Microsoft will make a TUI version of VSCode and Copilot+ will be implemented into BASH.

I read “Microsoft violates children” and I’m sticking with that thought, because it is accurate.

…are you okay?

Oh you can promote your optimism for the future all you want, but I don’t respond well to optimism, and that’s because I’ve seen the light - or rather the darkness - of a market dependant upon venture capital in league with political elites, an unholy alliance forged in an attempt to try and recoup the losses for investments made in beanie babies. Oh sure, the cocaine, sex workers and ritualistic sacrifice are cool at first, as are membership points that come with it, which you can spend in the cabal gift shop for a sex slave to go, but I cannot in good conscience tolerate the terms of service because it requires citizenry in a supposed state.

And it because of one thing. Do you know what that thing is?

The op and article being sussy baka withstanding, we do understand how the markets work and how balls are pushed forward.

I however have been greenwashed to before thank you very much and have been jaded enough to consider a life of eco terrorism. I even keep a spare packet of fluoride to sha-shaaw people in the face with in case things get rough.

I’m watching you, op…

(PS: In case of mod, /s)

No! Now take this slave labour cobalt and partake in the market place of ideas… I said partake! *shakes fist*

Had to do a double take. At first glance it looked like George Lucas from the side.

Good. The US shouldn’t get a blank cheque to just arrest somebody without a good reason.

That the leaked information caused the US government some pain is not a good enough reason, mostly because no power should be beyond reproach… because it’s extremely undemocratic and very anti free speech.

But congress gonna congress, I guess.

Tl;Dr “I want my~ I want my~ I want my NixOS~”. Yes, I am that old. Shut up.

I love the enthusiasm… but I must disagree :( unfortunately, much to my sheegrin bacuse I want to spite Linux commenter on this sub so badly because they are a bunch of brogrammers, but for me the year of the Linux desktop has to happen at the hands of device manufacturers. “Monopoly-by-default” is real, always has been, and never ever really left. Don’t take your eyes off Microsoft or Apple for one second - the bastards - because when you do, you fall into the vendor lock-in trap.

I personally think the EU should publish a bespoke bootloader with a gallery of operating systems that can be fetched using PXE, with image signing and checking of course, sort of like the “browser choice” alternative for OS’s. It doesn’t need to be the main bootloader, but it has to be available - and most likely GRUB2… because GRUB2 is everywhere. It’s what boots MacOS on M* machines. It’s the one boot loader to rule them all. What I’m saying is we’re in the year of GRUB2.

Anyways, outside my ideal there’s really nothing that will bring the “year of the Linux desktop” popularity wise, besides a large vendor relying on the actual Linux desktop stack - which is possible, but there’s probably a reason why Samsung bet on Enlightenment, and it’s not because it’s creator is so enlightened. MIT spelt in South Korean translates to MINE.

One thing 2024 has also stood for is cleaning house. GNOME was caught breaking their own strict rules, KDE keeps ironing out the ancient from the Plasma desktop paradigm, though now KWin has better Wayland support than Mutter for some reason, even though one has had Wayland support for years (a real tortoise and the hare situation this), and people are obsessed with a display server that nobody develops for anymore. (XWayland is XWayland, not X11). So finally we’re in the year of Wayland. Good bye, screen tearing. Hello breaking with protocol and causing screen corruption. Oy vey.

In regards to developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, and developers, then I look at the Rust stack, I look at the Zed stack, even the C# stack, or even a certain GUI framework with its own IDE built entirely using its own Emscripten SDK (can’t remember the name for the life of me). Here I see some new ways of doing the same thing and creating cross-platform solutions from the get-go, that might bring in new products and services on the Linux side.

But we already have access to more private and public services in software form on Linux than ever before before, so maybe the year of the Linux desktop passed us by but as a lackluster metric and Linux as a desktop (or LaaD as I’d like to call it, because I’m a moron) really won’t be popularized until one of the major vendor completely screws the Pooch, and then someone brings a solution based on the Linux stack. Come on, Copilot+ and System76…

Also, NixOS is finally trying to fix it’s issues, which is great, because Nix could realistically be a reproducible stack across systems, which can be tested by spitting out a single flake file. I see it as an addition to Flatpaks, Snaps and even AppImages. I want to petition Ableton to bring Live Linux, because I know in my heart of hearts that they’ve hired people with NixOS experience and that the Push 3 standalone needs some form of OS. But NixOS is a perfect example of why people are asking what happened to the year of the CoC’s? Maybe we can do a reboot.

So in conclusion, I’m over here waiting for the year of NixOS, which will be a lackluster event where nobody is happy with, most likely celebrated by another institutional figure having to walk it off. See you in 10-15 years.

I love GNOME, but Gnome Software is hot garbage. If KDE gets their gtk/adwaita tweaks in place, I might recommend Discover instead.

Also, arguably, by the most argumentative people, AppStream is also hot garbage, which is what was supposed to solve your problem regarding “too many package managers”.

I personally would wish AppStream didn’t suck and that it was also aware of NPM and crate packages. They’ve sort of been forgotten or relegated “developer tools”… even though you can pull full applications and system libraries.

How many “it’s 2025 already” problems do we have to encounter this year?

It will always be Twitter, because they can never give it to you.

Don’t blame the Americans. They don’t see that we have our own slow crawl in a race to the bottom. The EU has recognised it and pays lip service, but that organ-grinder gotta spin, spin, spin…

…but yeah, regulation wise Europeans get a ton more representation. In the US representation means which talking mouthpiece is going to serve the instituons today, and then they go do a lil insider trading - as a treat.

Show this to someone who believes in the honour system and self regulation… see how they react.