if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.
Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?
I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?
Now this is a hot take!
I dont know if I agree with you, but its making me think.
I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:
Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:
-Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
-Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
-When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former
A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.
I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.
So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).
This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
It gives a good short history of how we got here.
He’s the embodiment of “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”*
zz will also quit it. Zz when vim is sleepy
Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?
To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)
There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.