Best linux distro for a socialist?
Best linux distro for a socialist?
Yes I know that Cuba, the DPRK, and China have their own distros, but they're pretty specific to the language and networks of those countries. I use linux because it's free and open source but I use one of those distros that is privately owned and I'm thinking of upgrading to something that is truly communally owned but also has good compatibility with software, especially scientific software. Any good recs please?
Thanks!
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Arch seems fine, same with Debian if you don't want to tinker as much.
Any experience with Fedora? I ask because apparently it's the one Torvalds uses and because there are a few science-based Fedora variants.
I use the immutable community variants of Fedora. Bazzite if you're a gamer, Bluefin or Aurora if not. Immutable is a whole other workflow, mainly in how you install packages (using flatpaks/brew or distrobox), but the system itself is essentially 0 maintenance because updates are automated and the OS rebuilt on reboot (while keeping your programs and user files). So its more stable than Arch nd you don't have packages that are 2 years out of date like on Debian. The only downside is updates take a lot of bandwidth if thats a problem for you. But they're the only distros I recommend to anybody now outside of Debian for servers.
The makers of Fedora, Red Hat, were acquired by IBM. So whilst there may be nothing wrong with the distro, they are part of your typical evil corpo. And I say this as a Fedora user
It's good, but it is corporate.
I can't contradict the fact that Fedora is owned by IBM and used as an upstream for their Red Hat software, it is slightly concerning but not inherently problematic. I'll at least say I personally have yet to experience any negatives for that fact, and I'll also add that it does like Debian, and defaults to a "free" software repository, you have to manually enable the non-free ones.
It probably isn't the "most socialist", but it's open source, absolutely prioritises open source fundamentally, and consequently it's controllable by the people the second a corp fucks it over (like most Linux distros). I don't think it's turned in service of evil (yet).
Do you consider Ubuntu evil, and why? I know it's owned by a private company (ugh) but searching around apparently it's still open source
I don't think I consider any open-source Linux to be evil. As I say, by being fully and properly open-source, it's copyable at a moment's notice. So any of them are inherently held to a much higher standard than any closed ecosystem. It's like giving people the ability to seize the means of OSing with the click of a button.
Fedora is good
Only ever used Arch and Mint, sorry.
Linus Torvalds is not your ideological equal let's put it this way. Of course I get it, there's a lot to idolize there.
I'm not entirely sure from your posting what the word socialism means to you, but suffice to say that none of these software movements would ever be possible in environments like North Korea or China. A lot of the popularity Linux enjoys today is thanks to private entities like Canonical and Valve. Linus Torvalds has no disdain for such developments. He wants Linux to be "owned" by everyone because only if everyone can contribute will the codebase be the best it can be. This is purely pragmatic (apolitical) and a far cry from the views of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (which may be closer to your personal views).
Really this is what it boils down to. Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation are perfectly fine with private entities taking advantage of their software/code. It's what makes things like Android possible. And in the end everyone profits (from a code quality standpoint) because companies like Google then publish their modifications to what they have adopted.
However if Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have their way none of this flies because software must never be profitable, it must always be developed purely to a societal benefit (sounds a lot more socialist if you ask me). Richard Stallman uses Trisquel btw. A Ubuntu derivative with zero tolerance towards any kind of proprietary software or firmware whatsoever.
I mentioned Torvalds using Fedora not because I idolize him but as the dude who invented the damn thing he's probably not using a piece of shit distro that doesn't work well for anything. The DPRK, China, Cuba, and Venezuela for example each have their own Linux distros (Red Star OS, Kylin, Nova, Canaima) so when you say "these software movements would ever be possible in environments like North Korea [sic] or China" that's demonstrably not correct. Thank you for the Trisquel recommendation though.
Oh you mean Red Star OS was developed entirely within North Korea? checks second link
first versions were based on FreeBSD ... became Linux-based(the B in BSD referring to a place in California). Don't get me wrong, I've never been to Cuba or Venezuela and they're gorgeous countries from what I hear, but do you believe that socialism as we have seen and see it implemented in human history lends itself to the inception of collective grassroots tech creations?I feel like this should go without saying but Soviet history is riddled with stories like the one of Tetris. By design you cannot own anything under socialism. I'm not trying to cast this under a negative or a positive light I'm just trying to point out that the people under socialism can only sustainably devote their energies to whatever the state deems worthy of the collective effort. And if something like a piece of software or hardware that might be worthy of mass distribution is developed then this is decided by politicians, not a free market defined by supply and demand. (I really tried finding examples from countries other than the Soviet Union but I guess their non-existence at comparable scales speaks for itself as well.)
Of course you don't need to study the history of the political structures you subscribe to to understand their intrinsic challenges. The point I'm trying to make is perfectly coherent within the present as well. The Operating Systems you link to are all based on the work of people who lived and live within free markets where one can own the intellectual property of their work as an individual or an independently organised group of individuals (aka a Foundation). Of course there is nothing morally wrong with non-capitalist governments taking advantage of works released under a GPL or similar license within capitalist countries, but to suggest that those four Operating Systems you talk about are products of their respective countries is what is actually demonstrably false. Cuba seems to go so far as to release their Linux under a (partially) closed source model. North Korea not making the fruits of their communist efforts open source goes without saying. And China's Kylin seems to be entirely proprietary down to the license.
If you want to know my opinion on Fedora I can tell you from a gaming perspective (which probably isn't your angle anyways) I have found Nobara to be the best distribution I have tried by far. But again if I try to put myself in the shoes of a person like you describe yourself, Fedora is not a legal entity of any private or non-profit kind and Red Hat itself is an IBM subsidiary, so whatever privately owned distribution you are using right now, anything within the Red Hat sphere is probably "worse" from an ethical standpoint to a socialist. Same goes for Trisquel actually, a distribution I hadn't heard of before. If it's based off Ubuntu then it builds upon the work of a privately owned company. I don't even understand how this works out for the Free Software Foundation (or why it's not called GNU/Trisquel, if you know you know).
If I had to choose an entirely non-profit distribution I would probably go for something Arch-based or vanilla Debian like others have mentioned already.
You talk like the only right that matters is the right of individuals to make money off the ideas of individuals. I talked here a bit about how ridiculous it is for anything to be considered a product of one single individual and not that of a society, with it's own history (in this case, that of empire) and the social web of relations. That doesn't mean that the individuals in who these ideas emerged shouldn't be talked about, studied, even revered or whatever, but you've got to consider the broader context and stop thinking in terms of copyright law, which is extremely limited and doesn't reflect on reality (it wasn't made to, just like any type of property).
When you talk about how closed source is inherently bad, I want you to consider the wider context of worldwide US hegemony. It helps for me to visualise this relationship through a metaphor of an ethnic minority family, living in the imperial core (US, UK, Europe, etc.) — they have beloved family recipes (intellectual property) of delicious foods that have been passed down for generations. They only share these prized recipes with their closest family and friends. Otherwise — "if you want to try my food, get to know me". Now, does that make this family stingy or unwelcoming because they don't give out their favourite recipe to every stranger?
Oh, look at that some white person with a trust fund just opened a restaurant with an inauthentic take on their family's food. Someone else just started selling sexualised versions of ethnic minorities' garb. Wow, this white person just started selling a bad replica of a rug with sacred patterns to a religion of their neighbours. You've got to consider that some people live under a white supremacist hegemony that will vacuum up, commodify and sell their cultural products as a matter of inertia. There is a huge difference between open source as in "do whatever you want with this" and "do whatever you want with this, ethically". For most white people in the imperial core, they wouldn't know a thing about what it means to be ethical in relation to worldwide US hegemony.
Not sure why skin color plays such a huge role in your elaborations. This is way beyond the point I was trying to make towards OP. You seem to be doing a world politics spin on this.
Granted I have no idea what OP's understanding of socialism is. But OP suggested that because certain countries started their own Linux flavours this is equivalent to them creating their own operating systems from scratch. Their political structures are inherently incompatible with citizens collaborating towards such a goal without governmental instruction/intervention. That's all I'm trying to say. And once a government is involved I don't see how that would ever lead to publication of the sourcecode, regardless of the ideologies at play.
I really wasn't trying to start a discussion of capitalism vs communism. I'd hope that we could agree on the fact that all *NIXes (that I know of at least) originated within non-communist countries. Finland is definitely not as capitalist as the "hegemonic empire" you're talking about. But it has private ownership ... so yeah. Again to repeat myself, in this context I'm not trying to say one system is better than the other, I was just trying to sort of get to the point that for a socialist there probably isn't too much choice in terms of both hardware and software out there if none of it may/should be a product of private for-profit endeavours.
But I'm not saying OP should be that strict about it either. It really was just a thought I had because their posting talked about wanting to get away from private companies and then they asked about Fedora because Linus Torvalds uses it. A contradiction of sorts.
I didn't say Red Star OS was developed entirely in the DPRK, that's a straw man argument, and you don't understand the difference between personal property and private property. That the Cuban OS is partially closed source is unsurprising for national security reasons (not for making profit, which is the issue). There's nothing morally wrong with building off the work of a privately owned company, in fact stealing back from private companies is an incredibly good practice since the labour they use is stolen in the first place. China is currently doing precisely this by allowing foreign capital to access their enormous labour pool in exchange for development of their productive forces (factories, machines, computers, other technology). It's not a great system but Chinese workers are getting the better end of the deal, and it sets up a future in which more of the economy can be communally owned again. Idk why you're on hexbear if you disagree with all of this. Hexbear is not a liberal website.
goodbye, binch
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have their way none of this flies because software must never be profitable,
That's literally not what he says: (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling)
“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.
We want to invite everyone to use the GNU system, including businesses and their workers. That requires allowing commercial use. We hope that free replacement programs will supplant comparable proprietary programs, but they can't do that if businesses are forbidden to use them. We want commercial products that contain software to include the GNU system, and that would constitute commercial distribution for a price. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.
Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.
Stop lying. You don't understand what socialism means and you clearly don't care to learn anything about AES countries judging from this and your other comment. Get your reactionary views away from this site before you misinform more people about free software. You wandered into the wrong part of lemmy with your bs.
