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Comment by coffeebeqn

5 days ago

Linux is better in every conceivable way

Both Chrome and Aluminium are Linux, so which are you trying to say is better?

Or are you saying more conventional Linux is superior? Gnu/Linux is a good term for that.

  • When someone says "Linux" in isolation, they mean a conventional Linux distribution. Only extreme pedants and Richard Stallman call it "GNU/Linux".

    • They didn't say Linux in isolation, they said it on a comment on a story that mentions two Linux non-conventional distributions and has no mention of conventional Linux. Therefore the presumption is that they're referring to the Linuxes in the article.

I can conceive a couple of ways.

GrapheneOS-style sand-boxing for every app is long overdue in Linux. I'd love to have it's granular permissions for every single service. I'd love to have the battery management, the unified settings UI, the effortless disk encryption UX and key management.

Could you build it with SE Linux and a lot of glue? Yes, but nobody has. And doing it well, everywhere, would take a lot of hours.

  • > the unified settings UI

    You will never have a UI capable of encompassing all the settings available in Linux. You will only have a UI capable of configuring your desktop experience, which is just a small subset of the full Linux experience.

    • Is it unreasonable to ask "why not"? I like the state of Android's (as packaged by GrapheneOS) settings UI much better than any other settings system, period.

      It's all in one place - I can't think of a single thing I would want to configure that isn't found in that one dialog. It doesn't always make sense, but it's searchable, and the search works.

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  • Take a look at QubesOS.

    • For Linux on x86, it's by far best in class.

      Unfortunately, not even close to being as comfortable to use as GrapheneOS, and still significantly less secure than it - even if we completely disregard the sad situation of hardware security on x86 (but can't blame QubesOS for that one).

Except being able to buy GNU/Linux laptops from known brands, the same that sell Android and Chromebooks with 100% supported hardware, at FNAC, Worten, Saturn, MediaMarkt, Publico, Dixon, CoolBlue,....

It would be great, however it died alongside netbooks.

  • Only the first netbook came with Linux. The Asus EEEPC 701. This was mainly because it was so underpowered it couldn't run windows (and some nonresizable dialogue boxes didn't even fit on screen). But they dropped it with later models.

    • As owner of an Asus 1215B, that lasted from 2009 until last year, having gotten disk and memory upgrades during its lifetime, going through all Ubuntu LTS upgrades, bought with it pre-installed, that is certainly not true.

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