Comment by 1over137
1 day ago
Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
1 day ago
Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
GrapheneOS is not quite "without" Android but it's without what makes it bad (Google) and works fine for me. I hear LineageOS is ok too.
I love GrapheneOS, but note that it only runs on Google Pixels. But that's what I chose for the smartphone.
Hopefully GrapheneOS will soon be supported by a non-US phone...
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Fairphone with Graphene
I really like my Fairphone. I would but their next model if it grapheneos was available.
Graphene only runs on Pixel phones
As someone who had been in the Apple ecosystem since Windows XP, it was difficult to lose that constant seamless interplay between my phone and computer. But honestly? The trade-off was worth it in the end. I’m 8mo into Linux-only desktop and man…it’s great.
Look into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop.
1. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
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However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
I don't think that the proprietary office suites are needed. The alternatives are good enough for what people do, aren't they?
The problem is that people don't want to change, because it takes some effort. Why would people use WhatsApp instead of Signal otherwise?
There used to be programs that would connect to multiple proprietary systems, like Pidgin. If we had this today we'd have one free-software app for WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram (and some used in other countries, like IIRC Zangi?). However, the social and regulatory environment changed - now whoever made that app could expect to be charged with a crime.
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For the context of this thread, WhatsApp and Signal are both American.
Just look to the federal United States government using it for communicating military strikes, and including journalists.
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Linux is also realistically American since the largest contributors are American corporations and the dictator for life lives on Portland oregon.
America has a monopoly on software essentially.
assumign this is arguing in good faith..
the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
Not to mention that many of the most important open source events and organizations are based in Europe.
But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.
So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
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> Linux is also realistically American
I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.
The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.
Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.
While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
The question is which nation you'll have to depend on when you want a bug fixed. With OSS, the answer is "none".
The situation is a bit different now with sanctions.
Depends on if it's a hardware bug or not
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It doesn't much matter that Americans are the largest contributors, because you can still take it and change it however you want.
You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is American, because the hardware is American. Even if the company wants to open source it, the US government can block it in whatever country.
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Are the BSDs as US-focused?
The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.
That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.
The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.
You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.
I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
Yes, it started at Berkeley after all, with mostly contributions from US universities, and compiler toolchains are GCC and clang.
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