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Who is concerned with excessive Big Tech influence in Linux? I was a GNU/Linux user on my main machine (for "normie" stuff like household management, web reading, and photo editing) from about 2009-2017 and am considering full switch back. It seems to me that there is a huge amount of influence from big tech corps in the major technologies that undergird GNU/Linux . Should I be concerned in the medium to long term about the direction GNU/Linux is moving in with respect to freedom and privacy? What are the real-world concerns for a non-developer like me? Is it worth the time and learning investment in an even less mainstream OS like a BSD? I'd love some thoughts and discussion on this!
1 year ago · 👍 smokey, bimzhob, cobradile94, rwa
@reidrac, that was a helpful perspective, thank you. · 1 year ago
@teiresias thanks for your suggestions. I like the approach of staying with Linux but getting up to speed with an alternative on the side just in case.
@shyway Good point. After reading what you wrote, I did a quick search for fully open hardware and it doesn't appear to be really much available and it's likely never going to be much more than a niche product. · 1 year ago
@reidrac, Both to some extent. I mean, Intel, Redhat at least make sense. It was more a general question but Microsoft is on my mind right now in particular. While often left off lists that some people make of big bad players (the FAANGs) I read about them cozying up with Canonical and that WSL thing, and combined with some of the downright irritating things they're doing with Windows. Big Corps need to control as much as they can and squeeze as much profit out of everything as they can, at the expense of ordinary people who often have no place to go. So I hesitate to jump back to Linux if there are no strong protections against it being overrun. · 1 year ago
More than concerned I am disgusted, hence I am switching to the BSD side which is still funny exactly how GNU/Linux used to be. The point is the path has been already marked, corporations will exploit Linux until it won't be sustainable anymore, in a typical capitalism fashion, eventually the Linux replacement is already there to start a new cycle. · 1 year ago
The problem is hardware, complexity and black boxes. Dirver are propietary or too large to be implemented by few people. AMD driver for polaris/vega are over 1.5 million lines of code. Most hardware doesn't have easily availale documentation and vendors ask for NDA if you want to get the docs. Modern software/hardware is about lock-in enviroments and overly complex systems. · 1 year ago
Yes, I'm concerned. Personally I run Void Linux and Alpine Linux and am fond of them both. They don't chase every new thing that comes down the pipe from RedHat. Both are non-systemd distros, but as for systemd arguments, just ignore them and use whatever meets your needs. I don't consider myself an anti-systemd person. There's a lot to like there. A lot of folks in the Void community have no love for anti-systemd zealotry. I dabble in FreeBSD and even host a couple services on it. The dabbling gives me familiarity with an escape hatch, should Linux become intolerable. · 1 year ago
@smokey thanks for your thoughts and the ArcoLinux suggestion. I'll check that out. Certainly, building up from a base makes sense and helps one understand what's really in the box. I have not gone that route before, I'll consider it this time.
@reidrac thank you also. I ran Squeeze -> Stretch, worked well for me at the time.
The big question for me rn, when picking a distro or choosing components, is what to avoid really. For example, when I left there were huge arguments going on about SystemD. Is it really settled as *the* way forward for all? Or is it deeply problematic as some claim? I haven't been able to get to bottom of it yet. · 1 year ago
Generally speaking, the more control you have over all the software running in the OS, the more minimal and privacy respecting it will be. "just works" distros like previously stated ubuntu have proprietary software built into the kernel (albeit some of it is stuff like proper graphics drivers) and many redundant packages to make it work on every computer possible. If you want a GNU/Linux distro which is free of all that stuff then you need to pick a distro which offers complete control of everything installed under the hood. ArcoLinux is a good distibution for that. Heres a good review of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Lawzy7sf0
BSD Is very cool but very nieche/unsupported · 1 year ago
To my knowledge the kernel itself is maintained by the GNU Foundation which touts Richard Stallmans completely free and open ideology. That isnt going to change any time soon. Some companies have developed GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu and have telemetry/spyware built on top of the kernel base, but the GNU/Linux kernel itself has nothing to do with that. There are also many community maintained GNU/Linux distros which focus on minimalism and privacy and they are not corperate controlled. Im not worried about what a few companies do with the kernel, by doing research and picking the right Linux distro you can avoid it all together. · 1 year ago