Because if you don't, you're enslaving yourself to Microsoft or Apple and supporting the increasingly Orwellian mangling of your digital rights and privacy. I'm not trying to be judgmental, but I hope that if these issues speak to you, you'll consider freeing yourself with libre software, just as you would sacrifice your convenience to avoid supporting any other unethical businesses. But the wizard himself says it best.
As a Linux user I honestly don't think that OP's kind of reasoning is effective, even worse, separable from your usual "ethical consumerist" arguments (of which Stallman is definitively guilty).
Maybe a better way to approach it would be: "experience in advance a fraction of what post-capitalist information technology would be like."
Liam Hall
Fair point, I think Stallman's reasoning gets through to people more on the threshold (socdems) than to people explicitly on one side or the other. The reasoning you provided actually comprises a good part of what I use it; I'm just used to interfacing with less radical people, so I didn't think to express it that way.
Samuel Diaz
Same. Just wondering what a full-blown communist argumentation for Linux would look like. IMO open-source is a peek into a possible future. Not even Stallman beats this track, since he's too stuck on what is, and his moralism comes off as a reaction to the hegemonic.
Maybe we should think/meme about this.
Zachary White
For one, the libre model of software development contains thousands of beautifully elegant examples of how spontaneous cooperation and decentralized labor can create things frequently more efficiently and universally beneficial than the proprietary model. It's also very gratifying, inherently unalienable labor in most cases. Maybe that's not a practical reason for the end user to switch to FOSS, but I think that it's something comrades can appreciate.
Adam Smith
windows does dat too, m8
Jordan Johnson
Oh god, why did you make me think about Metro Brb I need to chemically scrub some memories from my brain
Bentley Fisher
Now think about Unity for a sec. Let it sink in. Try not to vomit.
Fuck Canonical and fuck Ubuntu. Gentoo is the one true revolution OS.
Nathaniel Williams
Actually nvm the one true revolution OS is actually
William Carter
...
Nathaniel Gray
...
Henry Phillips
I use a commodore 64
Oliver Davis
The second OS I installed in my life was Gentto, at age 15. It was basically like this
Ran it for 2 years, then the whole portage shit got fucked beyond repair. Wasn't even bothered by the constant compiling. Software ran 20-40% faster than on debian.
Might return some day.
Camden Hall
Yeah, my post almost sounds like shilling. I'm going to delete it.
Joseph Smith
Gentoo is not hard, tho. Making a big deal out of it is a meme. If you have the patience to follow well written guides, search forums for nuances, Gentoo will work for you.
Henry Hill
It's not hard to set up, but continually dealing with all the problems you might have is very difficult for beginners, because there's not a guide for everything.
John Ramirez
Staying behind with updates helps. Issues gets dealt with, it's the speed that's really tempting to me, not the newestest release of every software that includes only a few bug fixes.
Jaxon King
Go back to /tech.
Noah Morris
Please don't refer to Free Software as Open Source.
The Open Source term is a porky attack on the philosophy of free software. There is numerous proprietary software that is Open Source but not Free Software. They are not interchangable.
Samuel Moore
Fuck you both.
Unity is an excellent DE for its use case, you may not like it but it's better than gnome and many other DEs on a laptop/netbook.
It provides one of the most noob friendly experiences while also preserving more screen realestate than gnome.
But please, meme on about something you don't understand.
But when you buy a computer unless it is a custom build it will likely already have Windows on it and they already profited on that OEM before you bought the computer. Even if you did get it custom built you're buying your computer or parts from corporations and market businesses still. Microsoft helps develop tech for feds, and police directly while Apple at least as of recent at least tries to stand up to the government prying into peoples private lives.. Also Linux doesnt protect your privacy, it just doesnt have privacy invasion in the OS itself by default but it can be snuck in the software or your hardware. Also just using the internet you're paying a large corporation money to use their servers that are connected to other privately owned servers that make up the internet.
Bentley Reed
Ok and…?
Is this another defeatist post?
Aaron Clark
and because of conditions like this if it's unavoidable it's good to try to figure out what corporations or businesses can be useful to support for time being. Using Linux is just avoiding funding one corporation not all of them or the government so it should not be presented as anything more than that.
David Young
I personally don't care about funding corporations. Not sure of the OPs stance.
I care about software freedom.
Ryan Allen
I wonder who's behind this post.
Jack Sanders
Open source isnt really software freedom in itself though. It's just attempting to make similar software to what people pay for but it often comes short or is unable to replicate fully due to copyright issues. Software freedom would be making already existing paid software open source and free.
Ryder King
I didn't say that. Obviously you can protect yourself some by doing a little modification or picking one company over another. I basically just said there is more than one way to do things.
Benjamin Reed
See:
Kevin Bell
Unity is okay for mobile environments, but it's fucking shit as a desktop DE. It was Canonical's attempt to bridge the gap between the two, and like every prior attempt by others, it failed.
Michael Reed
I thought they had abandoned mobile platforms?
Jose Lopez
Yes, they also just officially abandoned Unity as well, they are now moving to GNOME.
I didn't mind Unity as much because they didn't try to fuck everything for everyone, like the new direction GNOME devs have taken, ruining GTK in the process. GNOME 3 of course being another touchscreen/tablet environment that is useless as a desktop environment.
