MIT is a “free license” and software that uses it is Free Software. See the Free Software Foundation website for details.

My only goalpost is accuracy.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

So when I install EOS for the first time, I should use the ISO from when the project was founded?

This comment is silly. The fact that every rolling release I can think of tracks against releases in exactly this way is not.

Of course they do. It is a silly comment.

Now that GIMP has finally released version 3, they seem to be moving faster. I hope they are able to get more positive mind-share.

For example, they are close to releasing 3.2 that already has lots of great stuff in it. It looks like 3.4 could address some really long running deficiencies like native CMYK.

If stuff actually gets released, they may not only attract users but developers which is what they really need.

Lots of nice changes in this release. I see lots of the things people complain about.

I am not a GNOME user myself but since Niri uses XDG-desktop-portal-GNOME, this looks like a release to look forward to.

What an odd boast. What is it based on?

MIT licensed software outnumbers GPL licensed software two to one or more in most Linux distros and elsewhere.

There was more MIT code in the X server than there was GPL code in the world before Linux came along.

And even Linux will never be GPL3 or even drop its exceptions. So, while it is ironically the crown jewel in the GPL universe, it is not even really GPL.

“Linux” as it is used in the real world means “Linux distribution” which is a Linux based operating system that runs the ecosystem of applications and desktop environments common to the “Linux” ecosystem.

If people mean the “Linux kernel”, they say so. With few exceptions beyond trying to make GNU/Linux a thing*, people do not mean just the kernel when they say “Linux” on its own. Even the Linux Kernel Mailing List says “kernel”‘when that is what they mean. And you do not get the kernel from the linux.org website. Guess what you do find there—a bunch of information about Linux distros (real ones, not ChromeOS and Android).

People ARE saying what they mean because they know what the word Linux means. Swearing does not make you more correct.

If I say “United States”, only morons pop up to tell me that I need to say USA because otherwise people might think I mean United States of Mexico. Everybody in the world knows what United States means. Swearing and shouting “say what you mean” would be ridiculous. And nobody wonders if I mean the city or the country if I say Mexico. If I meant just the city, I would say so.

And people know what Linux means too.

• why isn’t GNU/Linux a thing? Well, amongst the many reasons is that many Linux distros that are clearly “Linux” and even “desktop Linux” do not use GNU software. The most extreme is Chimera Linux probably but Alpine, Void, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Serpent, and others match this description to various degrees. And outside of RHEL, actual GNU software makes up a tiny fraction of the software even in distros that use it (like say Arch). Chimera Linux, Void Linux, and Arch Linux are all remarkably similar though they differ dramatically in GNU usage. They are all “Linux” but not GNU/Linux. Android is totally different from all of them despite using the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux is one of the least descriptively accurate terms you could come up with for any reason other than purely political.

The kernel is copyleft (100% of it). The majority (more than half) of the other software in a typical Linux distro is not copyleft. The most popular license is MIT. Apache 2.0 (the license that Android uses) is pretty common in Linux distros as well.

To top it off. the majority of GPL software has nothing whatsoever to do with the GNU project, starting with the Linux kernel.

This idiot has been writing articles over there for decades. He has always been pro Linux which is nice. Unfortunately, he has also always been an idiot.

People do not realize that Windows has, and has had, other subsystems. So the name seems dumb.

When you realize that as far back as 1993 there was:

• subsystem for Win32
• subsystem for POSIX
• subsystem for OS/2

then Subsystem for Linux does not seems as crazy.

Having “for Windows” at the end sounds natural if you only have one but putting saying “Windows subsystem for” makes more sense when you realize there are a bunch of them.

Regardless, the decision was made 30 years ago and not recently as people assume.

I have mixed feelings about Zorin.

They are doing a great job of promoting themselves and in attracting converts from Windows. It seems like a nice enough distro as well that users are likely to have a decent experience with.

On the other hand, they are charging money for a “pro” version that mostly just bundles software that users could get for free. My first reaction to this is that it is exploitive, both of uses and software devs.

But then I remember that they also offer support and I think that introducing people to software they did not know about is also a service.

And if they use the money to do all of the above, the Linux ecosystem benefits. So, perhaps they are not that bad.

Perhaps the best thing about them is they make it harder for truly scammy “windows” distros like Wububtu to take hold.

If they start to make “real” money, I do hope they share some of it back with the projects they leverage.

Yes, they do, via the mintupgrade tool.

Not sure why the downvote, other than that they specified “versioned” (not rolling).

All rolling distros obviously auto-upgrade by definition.

That is pretty limiting solution though.

First, you can only have one libadwaita library installed. So, if GNOME is already on a system, installing another DE alongside it will create a conflict.

Second, livadwaita is not designed to enable third-party theming. It surfaces the capabilities desired by GNOME, which is less and less all the time. That limits what others can do.

Do you mean by supplying your own version of libadwaita?

Absolutely GNOME.

GIMP just finally finished their port from GTK2 to GTK3 a few months ago. GTK4, released 5 years ago, has literally nothing to do with them.

Like GNOME, I think that GTK is one of those projects that now says that the letters do not stand for anything.

Our first “Linux put me in the hospital” story of 2026!

It has really only been a problem since GTK4. A lot of the rest of the GTK universe has stuck with GTK3. Now we are seeing people come up with alternative versions of libadwaita.

We should end up seeing a fork on the GTK side with GNOME going one way and everybody else another.

I always preferred GTK and its ecosystem. But GTK is more and more positioning itself as just a toolkit for GNOME. And GNOME is more and more going not only going its own way but also not concerning itself with compatibility beyond what I will call the Red Hat Linux platform.

So I can certainly see why anybody outside of GNOME would consider migrating off GTK. I mean, this is basically how we got COSMIC as well, based off the Iced toolkit.

Ironically, the bug report I read was originally filed for Android as crashpad did not built with bionic either (bionic being the C library on Android).

Glibc is the most popular C library on Linux but also the most non-standard.