That was the PR misstep I mentioned.

I think it would be easier to beef up Flatpak’s permissions system than to become reliant on Google

You’re so quirky and different!

Virtue signalling is very important to some people.

Yes, it’s hyperbole.

Framework gave money or laptops to a bunch of different Linux projects and has generally been very active in the Linux community.

One of the laptops they gave out went to DDH, who in addition to having a project that in reality is little more than an Arch script, also posts a lot of alt-right drivel online.

Most famously him moaning about London being too full of immigrants - something made even more ironic given that he himself is an immigrant to the UK. Clearly he meant non-white immigrants.

It’s unknown how much Framework knew about his unsavoury opinions, and plenty of other projects they’ve supported have been very progressive, so it doesn’t seem like they’re choosing to support only people who align with a specific political stance.

A lot of people are frustrated with their response to the criticism - that they’re a small team that don’t want to wade into the politics of each project they donate a laptop to. Which I kind of understand, but I also understand being miffed at them for sending a laptop to a super hateful person then shrugging their shoulders and saying “look, we don’t want to be political or have to research the personal opinions of people in the community”.

Personally I think it’s more of a fuckup and PR misstep rather than endorsing any particular world-view.

Nah. They actually already were a sponsor of it before then. This article is just publishing old information.

You’re so strong. Thank you for your valiant effort.

There’s nothing wrong with giving money to FOSS projects.

In fact, a major issue with the open source world is users never donating.

I’ve never used Zorin and don’t intend to, but the existence of optional paid software isn’t why.

I’m surprised anybody thought it could be.

Guys, it is literally just a small form factor PC (with a couple of console QoL additions like waking from controller support and HDMI CEC). It’s an open platform.

If Valve sold it at a loss, offices and governments would buy them up and reimage them with Windows.

Sony and MS can only get away with making a loss because the closed platform guarantees they make money back on game sales.

Part of the reason the PS3 got more locked down after release is that governments, researchers, and companies openly talked about buying them and running custom software on it, because the hardware was so subsidised.

That said, this is a low end device for 2026, make no mistakes of that. If Valve want to, they can sell this for $500. Perhaps even lower if they’re fine with razor thin margins.

Remember that this thing’s price needs to be justifiable not only now, but also in 2 years or so when vastly more powerful consoles come out.

u can shortn txt lk this 2

But, much like the thorn, it’s quite jarring.

I won’t bash Mint, because I think Mint Cinnamon is great (if a little ugly out of the box).

For the past 3-4 years, though, I’ve been using Fedora and I’ve been very impressed. Almost as cutting edge as Arch, yet it’s well-tested and in my experience rock-solid stable.

There was a lot of BS advertising not long ago about it being a web browser “for gamers”, whatever that means.

Framework tried to design a version that worked with SODIMM with AMD but the performance was seriously hampered, and the plan was dropped.

I personally don’t get the hype around Cosmic - I’m not clear what makes it so exciting for people? It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

It’s likely they don’t actually have much of a problem with Gnome UX, they just want to be fully in control, rather than Gnome devs being in control of it and there having to be compromises.

Which is fair enough. Gnome DE belongs to Gnome and it’s up to them how the project is run. S76 wants to be fully in control of what they ship, so they moved.

I doubt it was made specifically to solve a Gnome or KDE user’s problem. It’s just a business decision to make them less reliant on others.

I guess people are just happy to have another major DE, and to have one built from the ground up on newer tech, without the legacy cruft that the likes of Plasma, Gnome, and Cinnamon do.

I mean some of them have been good. I actually really like the offline translation, for example. No more sending data to Google Translate servers is a genuine privacy win.

There’s also been some better screen reader support integrated because of it, and my sister loves it, she just wants it to be expanded further.

Yes, there’s also the LLM integration, which I’m… less enthused by, to say the least.

But at least it’s optional and can be tied into local models if you wish. Plus there’s the factor of new normie users testing out Firefox and going “it doesn’t have a gpt bot? Pfft I’m going back to Chrome, Firefox is so far behind” to contend with. If the market decides it wants that feature, then Mozilla can’t really ignore it.

It’s really not unless you’re a techie who’s used to naming files in away that promotes better sorting.

The date format this uses should match with the one you have set in your system, which for most people will be DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY in the US. Because that’s what the user is used to seeing.

If you think most people are used to seeing YYMMDDhhmmss then you are in a very tiny and very incorrect bubble lol

Man, fuck this article. It’s heavily implying the filesystem was dropped just because Linus and co dislike the creator, or because he’s said something that they disagree with and they want to shut him down in retaliation.

That is not the case. This guy has routinely and flagrantly not followed the established rules towards kernel development, doing things like pushing big feature updates, filled with bugs, just before the release of a new kernel, when only bug fixes are being accepted.

When he’s respectfully told he can’t do things like that, he gets angry and says he’s better than others, his work is more important, he should be an exception to the rules because he’s gifted.

You can’t run a project that way, it’d be chaos. Linus was right to kick him. He has been told if he starts complying with the rules then he can start submitting again.

The only children in this story are the BcacheFS dev, and this article author. Fuck him for presenting this as a culture war rather than “rule breaker told to leave club for repeatedly breaking club rules”.

Because one is the official storefront and one isn’t, it’s a 3rd party launcher.

Heroic is neat, I’ve used it, but it still has those quirks, extra set up time, configuration, and complexity that something like Steam simply doesn’t.

I install Steam to buy/play Steam games. I click install, it just installs. It doesn’t ask me to jump through hoops to get anticheat working, I don’t need to set custom wine prefixes or do anything daft with install scripts, it just plays, and my cloud saves work flawlessly with zero additional effort.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic towards Gog if they hadn’t told us on multiple occasions they were going to bring their storefront to Linux, only to not do it and ignore community questions regarding it.

I don’t really see how it’s overblown, either. My complaint is that Gog Galaxy doesn’t support Linux, and it doesn’t. I’m just stating things as they are.

Clearly you don’t mind the extra legwork/tinkering (nothing wrong with that btw, tinkering is cool), but I do. I work, I have kids, my time is very limited. I’ve went from being an avid tinkerer on my PC to someone who can’t stand it when my PC doesn’t ‘just work’ in the simplest, fastest, barrier-free way possible.

I have like 40 games on Gog, but I don’t buy from there anymore. I want to just play games on my PC/TV PC/Steam Deck without having to spend a while configuring everything, and that currently isn’t possible through Gog.

You could find an article and post it?

Gog frustrate me. It seems that Linux users and people who dislike DRM are natural bedfellows, yet they continue to not support Linux even after saying they’d bring Gog Galaxy to it.

Now I’m sure people will reply with “why don’t you just configure bottles, why don’t you install Wine and these 30 prefixes, why don’t you install Lutris”, but all of that has quirks, extra set up time, and extra complexity.

I don’t want to battle my PC, that’s half the reason I moved from Windows in the first place. I just want to open the launcher, click install, then click play and have it work. Steam has that going for it.