Put any distro in front of me and provided I don’t need to master it, I’m good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We’re all using mostly the same kernel anyway.

90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn’t matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn’t care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I’m using it.

The only time I’ve encountered people that care a little too much about what distro is being used, is right after having transitioned to Linux; the sheer liberating potential of the thing can make you lose your head.

I’ve come across a lot of professional bias about Linux distros, but that’s usually due to real-world experience with tough or bad projects. Some times, decisions are made that make a given distro the villain or even the hero of the story. In the end, you’ll hear a lot of praise and hate, but context absolutely matters.

There’s also the very natural tendency to seek external validation for your actions/decisions. But some people just can’t self-actualize in a way that’s healthy. Sprinkle a little personal insecurity into the mix and presto: “someone is getting on great with that other Linux I don’t use, so Imma get big mad.”

Sorry to hear about your friend. While I’m no doctor, that seems to fit the bill to me. I’ve known people that had other trauma when young, and yeah, maintaining healthy relationships seems to be the hardest thing for them. Your story reminded me of a lot.

Yes, but it’s a little worse than that. One might take that to mean environmental, congenital, or even genetic factors. But there’s more. Consider the role that trauma has to play here as it can directly cause arrested psychological development:

https://psychcentral.com/ptsd/signs-trauma-has-you-stuck

I mean, maybe if you bake a stone cold potato that was in the fridge and then cook it for two hours? But even then we’re probably talking about a handful of minutes at the most.

Which car company bar did you say you work for?

A major one.

Is that MIT (munch it today) or GPL (generally pleasing w/lettuce) licensed?

I’ve been in situations where I wanted to retain credit/ownership of ideas and code, but wanted to be able to use them in the workplace. So building a MIT/BSD licensed library on the weekend and then importing it on Monday was the only game in town. I get the portfolio piece and my job is easier as a result. But I stick to non-novel and non-patentable stuff - “small” work really, as Stallman is quoted here..

In some work environments, GPL or “GPL with an exception” would never get the kind of traction it should. Lots of places I’ve worked lack the legal and logistical framework for wrangling licenses and exceptions. It’s hard to handle such cases if there’s literally nobody to talk to about it, while you have automated systems that flag GPL license landmines anyway. The framing is a kind of security problem, not a license problem, so you never really get to start.

The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of “free” software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I’ll add that in no way do I support Intel’s shenanigans here.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

But don’t take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I’d love to see a citation here because that’s the first I’ve heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.

I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.

Edit: as a software developer I can say that I’ve never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I’ve also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.

If it’s open, looks don’t matter. Also doesn’t matter if the drivers are trash, or if it runs zero games. It’s all fixable trash - that’s the point.

(Also, that’s not a GPU, but it’s the thought that counts)

A few things come to mind here.

1. MS tried to ship a renegade JDK with proprietary features, back in the 90’s. That didn’t go very well for them, as they drew the ire of Sun Microsystems which was a decently sized player at the time. It was a clear licensing issue, and they lost the case. Point being: they’re historically not great at this kind of thing.
2. The GPL is designed to thwart this scenario, specifically for things like paid software (e.g. Windows). MS would have to move to a “free Windows software, paid service” model before any of this could happen. But the service must be optional, and they’d have to provide the source to anyone that wants it. That said, they’re on track to make Windows free (as in beer), so who knows?
3. Nvidia gets to ship binary Linux drivers, so closed-source binary packages for MS proprietary components on top of Linux might be possible. But again, I don’t think they get to charge for that.
4. WRT to drivers/packages, RedHat famously charges for access to their package repository, making automated patching and upgrading a nightmare if you go without. This is one hell of a GPL loophole and worthy of far more corporate exploitation. I can easily see MS following this path.
5. “The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.” - John Gilmore - (Many) People will just fork away or happily sit somewhere else in the GNU family tree, far from anything MS builds. If the need arises, compatibility layers like WINE will show up eventually.