Posts by danielfgom

Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin

Surprised

I'm surprised they are allowed to ship without Snaps. I thought it was a Canonical requirement.

Maybe not....?

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

We only just got Windows 10 settled....

As an IT Technician/Sysadmin getting everything moved to Windows 10 was a major pain. Especially managing updates for everyone so that drivers wouldn't be broken and production machines stop working. But after so many years it's finally settled and user have only just gotten used to how Windows 10 looks and works, and now you expect us to do it all over again onto 11??!! F* off!! No chance! This sh!t needs to keep doing duty for at least another 5 years before we even entertain the idea of maybe moving to Windows 11....MS are seriously out of touch with how Windows is used in small/medium enterprise....

Not to mention millions of home users who also can't be bothered to learn something new. so many of them already freaked out when they booted their pc one day and Windows 7 was gone only to be greeted by Windows 10....

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

Looks the same

Looks exactly the same to me. Overall KDE has a UI problem - it's a terrible UI for readability.

And the lack of colour in the icons doesn't help because you can't make out what you're looking at!

The Gnome (2 and above) UI is way better. Especially Cinnamon desktop, Mate and XFCE. Everything is legible and icons easily distinguishable.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Dev work should be either paid or free

In my opinion if you're a FOSS Developer you should adopt one of two possible scenarios:

1. You have a full time, paid job somewhere and all your FOSS dev work you do in your spare time for the love of it and to have something in the world that you've made which other people benefit from. In other words, you do it out of the kindness of your heart and because you enjoy it and get satisfaction out of it. But it isn't paying you. There are many apps, libraries, distros etc that fall into this category.

2. You either work for or create a company that sells a software product which is FOSS but behind a paywall or have active corporate donors. You earn a living from that and it's your full time work. Accept that some people might buy and pass the software onto others, as is allowed under GPL, or even fork it, but your company provides enough innovation, value and support that the majority of your users would gladly pay for it. For example Red Hat, Ubuntu etc. Blender is a good example of a FOSS company with Corporate and public sponsors who keep it going and a large vibrant community behind it. That would be the ideal IMO - you make FOSS and get paid. It is possible to do but you really need to make an excellent product. Distro's are another example of this, for example Linux Mint, who get good donations to be able to keep doing the work they love. They had their own vision of how a distro should be, and there are enough people who share that opinion who are willing to support it.

I do agree that the average, and especially new, Linux desktop users are not educated about FOSS and the freedoms it affords them. They just see Linux as an alternative to Windows and are happy often, to use both, not realising that GNU Linux exists as an antithesis to Windows/proprietary software. Somehow these people need to be educated otherwise eventually the FOSS Principles will disappear and if that happens there is nothing stopping GNU Linux becoming proprietary.....

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Timeshift saved me this time

I'm running LMDE 6 and was hit by this issue. Not only was the wifi no longer working but the entire machine was non-responsive. Even the terminal was hanging. Total disaster.

Thankfully I had enabled Timeshift after initial installation of LMDE 6 so I was able to restore my system to an earlier time point. Only today, the 18th, has Debian finally released 6.1.67 and everything seems ok now.

I know of at least one user on Mastodon that this bug led him to ditch LMDE and he did a fresh install of Fedora instead. I'm guessing he's not the only one not running Timeshift who couldn't fix their systems so they jumped distro.

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Makes me love using Linux exclusively all the more... :-)

On a more serious note, this is nuts! Especially if Server is doing this! In Enterprise we ran all our corporate printers off a print server and each one had it name by department because it was a large facility with about 35 printers of all tpyes. This will be chaos if it suddenly renames them all HP!!!!!!!

What the F are Microsoft doing? amateur hour....

Red Hat greases migration to RHEL for CentOS 7 holdouts

wow, is that how much it costs? That's nuts. When I worked Corporate IT we ran all Microsoft Server and it was hard enough to get the CFO to approve the CAPEX for the hardware and server licence, even though we needed the extra server. There's no way on earth he would have approved GBP25 000 for a support contract, No. Way.

Red Hat is obviously out of touch with Medium Enterprise. We weren't massive but we were spread over 2 continents with 6 factories and supplying Military as well as Health Sector but no way we could afford that kind of money. Which is why CentOS was so popular.

Rocky and Alma will continue to service that market.

At MOST, the CFO might have agreed to spend GBP 1000 a year on support. No more than that.

I mean, when a staff member needed a new pc or laptop I had to do a CAPEX for each and every one that cost more than GBP 500. If you know the market, no pc worth buying costs less than GBP 500. Throw in a monitor or two and a dual-monitor arm and we're well over 500.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

X is fine. RH are jumping the gun

I use LMDE 6 and X is the default and will remain so for at least 2 years, and that's fine. It does the job very well and Wayland simply isn't up to par yet. Red Hat is jumping the gun because they want to *force* developers to develop for Wayland, faster. I can't see any other reason why you'd do this when X already works fine for the majority. If Nvidia is the reason, F Nvidia. They are hostile to FOSS anyway so let Linux users get rid of their nvidia cards and get AMD instead. Tell nvidia using your wallet, that they need to support FOSS or lose money.

Cinnamon and KDE sync version numbers in desktop sibling rivalry

Stark differences in DE

I've used both KDE and now Cinnamon and there is such a stark difference between the two. The biggest is that for me KDE is illegible. I detest the icons inside programs (eg Libre Office) because I cannot understand what they are. The font also seems less easy to read and that blue and white alternating rows when you put files in list view or go into settings and there is a list view, is totally trash - I can never understand what I'm actually selecting. It's awful UI design yet version 6 continues with no improvement.

Cinnamon (and all gnome based DE's) on the other hand are all far more legible. Everything is familiar, fonts are clear, icons are easy to read etc. Far, far more comfortable to use, for me at least. I think this is also why Gnome got the $1 million grant because they are more likely to use it for accessibility and that will trickle down to all gnome-based DE's like Cinnamon, Mate etc

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Re: Take responsibility

One Drive! You must be kidding. It is the worst sync to the cloud system on the market. I'm an IT Technician by trade and have seen enough not to recommend OneDrive, or anything from Microsoft actually, to anyone.

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

System 76 are right

Personally I would side with System 76 on this one. They are primarily an OEM and make their living from hardware. More and more buyers expect a cohesive, reliable OS and UI when they buy a pc/laptop.

System 76 need to prioritise their customer experience because broken extensions make them look bad and could give them a bad name. And since the Gnome people are all assholes anyway, deciding to make their own DE was the best decision.

They can style it how they want, add features at will and not have to wait for Gnome to do something. It will be way better for customers. After all if a customer must have gnome, they are free to install and Linux distro that had Gnome.

Seems like a win-win for the customer and System 76.

SUSE CTO talks about OpenELA and keeping customer trust

Suse understands Enterprise IT

As an IT Pro Side's comments about providing support for another 2-3 years to give IT time to think about the next move is spot on.

People may not be aware but as Sys Admins/IT Technicians we are silly busy keeping systems running, troubleshooting issues, supporting users, setting up hardware, managing shares, etc One doesn't often have the time to worry about replacing your entire server OS. And it's not a task we're keen to do because things will break.

Plus you'd be surprised how hard it is to get the board to actually spend any money on IT. We're often running on a shoestring budget. So when if your raise the issue early, by the time discussions are had, budgets are made etc years can pass.

There will be A LOT of IT taking advantage of Suse's extended support offerings, especially if they price it right.

The battle between open source and 'sort of' open source is as old as software

Principles of Free Software more relevant than ever

Steve I'm one of those who agrees 100% with Stallman and feel that the Free Software principles are more relevant now, than ever. Computing is getting increasingly user hostile, just look at Apple's lock in (prison) and how once they've trapped the user they milk them like a cow. Windows is going that way too, and Google too with it's web tracking stuff.

What irritated me is that HashiCorp was angry because of the support OpenTofu received. Well, clearly HashiCorp have never read nor subscribed to the Free Software manifest, because if they had they would know that one of the fundamental principles is the user being able to modify the code, as well as redistribute it, modified OR NOT.

That's exactly what Red Hat have done. They've ignored this user right and labeled anyone who redistributes the code as free loaders. They are in essence no longer Free Software.

It's because of things like this that Stallman goes to great lengths to differentiate between Free Software and Open Source software. They are two different things.

Because of what Red Hat has done I've been calling the Community to stop using Fedora all together in protest. Let's be honest, Fedora is not Community based. They are Red Hat's beta testing and development team and the users are the beta testers. It's 100% corporate, from the staff all being Red Hat employees to Red Hat financing it.

I call on all the Free Software Community/Linux Community to only use 100% community distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware, Gentoo etc.

I'm showing my support by using LMDE - Debian with the latest Cinnamon dekstop, and everything 100% community.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

Snaps are good for Enterprise

I can 100% see the benefit of Snaps in the Enterprise and running your own Snap server to control versions and make it secure and fast to get the on an end user pc. For that purpose it's a great solution.

However for home users I don't see the benefit, same with Flatpak, because they are so huge and often home users have limited storage. Especially laptops whose makers seem to think that 128GB is enough (thanks Apple, not).

The best would be if the distro repo had updated native packages. But from what I've seen it's the package developers who are pushing this because they don't want to compile separate binaries for each package type (deb, rpm etc) and maintain older versions for slow release distros as well as new releases for rolling distros.

Surely there must be some kind of automated packaging tool that could do this for the dev so they don't have to do it manually?

Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

Re: Money isn't everything

Ha ha! Brilliant! Your naked it.

Don't forget SELinux too....

Re: I used Test on the latest Fedora

I couldn't agree with you more.

Red Hat have totally broken the Free Software principle of being to redistribute software unchanged, and on top of it called Free Software user's, "free loaders".

Every Linux user should boycott Fedora/Red Hat/IBM altogether and no longer be their beta testers nor customers. They can get lost and pay for all their beta testing!

Good choice with Debian 12. I elected to use Linux Mint Debian Edition and couldn't be happier.

Debian is the grand daddy of Linux and bastion of free software. Far more noble then Red Hat will ever be.

Don't forget Red Hat works with the NSA, the antithesis of Free Software principles and the enemy of free society everywhere.

Who cares that Red Hat made billions when they've turned out to be scumbags?

I CALL ON EVERYONE WHO TRULY APPRECIATES FREE SOFTWARE PRINCIPLES AND FREEDOM OF COMPUTING TO STOP USING CORPORATE BACKED LINUX OF EVERY KIND AND USE ONLY 100% COMMUNITY DISTROS.