It's funny. As much as I detest DJT and all the terrible things he's brought to the world order/markets/general stability, I do have to be thankful that he's helped spur on digital sovereignty and sparked a revival in independence rather than US hegemony. It's also a shame, but the US has proved itself too volatile and an unstable partner.
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It's finally the year of the Linux Desktop! And all it took was an apocalypse, the rise of the fourth reich, (soon to be) two global recessions, and continuing unprecedented damage to the world order / faith in international law.
Oh, and Windows actively trying its absolute hardest to make everyone hate it for about a decade.
But hey,... progess! The more penguins, the better.
all it took was an apocalypse, the rise of the fourth reich, (soon to be) two global recessions, and continuing unprecedented damage to the world order / faith in international law.
Absolutely wild brand activation tactics from the Linux marketing team.
I fucking hate that so many of them are going to Ubuntu berceuse of course they are
"oops sorry we switched back to manual approval mode because our invincible foolproof package management system pushed out malware again"
you forgot the /s
Having someone to complain to/point fingers at/sue is incredibly important in the business world, and a big part of why M$ is so big.
In fact, just having support is a big thing. Look at how shitty M$ support is. Or Cisco, for that matter.
Not to mention a steady, predictable, accountable release cadence.
If you want that, in the Linux world, it's basically Ubuntu/Canonical, RedHat/IBM, or Oracle/Oracle.
I'd call Canonical the lessest of 3 evils here...
Linux's message to the world: "The I-Told-You-So's Shall Continue Until Installation Rates Improve."
we brought this upon ourselves by failing to listen to the FOSS gods.
Oh, and Windows actively trying its absolute hardest to make everyone hate it for about a decade.
You're off by about thirty years.
Nah, Windows XP and 7 get a pass. These were solid consumer OS's.
You go back 30 years and you're at Windows 95 (holy shit) and the beginning of massive home PC adoption.
I don't feel they got hostile towards users until probably midway through Windows 10 lifecycle. The first half wasn't that bad, aside from changing up 20+ years of muscle-memory....but Gnome did that, too.
Apocalypse?
Covid. I'm being slightly hyperbolic.
A decade? I had a Windows ME upgrade disc - M$ has been at this for a long time.
The French are doing the right thing. Getting independent from the US software dominance takes time and the US regime could decide any day to use it stupidly and brutally. I just wish my government had as much foresight.
My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don't act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it's purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they're much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft's services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, ...) there's also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.
This is why, as an Aussie, I'm very disappointed in our subservience to the US all the time. It's honestly pathetic. We abandoned our initial plan for, admittedly not cutting edge tech, french-built submarines to go with far better-specced US-built subs but who knows if we'll ever actually get any of them.
Honestly, I don't trust the sepos not to hamstring them somehow.
would be great if they did phones next.
Jolla is the only real option software wise
Other options exist, but not so polished. It's a tough project that apparently needs more support than small FOSS projects can provide, I've seen a lot of promising alternatives come and go.
Hardware/firmware wise, would really like to see open standards like we have for PC bootloaders. EU requiring nonproprietary bootloaders on phones would be a real step forward.
They could throw support behind GrapheneOS, it’s great and it’s Canadian eh
Graphene is good, though it's still pretty reliant upon Google not making life even harder for them, which it has been doing consistently.
A safer long-term option that is detached from Google's whims entirely is PostmarketOS, which isn't based on Android at all, but is instead a project based on Linux directly.
If the EU would dare, it could totally fork AOSP. Then each country, company, non-profit can build its own mobile OS on top of it.
I'm not entirely sure if that would be better than just adopting PostmarketOS, since forking AOSP would mean maintaining a fork of that entire ecosystem, and I'm unsure how they would deal with all the phone manufacturers dropping support for phones rather quickly, or using outdated kernels to access GPU and hardware drivers for said phones after the manufacturer drops support.
Investing in PostmarketOS instead would bring with it much less stuff to fork, along with access to the mainline linux kernel (instead of outdated Android ones) that use open-source GPU drivers that can be effectively maintained, and it can support Android compatibility with a compatibility layer, Waydroid.
A polished PostmarketOS ecosystem only seems to offer advantages compared to a forked AOSP, so if they're choosing which to invest in, Postmarket seems like the clear winner.
The kernel update issue on Android is going to be exactly the same for PostmarketOS and for the exact same reason: proprietary firmwares and/or drivers.
There is a huge ecosystem for Android today, including apps for so many EU companies, that they would have to re-develop to port them to Linux, or they'll just rely on Waydroid, so you still have to follow Google somewhat, and now you need to maintain both a GNU/systemd/Linux AND a compatibility layer with Android. With a fork of AOSP, you need only the last.
From a security and privacy standpoint, Linux was never designed to handle hostile apps designed to aquire as much data as possible. Android has a sandboxing system: an app cannot go and check what other apps you have. A Linux app can pretty much access everything on your system. GrapheneOS adds on top of that storage and contact scopes: you can define a subset of each per app, and they won't see anything else.
In an ideal world, it wouldn't matter: everything would be opensource and developed in good faith. In the real world, you still have tons of malevolent apps that people will want to use anyway, so better take that in account.
The kernel update issue on Android is going to be exactly the same for PostmarketOS and for the exact same reason: proprietary firmwares and/or drivers.
That is not the case, as PostmarketOS uses community made open-source drivers, even for the GPU, and all devices that it supports uses the mainline kernel, as all of the drivers they develop are upstreamed to mainline, instead of it being a proprietary driver that is locked to a specific kernel.
The open-source drivers aren't currently as polished as the proprietary ones, but as we've seen the open-source AMD driver for desktop, it can become the best option with community effort and funding.
and now you need to maintain both a GNU/systemd/Linux AND a compatibility layer with Android
The point of adopting Postmarket is that they could then rely on the open-source community to help with maintaining most of of the components, much like how Linux desktop or Linux Server works currently. Waydroid is developed by its own team, so they wouldn't need to fork that and maintain it to have access to Android apps (though they could help contribute to it if they wanted to).
From a security and privacy standpoint, Linux was never designed to handle hostile apps designed to aquire as much data as possible. Android has a sandboxing system
Android is Linux at the core, yet it was able to be hardened, which shows that PostmarketOS could be similarly hardened if such features were adequately funded and developed by the EU. Linux already has Wayland, which is a huge step forward for security, and Flatpak packages already have Android-like permissions built in (though they would need to modify how those work by default to increase security).
For sure GOS is great, but it is still only android fork. Not real independent alternative for duopoly
And it also only works on Google hardware 🤮
(And maybe one future Sony phone maybe?)
Just ordered a Sony Xperia with SailfishOS! I hope you're right! 🤞
(FYI just in case: SailfishOS is NOT an Android fork! I didn't realize this until recently.)
Good. As an American, fuck Microsoft. And fuck Trump.
Every country should do this. I'm an American however my country is turning into shit by the day.
Micro$oft isn't America.
Micro$oft is a special interest inside America, maybe, at best, American-government-aligned, assuming the government is heavily influenced or captured by Micro$oft.
If Ameirca is first and foremost its people, the megacorp and the oligarchical interests (economic royalists) inside America are at odds with most of the American population. The megacorps and the oligarchs can be considered anti-American.
Anyway, what's bad for Micro$oft is not always bad for America. What's good for America is not always good for Micro$oft. These interests are not all on the same page, to put it politely.
(this is just me agreeing with you in a longer form)
Hopefully more follow! Supporting European mobile OS would be huge step next
Wait until Le Pen or Bardella comes into power and remake the deal with American tech oligarchs, undoing Macron's push for strategic autonomy. As long as the right in France isn't killed, any attempt of decoupling will only be coupled back to US, because fascists have internationalise their ideas and coordination.
I have read items like this for years about some jurisdiction in Europe switching to FOSS. These things take a long time to implement, lot of retraining of people that have used MS for decades. The cost is significant since you still need to pay the license fees and have support during the transition.
The French Revolution 2.0 where is the Person who says: if they dislike Microsoft why dont they use mac?
probably getting shouted down by the french policymakers who made this decision along the lines of "Apple is an American company too and we're SICK OF AMERICA'S SHIT"
Nothing against Macs intended here, but why would anyone say that in this case?
It'd be like an anti-fast food movement where someone suggests Burger King as an alternative to McDonald's. It wouldn't make any sense for the goal.
Hmm, it would be interesting if all these governments switching to Linux would make their own distros.
@Vince @fne8w2ah we dont need more fragmentation
Interesting idea. Cops already have their own Matrix fork (https://element.io/en/case-studies/tchap) and Android fork for secure messaging and secure phones. I haven't played with the secured phone, but it should be a custom locked-down Android ROM.
Creating distros is easy, funding for the volunteers upstream is what's lacking.
I hope the move also prompts them to start supporting upstream with funds, code, infrastructure, engineers, benefits and so on.
What does he play?
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