Robert Ian Hawdon

I can think of nothing worse than having your pet project adopted by BigTech and being expected to fix bugs free of charge. I’m not even sure what the solution to that would be other than walking away from it. Thankfully, my biggest project (DF-SHOW) is niche enough to be just a personal project, but a common enough concept (a TUI file manager) that there are plenty of other, more well established, solutions available.

I wrote it for myself, but figured others can benefit from it.

Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it’s widely supported.

You’ll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it’s down to human error. As someone once said:

“Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn’t think rope would do that, you should have read the man page.”

Similar, but I’m not ashamed of having my projects on display, so it’s just ~/projects for me.

Heck, here in the UK, we have a TV licence and the OG ad-free service, the BBC.

Yeah, the BBC has had its fair share of controversies over the years, but I’m still glad it’s there and still ad-free.

Kagi’s AI summariser is pretty good. It cites its sources and, by default, it only kicks in when you search with a ? on the end.

To be fair, I’m pretty impressed with Kagi Search overall. But that’s a topic for a different thread, I think.

All valid points.

I believe in this instance, it’s mainly because they have figured out a way to profit off Linux and that is via their cloud hosting platform. As long as they’re making money, it’s probably fine.

Depends how you define evil? If you mean they’re continuing to Linux in an effort to ensure it works well in their Azure platform which they can charge money for using, then yes?

They’re making all the right decisions though, they know that there is great demand for Linux in the server market, and are happy to allow it to run on their cloud platform to ensure viable competition with the other big players (AWS & Google).

Then in turn, their contributions benefit the open source community as a whole.

The fact they’ve also made .NET Core cross platform and another step in the right direction, as well as making VSCode cross platform too.

What would be nice is if they made desktop Office available. It’s one of the few subscription models that would probably work out well for them as many businesses would probably be happy to run Linux clients with native Office 365 support.

DOS -> Windows (3.1 through to XP) -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Fedora -> OpenSUSE -> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Ubuntu -> Arch

It’s been quite the journey.