The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.

plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.

The author of JSLint wrote:
"So I added one more line to my license, was that, “the Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” And thought: I’ve done my job!
/…/
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company. I don’t want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I’ll just say their initials, “IBM,” saying that they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that they wrote and they’re pretty sure they weren’t gonna use it for evil, but they couldn’t say for sure about their customers. So, could I give them a special license for that?

So, of course!

So I wrote back—this happened literally two weeks ago—I said, “I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.” "

It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”

You are more than welcome to remove the need for any passwords at all on the linux systems you admin. Good thing about free software is that you decide how you want it, hack up or put up.

Hm, not that I remember. My memory isn’t the best though.

On my laptop with nvidia (msi, debian 12), if I unplug the charger the screen orientation goes from landscape to portrait, everything is tilted 90 degrees. I hate this laptop, so I rarely use it.

Ah, I see. It seems like you’re not the only one wanting this behavior, there is a workaround that might work: https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2085#issuecomment-487007720

Are you using Caja file manager? If there’s no setting, it could be that the authors of that file manager just wanted it that way. You can try other file managers like thunar and see if they are different?

Things you can do in finland: tango, fight with knives, computer stuff.

Back in the day, find required that you added “-print” to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But… following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.

I think you actually convinced me to start using OpenBSD again.

Is the breaking change going to happen in stable mid release cycle? Or at a major version upgrade?

OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.

I bet some of those people use neovim instead of the more unix philosophy ed.

Free cost and free as in freedom to understand and modify the code. I also think it’s a beautiful way of doing things. We also have Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. The internet has a tremendous potential for collaboration, people doing things because they want to, for the benefit of everyone.

I bet they considered the options. It could simply be that no one has had time to change the installer. It could also be that the people who care about free software to the degree that they want to avoid non-free firmware usually figure out how to do it, and that too many options confuse new users. I don’t know. A feature request discussion in the appropriate mailing list could be a good idea if you want change.