@snailerotica @falktx
What about software that can't be recompiled like old Linux-native games that may be abandoned or no longer have sources available? Will these keep working, or does this only affect newly compiled software?
BTW - sorry, I was hoping my post was clearly satirical. I don't want to skew the facts.
@unfa @snailerotica it did not read/appear as satire to me..
on the topic of old native games, I find it hard to feel pity for proprietary software that no longer runs.
if one is interested on the longevity and preservation of some software tool, the first step is to make it open.
@falktx @snailerotica Also - if a native Linux game stops working after an OS upgrade users will blame the OS not the game devs or publishers. Also also - people will just have to get the Windows copy of the game and play via Wine. I don't see how any of that helps the Linux ecosystem and adoption.
Surely I'd prefer my favourite games to be all open-sourced, but except for John Carmack who did this back when he had enough levarage at id Software, I don't see any other game studios doing that.
@falktx If we decided to completely isolate from anything proprietary, we'd be limited to using RISC V and Libreboot, because anything else makes our computers run proprietary binary code.
(Though those pesky microcontrollers are still non-FOSS!)
We're always making a compromise, and different people would draw the line in wildly different places.
I think it's an important issue, because maybe if we go too far adopting proprietary stuff, Linux would loose it's identity?
I don't know.
@unfa the fight for those micro-controllers is already lost, but at least on a higher-level we can still control the OS to a point. taking that away just to be able to run a few games is not great.
the wider linux adoption often involves things that opensource does not benefit from. on the contrary, companies want to use the opensource tools as base to build their commercial proprietary offerings. with the gains very rarely trickling down
I just dont expect good things from a mass-market linux
@falktx Yeah, that sucks.
Though getting "normies" to use Linux without providing these things wouldn't really work.
I think humanity as a whole benefits from a wider Linux adoption as it does push user freedom forward. It is not great when we need to add freedom-limiting tools into Linux to enable some highly proprietary services to work, but we can still compile our kernel without these. I'm sure there are distros that come completely free of any DRM code in the kernel etc.
It is a compromise.