• 4 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • I also think there are great projects under the FSF. My issue is the politics and Linux-libre because it’s harmful.

    I don’t think CPU microcode will be open source but the good thing is that RISC-V and ARM don’t need microcode so that could be avoided entirely in the future.

    Right now (and for a while from now) we have to always settle, the FSF only never settle because they settled when writing their nonsensical guidelines. Closest you can get to full open source device is the MNT reform laptop. Technically you can even have an Open Source CPU on it but everything is at the cost of usability and yet it’s still not perfect. But nothing is perfect imo, that’s why imo you can never settle.



  • But their principles are bs to begin with. They decided what’s good and what’s bad based on completely arbitrary metric. It does not matter whether code is baked into hardware or is flashed in it during boot process. Proprietary is still proprietary.

    They should fight for 100% free software and choose the lesser evil from there instead of fighting for the lesser evil (or imo the bigger evil) from the beginning.

    Edit: Imo they are violating their own principles spiritually. They are just avoiding violating their own principles bureaucratically.


  • It exists because FSF. (watch Linus’s opinion on FSF) Unfortunately the FSF is full of obsessive people, who want politics to be an if-else problem. But that’s not how politics work, you always have to compromise somewhere. You cannot have hardware that uses open-source firmware, has schematics available, doesn’t use slave labor, is usable, is secure etc. You always have to choose between different evils.

    But that’s not what the FSF does. They decided to draw a thick line through this blurry mess, so that these obsessive coders can have a digital high/low solution to this analog problem.

    hm how do I continue…? It’s hard to explain because it does really make sense but I will try. So if some software runs on your computer and you can modify it from the OS, it has to be Open Source otherwise it’s not FSF big wholesum chungus certified. But if it runs on your PC and you cannot modify it from the OS, it can be closed source and still get the Chungus certification. What you end up with is that FSF recommends some old crap wifi cards running proprietary firmware because you cannot modify the firmware without external flashing. But it rules out new wifi cards that load the firmware during boot because the linux kernel cannot have proprietary software in it reeee. Obviously the latter situation is better for freedom because it’s at least easier to replace with Free firmware but they don’t care about that.

    In other words Linux Libre exists only because of some stupid bureaucratic rule that actually harms Free Software instead of helping it.

    Wait I haven’t told you about microcode updates! Microcode is proprietary software controlling your x86-64 CPU. Linux Libre does not include updates to this firmware even though the microcode is proprietary regardless. So with Linux Libre your CPU is controlled by code that is proprietary, broken and vulnerable to stuff like Spectre or Meltdown. This part is so stupid that it’s almost funny. (but it’s actually sad)


  • It’s definitely not safer. It does not include microcode updates so it’s quite the opposite of secure. Technically you can load them at boot but why would you intentionally make security harder to achieve?

    Not including microcode updates is also extremely dumb from the philosophical standpoint. Microcode is closed source firmware running “inside your CPU” so if you don’t include the updates, your CPU now runs on both vulnerable and proprietary firmware.






  • Garuda advertises a different scheduler so I would think that would make difference. It’s also one of the things people recommend to improve gaming performance on Linux. Unfortunately as others have pointed out without 1% lows, there is nothing of value in this video. Saying that with respect to Nick. He should step up his game in this area. Average fps just doesn’t tell anything, especially on Linux which is even less consistent than Windows