I sometimes wonder if the GPL shouldn't have a "free renaming" clause, since most of the anti-GPL people I meet seem to hate it on purely guttural, emotional "IT'S A VIRUSSSSSS!" grounds. So let's change the license--you're allowed to rename it to whatever you want so that you can feel like a special snowflake. And maybe even you're allowed to insert as many reasonable new attribution clauses or other new clauses that don't affect reuse by other people. Sure. I don't care. That's not the point.
The point is that projects like these, where midgets stand on the shoulders of giants, can easily leverage the selflessness of open source volunteers into the creation of more closed ecosystems.
Pretending that the issue was the license and not the corporate backing is ridiculous. Parts of Android ARE GPL (namely, the kernel.) And early on, more of it was GPL... it's my understanding that other GPL components were slowly phased out.
OpenMoko is a red herring. If Android didn't exist then I'm pretty damn sure something like Maemo/Meego (a GPL phone project sponsored by Nokia and Intel, although parts of it was LGPL or permissive to allow for some proprietary customization it wasn't all of userspace) would have rapidly achieved a large portion of the market share. Did you ever see an N800? It kicked the crap out of the G1 and iPhone 1, even though it had a resistive touchscreen.
Or do you think the rest of the world would have swallowed the stupid tax (err, I mean the Apple tax) and Samsung and all the rest of creation would have all quietly gone out of business rather than dare touch a project that had slightly more GPL code in it than early Android did?
You are out of your mind.
Yet they ALWAYS fail to recognize that GPL "lock up" of BSD code is far more common and far more insulting.... Makes GPL no better than a commercial license in that respect.
It's not locked up. That's bullshit doublespeak. It's freely available under the GPL. This permissive license ==> freedom thing is so dumb it's Orwellian. It's only the freedom to deny other people freedom. Repeat that to yourself until it sinks in: There is no freedom permissive licenses give you (that the GPL doesn't also give you), except the freedom to deny those freedoms to other people when you re-release the code.
You might as well complain after the police shoot someone who is firing a gun into a crowd that they were wrong because shooting people is undesirable.
And maybe you'll enjoy the changes that Red Hat sponsored devs (and in particular the GNOME devs) are eventually forced to adopt as their products continue to decline in popularity and their insane ambitions to become the next Apple through treating their users like dirt is realized to be harmful for business.
Re: availability of software in the distros I suppose it depends on what packages you care about. Fedora may well lead the industry in rapid-fire upgrades of GNOME and Poetteringware, but these are things I tend to not notice.
I have been informing people professing ignorance of the reason why Gnome continues to be the default in many distributions.
Is there some blindness epidemic I am unaware of? I didn't realize accessibility was the kingmaker in desktop Linux. If so, that's a bit crazy. Braille menus are available "on request" at McDonalds. They aren't the default. Neither were stickykeys in Windows.
Needing/wanting more up to date software is enough to choose Fedora over Ubuntu.
That alone is not a very compelling reason. You aren't gaining much over the latest non-LTS Ubuntu, and if you're perpetually in need of the cutting edge there are rolling release distros that would be a better fit than Fedora. PPAs offer another easy Ubuntu-hosted channel for obtaining more up to date software even if you're on an LTS release.
You do exclude it from the discussion by saying " Still, it isn't a Red Hat product. Fedora is more popular and was the topic at hand.".
I think Alpine linux is interesting. I demand you stop whatever tangent you're on right now and start talking about Alpine linux. If you decline to immediately stop what you're doing, research Alpine, and write up a dissertation on it then you are unfairly excluding it.
I don't reject CentOS; I just meant that I can't be bothered to dissect their pros and cons and official status in relation to Red Hat. The fact is I have (briefly) used CentOS and they definitely were not a part of Red Hat when I tested it, and the post I was replying to mentioned Red Hat (not CentOS, which regardless of its new management structure does NOT appear to bear the Red Hat name or logo), and Fedora is more popular than CentOS, and the very first post in this conversational thread mentioned Fedora (and only Fedora) by name.
Satisfied? Yes, CentOS is a tangent worth exploring if support is of paramount importance (given the release schedule of other projects and my own personal tastes, I think 3-5 years is good enough while Fedora's window is clearly insufficient... but to each his own), but it wasn't what anyone here was talking about. Except you.
If you're blind and GNOME is the only thing you can use then godspeed. I'm glad they exist for your sake. For all us sighted people who have even an ounce of self-respect, it seems very much as though GNOME has been acting like Apple's inbred half-brother, a toxic combination of mediocre design with an actual sadistic glee they exhibit while mocking users when they complain about the simple features that GNOME devs have purposefully broke. And when they aren't being jovial about it, they're being passive aggressive twats: they whine for civility and complain that people aren't sending them money or patches after they intentionally broke screensavers (and then they tried to lie and backpedal on their apparent motives, implying that they were just being perfectionists and a fix would eventually arrive... and then a couple years later they decide to simply kill screensavers permanently.) They're sucking up the oxygen, leading noobs astray and disillusioning them with Linux, fragmenting the desktop way worse than it was 10 years ago and for reasons inconceivable other important DEs are still putting their eggs in their GTK 3 basket. Most of Red Hat's other recent big name projects have been similarly irritating, alarming or conducive to eye-rolling with the possible exception of Docker.
So, I suspect there would be plenty of reasons to dislike CentOS, if I tested it. I concede that you may have a solid point here, but it's not one that I have the time to confirm or refute, and it does not address the initial tangent wherein I was expressing puzzlement that someone would want to use Fedora, the everyday desktop distro that Red Hat is most associated with, the distro that the original poster mentioned BY NAME, the distro that's currently more popular than CentOS.
Fedora is leading in no area that I can discern. The best I can figure is it's a lazy option for people who want slightly more up to date apps but hate non-LTS Ubuntu and can't be bothered with any of the fancier distros, or it's an option for people who are familiar with Red Hat Enterprise (or CentOS) through their job. Or it's the legacy/momentum option for people who've been with them for 10+ years. Or perhaps Red Hat seems cooler than "dumbed down" Ubuntu... which would just be sad.
it's true I was taking a rather broader "in principle" view, since the pro-HOA arguments I read here are very similar to the libertarian or conservative (that allegedly 'small-government' conservatism) arguments often used to argue that the courts should respect all contractual restrictions. Because freedom.
More specific to the HOA situation, I would say that the addition of democratic-like elements aren't enough to justify suspension of basic property rights. Specifically, "ownership" should in fact be a rather binary thing. You get to do what you want with things you own, period. I'm pretty uncomfortable with contractual rights trumping fundamental property rights, particularly when the property in question is a highly limited and non-fungible one like land. If people really want HOAs to exist then they should probably be changed to have more of a shared stake holder type of structure (so that one is buying into a company with shared ownership of all houses, not buying into a single house) or maybe a rental structure, but I'd have to think about it and research a little more.
The external implications here are just as important as the internal implications for each HOA member--an HOA would be forced to declare themselves as a single entity owning multiple lots, subject to zoning restrictions and taxation based on size. This could be an organic way of keeping HOA sizes down (so that one is primarily dealing with nearby neighbors) and keeping some non-HOA options available for prospective home buyers. I also think that having "YOU ARE NOT PURCHASING THIS HOME. YOU ARE BUYING INTO XYZ HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATION" at the top of some forms would be helpful, because some people clearly do not understand what they are getting into.
To recap: the overarching principle should be that you get to choose to do what you want with the stuff you own, and if you aren't allowed to do what you want with your house then it follows that legal structure should be changed so that you do not, in fact, directly own your house. Some interesting related issues here are violations of first sale doctrine, particularly regarding OEM software and digital goods.
I probably gave you too much room to hide in that wall of text so as a reminder:
1. The original topic here is about an alternative to Windows 10 for general desktop usage, implicitly for someone who has traditional desktop needs and previous desktop usage.
2. The topic is NOT about the perfect desktop OS for someone who is in love with their tablet and has never used a desktop computer before.
3. There every reason to suspect that many Android applications will be very cumbersome to use with a mouse. Some may even be unusable.
4. This is a very small, unofficial, closed source project with a highly questionable future that is being compared against *all* modern desktop Linux distros.
5. The topic is about today and this project, not whether Android will defeat traditional distros in the long term.
Your arguments are becoming more and more disingenuous. Yes I understand that low power mobile GPUs are an active area of development; that doesn't mean that they are even remotely comparable to current mid-high end desktop GPUs. (If you really want to bark up that tree, please post some benchmarks.) Yes, I understand and have already conceded that Android has more games. Go find the nearest serious Windows gamer and try to argue that makes it a better gaming platform. I find it amusing that you think that the fact that it has more office suites means it's better.... more likely none of the gimmicky halfassed office suites it has is decent enough to become a standard. Have you actually had to use MS Office in a production environment? With lots of kludge-y macros and database accesses?
I knew all of these things *existed* for Android; the question is whether or not they are noob-friendly, replacement-friendly or if they can even be plausibly considered to be replacements at all.
Especially for non-technical users i think choosing something like remix-os is a no-brainer.
I don't know if you genuinely believe this or if you're some kind of (forgive me) shill, but as a description of the current state of affairs this is not a no-brainer... it is brainless. Anyone who is genuinely looking for an alternative to Windows 10 on their desktop does not need to go and adopt the first non-open source, unofficial port of a tablet os produced by a relatively small and obscure team that comes tumbling down the pipeline. Ubuntu and Linux Mint have been established for the better part of a decade, have massive online communities and require no technical skill or CLI usage whatsoever to install with working flash, video playback, document editing, etc. functioning right out of the box. And these platforms will receive updates from both the community and a major commercial Linux provider for the next five years, as well as offering clear (optional) upgrade paths at the two year and four year marks.
Long term, of course Android is a threat. The public has showed an astounding willingness to tolerate a tsunami of slings and arrows to avoid leaving their precious walled garden, but that battle is going to be won (or lost, depending on one's side) based on slow encroachment, not little piddling projects like this one that overturn the apple cart by making a better desktop overnight. I haven't had the chance to play with this thing yet, but it's almost certainly more breakable, less secure and is a less reliable install as compared to the latest LTS from Linux Mint. That's not its fault--it is in fact a small, unofficial project with (reportedly) no source code available. I'm simply in favor of recognizing it as such.
At the end of each one of these "voluntary association" contracts, the vast majority of which are non-negotiable
Yes they are, you had the option to NOT buy the property...
That is not what negotiable means. Go look up "contract of adhesion". Your sophistry to the contrary, non-negotiable contracts are already treated differently than other types of contracts in common law. This is because (in part) the lack of negotiation strongly implies that one side has a monopolistic advantage over the other one, and I would go a step further and claim that when the details are examined it's usually the case that it's a monopoly that the government helped create.
do you think people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery?
Sure, but I don't acknowledge the government's right to arbitrate over any transfer of that ownership.
These pro-contract law 'freedom' libertarians really need to come up with a new name for themselves. Fascio-libertarians is actually rather fitting (though I realize it has a strong pejorative cast), seeing as how classical fascism is often described as big business backed up by the police.
but it is extremely illiberal to deny a group of people the right to voluntarily associate in a manner than they all find beneficial.
As a "deregulation libertarian" (for lack of a better term), I really despise this all-too-common perversion of the word "liberalism", whereby one is deemed illiberal if one don't agree with the unlimited privatization of the law and freedom of association is conflated with an unlimited "freedom" for deep-pocketed corporate entities (not actual, singular human beings) to unilaterally foist contracts of adhesion on individuals.
The perverted (but commonly accepted) libertarian or classical liberal argument is that every contractual restriction that the courts deem invalid is a gross example of big government trampling on individual freedom. I tend to believe exactly the opposite: that every enforcible contract provision, beyond the minimum necessary for societies and essential institutions to function, represents an enlargement of government and should be considered by default undesirable unless there is a compelling argument to the contrary. This is particularly evident in any situation where contracts are neither simple (like the sale of goods) nor negotiable. It also should be particularly evident when one person is signing a multi-page contract with a fictitious legal "person" who has access to a half dozen layers.
At the end of each one of these "voluntary association" contracts, the vast majority of which are non-negotiable, there are the police with guns drawn to enforce the terms. You can call that many things, but it is not small government, and it is not the pinnacle of freedom.
Corporations forcing consumers to use shitty, pro-corporate watered down versions of the court system with zero right of appeal (due to binding arbitration clauses) is not liberal. And as the grandparent said: allowing HOAs to snap up all the good land (a limited resource that government traditionally aims to ensure equitable access to) and then set up their own capricious set of permissible usage rules that are ultimately enforced by public police paid for with my tax dollars is not a particularly liberal state of affairs.
If you still disagree, then I have a simple question for you: do you think people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery? If not, where do you think the line should be drawn regarding the rights people are allowed to "voluntarily" sign away? It is just on this side of slavery, or are there perhaps other areas that the government shouldn't be sticking their noses into, regardless of what any piece of paper says?
Android has games that are 60GB to download and use all of the latest graphics tech? Since when? Did I miss out on something where someone managed to build a graphics card that requires very little power or cooling? It guess it's possible I missed out on some major development; I grew completely bored with the limitations of tablets about 3-5 years ago.
People have ported Eclipse and Visual Studio and all that crap to Android? And it's exactly the same, feature for feature, as the x86 version? The glibc library is available and in common use? I'm not saying it's impossible in principle; I'm talking about today, right now, re: the original poster's assertion that this unofficial, closed-source Android port is better than Windows 10 and Linux Mint for general desktop usage RIGHT NOW .
I'm not saying this project is worthless. If you want to argue this is a Chromebook killer or a handy way to get a keyboard and extra CPU power for your Android on the cheap, that is another discussion entirely. If Google starts officially supporting an x86 Android and encouraging people to develop for that, that's another discussion entirely.
Also, I don't know if you're the same person who's replied to me three times but "the point", as you say, has been rather different with every response. Is it avoiding CLI, is it the software library, or is it having a windowed desktop gui? And are we talking about a Win10 alternative or aren't we?
My response is that CLI isn't necessary at all with Mint and the windowed desktop gui surely isn't going to be *better* than all modern desktop linux GUIs. That leaves only the second point on a differing software library, and *as a dropin replacement for x86 Windows 10* it seems very clear that a distro like Mint would be better suited to the task.
If someone is fine with more tablet-y usages but just wants a more powerful processor and keyboard (on the cheap), well, that's another matter entirely.
Does it have the drivers to support typical desktop peripherals? Are Android's versions of full-featured IDEs, Office Suites, web browsers, photo editors, etc. on par with Debian's?
I'm not saying it's utterly impossible to use it as a desktop replacement; I'm saying that the idea it would be better than an XFCE LTS release for a noob is a strange one. Even if this port were utterly flawless and addressed all UI concerns (for apps that assume multitouch instead of mouse input), it seems unlikely that Google Play has the same level of heavy duty apps that Debian repos have.
Even the games would be spotty. Android has more social gaming, but it would presumably be missing all of the modern-graphics high res games (at least some of which are available via the desktop linux Steam client.)
Android is not ready to magically take over the desktop and be automagically better than all existing linux desktop distros just because someone ported it. May (not all) Android apps, as you may or may not have noticed, tend to be smaller and more simplified compared to what equivalent x86 desktop apps can do.
The person I was replying to said "CLI issues", not "software library", and he was claiming that this x86 Android port would be a superior alternative (vs. desktop Linux) for someone seeking to avoid Windows 10. I don't really know what Android looks like these days, but I'm assuming it's not exactly a drop-in replacement for x86 Windows 10. It's not better vs. worse so much as apples and oranges.
Quick, somebody get the GPL-bashers in here to remind us all about how this is so much better, how we all have so much more freedom ever since Google embarked on their "no GPL in userspace" crusade!
I understand the corporate guys are justing doing what they're told, but I can never understand why the volunteer devs contribute thousands of hours of their life to a permissive-licensed projects. Do the BSD guys feel a great swelling of pride in their chests when they think back to how their tireless work laid the foundations for Apple's OS X era renaissance, or how they helped Microsoft fix early revisions of Windows NT's networking (and hey, weren't "winmodems" introduced at around the same time?)
Remix OS's source code might turn out to be of little importance, but it should serve to remind us all that AOSP isn't guaranteed to last forever. Tthe only reason big corporations promote permissive licenses (as opposed to proprietary licenses) is because they're afraid of GPLed components gaining any more traction. It's much harder to slam the floodgates on a GPL project.
Nice try but, I have to say that's a fairly poor XKCD and a mediocre invocation.
XKCD didn't invent the concept of the rubber hose cryptographic attack (or wrench variant) and he rather bungles the joke by the RSA reference. No one uses RSA for full disk encryption. He's also overlooking the multiple cryptographic solutions (most famously, the overrated but noob-friendly Truecrypt) that used multiple nested containers so that (if you set it up properly) the attacker can't know whether you've decrypted the "real" container or not. Other comic writers might get a pass for this laziness, but not Munroe.
All that said, although I think this device is pretty damn impractical and I'm not certain what the target market is (uhhh.... Silk Road 3.0 operators? Rich people who really, REALLY don't trust their evil maids?), it does seems like it's a pretty good defense against the torture attack. Unless your attacker knows in advance you're using one of these, he's most likely going to trigger it before he gets around to torturing you for the passphrase.
I can't fathom this being any easier for a noob than (for instance) Xubuntu / Linux Mint XFCE edition, unless someone has literally grown up knowing only tablets and has never used Windows or OS X in their life. As you imply, the fact that many apps require or assume various gestures (some of which use more than one finger) means that a mouse-driven experience will be less than seamless.
That said, it's an interesting option for old netbooks and I'm particularly curious to see if it will perform well in Virtualbox or Xen. Also could be interesting if the x86 machine in question has a touchscreen.
Or, on even further reading, maybe at this point it is officially a RHAT product but not a "Red Hat" product. I really can't be bothered. The implied subject was Fedora.
On closer inspection, it appears RHAT hates them slightly less nowadays. The last time I tinkered with them there were still references to the 'prominent north american' somethingoranother (RHAT's lawyers didn't want them using Red Hat's name in any fashion).
Still, it isn't a Red Hat product. Fedora is more popular and was the topic at hand.
CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise is quite different, yes. But it also isn't nearly as popular as Fedora, the last time I checked. I was talking about the more popular Fedora product specifically, though I guess I didn't make that clear.
However, "Red Hat's desktop product" should have been clear enough. I was specifically addressing the actions and motives of Red Hat and the CentOS rebranding is most certainly not something Red Hat directly supports or encourages. But that's not to say it isn't stable or that it doesn't receive security updates.
As for ignorance, well, I suspect there are a host of reasons for not choosing CentOS, starting with the aforementioned fact that the company that does all of the legwork for it pretty much hates its existence.
Debian dependencies are not always the same as Ubuntu dependencies. (I've recently did a comparison with my default install and multiple packages had different names, for instance.) Yes, with enough luck or hackery everything Ubuntu will work on Debian (or vice versa) but Ubuntu offers the hosting (as you point out), and implementing the add ppa command, and the ppa being presumably configured for usage with Ubuntu's repos (although maybe you could host a Debian PPA on Ubuntu servers? But I've never seen one advertised), makes ppa usage easy and reliable on Ubuntu specifically.
A Gnome 2 release? Sure. But that wasn't the question. Even then, I'm not sure a Gnome 2 release from 10 years ago would be in any way better than today's XFCE4. Vintage Nautilus might be better than today's Thunar, but other than that I think XFCE4 would win out.
Fedora is a very upstream distribution, and also does very little modification to the bundled software.
Like Debian, Gentoo or Arch? Maybe I'm misinformed but I thought Ubuntu was the only one well known for that sort of thing.
I just realized I overlooked Debian's rebrandings due to FOSS concerns. But I think at least some of those issues were ironed out--or at least, firefox-esr has recently replaced iceweasel.
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I sometimes wonder if the GPL shouldn't have a "free renaming" clause, since most of the anti-GPL people I meet seem to hate it on purely guttural, emotional "IT'S A VIRUSSSSSS!" grounds. So let's change the license--you're allowed to rename it to whatever you want so that you can feel like a special snowflake. And maybe even you're allowed to insert as many reasonable new attribution clauses or other new clauses that don't affect reuse by other people. Sure. I don't care. That's not the point.
The point is that projects like these, where midgets stand on the shoulders of giants, can easily leverage the selflessness of open source volunteers into the creation of more closed ecosystems.
OpenMoko is a red herring. If Android didn't exist then I'm pretty damn sure something like Maemo/Meego (a GPL phone project sponsored by Nokia and Intel, although parts of it was LGPL or permissive to allow for some proprietary customization it wasn't all of userspace) would have rapidly achieved a large portion of the market share. Did you ever see an N800? It kicked the crap out of the G1 and iPhone 1, even though it had a resistive touchscreen.
Or do you think the rest of the world would have swallowed the stupid tax (err, I mean the Apple tax) and Samsung and all the rest of creation would have all quietly gone out of business rather than dare touch a project that had slightly more GPL code in it than early Android did?
You are out of your mind.
Yet they ALWAYS fail to recognize that GPL "lock up" of BSD code is far more common and far more insulting .... Makes GPL no better than a commercial license in that respect.
It's not locked up. That's bullshit doublespeak. It's freely available under the GPL. This permissive license ==> freedom thing is so dumb it's Orwellian. It's only the freedom to deny other people freedom. Repeat that to yourself until it sinks in: There is no freedom permissive licenses give you (that the GPL doesn't also give you), except the freedom to deny those freedoms to other people when you re-release the code.
You might as well complain after the police shoot someone who is firing a gun into a crowd that they were wrong because shooting people is undesirable.
And maybe you'll enjoy the changes that Red Hat sponsored devs (and in particular the GNOME devs) are eventually forced to adopt as their products continue to decline in popularity and their insane ambitions to become the next Apple through treating their users like dirt is realized to be harmful for business.
Re: availability of software in the distros I suppose it depends on what packages you care about. Fedora may well lead the industry in rapid-fire upgrades of GNOME and Poetteringware, but these are things I tend to not notice.
I have been informing people professing ignorance of the reason why Gnome continues to be the default in many distributions.
Is there some blindness epidemic I am unaware of? I didn't realize accessibility was the kingmaker in desktop Linux. If so, that's a bit crazy. Braille menus are available "on request" at McDonalds. They aren't the default. Neither were stickykeys in Windows.
Needing/wanting more up to date software is enough to choose Fedora over Ubuntu.
That alone is not a very compelling reason. You aren't gaining much over the latest non-LTS Ubuntu, and if you're perpetually in need of the cutting edge there are rolling release distros that would be a better fit than Fedora. PPAs offer another easy Ubuntu-hosted channel for obtaining more up to date software even if you're on an LTS release.
You do exclude it from the discussion by saying " Still, it isn't a Red Hat product. Fedora is more popular and was the topic at hand.".
I think Alpine linux is interesting. I demand you stop whatever tangent you're on right now and start talking about Alpine linux. If you decline to immediately stop what you're doing, research Alpine, and write up a dissertation on it then you are unfairly excluding it.
I don't reject CentOS; I just meant that I can't be bothered to dissect their pros and cons and official status in relation to Red Hat. The fact is I have (briefly) used CentOS and they definitely were not a part of Red Hat when I tested it, and the post I was replying to mentioned Red Hat (not CentOS, which regardless of its new management structure does NOT appear to bear the Red Hat name or logo), and Fedora is more popular than CentOS, and the very first post in this conversational thread mentioned Fedora (and only Fedora) by name.
Satisfied? Yes, CentOS is a tangent worth exploring if support is of paramount importance (given the release schedule of other projects and my own personal tastes, I think 3-5 years is good enough while Fedora's window is clearly insufficient... but to each his own), but it wasn't what anyone here was talking about. Except you.
If you're blind and GNOME is the only thing you can use then godspeed. I'm glad they exist for your sake. For all us sighted people who have even an ounce of self-respect, it seems very much as though GNOME has been acting like Apple's inbred half-brother, a toxic combination of mediocre design with an actual sadistic glee they exhibit while mocking users when they complain about the simple features that GNOME devs have purposefully broke. And when they aren't being jovial about it, they're being passive aggressive twats: they whine for civility and complain that people aren't sending them money or patches after they intentionally broke screensavers (and then they tried to lie and backpedal on their apparent motives, implying that they were just being perfectionists and a fix would eventually arrive... and then a couple years later they decide to simply kill screensavers permanently.) They're sucking up the oxygen, leading noobs astray and disillusioning them with Linux, fragmenting the desktop way worse than it was 10 years ago and for reasons inconceivable other important DEs are still putting their eggs in their GTK 3 basket. Most of Red Hat's other recent big name projects have been similarly irritating, alarming or conducive to eye-rolling with the possible exception of Docker.
So, I suspect there would be plenty of reasons to dislike CentOS, if I tested it. I concede that you may have a solid point here, but it's not one that I have the time to confirm or refute, and it does not address the initial tangent wherein I was expressing puzzlement that someone would want to use Fedora, the everyday desktop distro that Red Hat is most associated with, the distro that the original poster mentioned BY NAME, the distro that's currently more popular than CentOS.
Fedora is leading in no area that I can discern. The best I can figure is it's a lazy option for people who want slightly more up to date apps but hate non-LTS Ubuntu and can't be bothered with any of the fancier distros, or it's an option for people who are familiar with Red Hat Enterprise (or CentOS) through their job. Or it's the legacy/momentum option for people who've been with them for 10+ years. Or perhaps Red Hat seems cooler than "dumbed down" Ubuntu... which would just be sad.
it's true I was taking a rather broader "in principle" view, since the pro-HOA arguments I read here are very similar to the libertarian or conservative (that allegedly 'small-government' conservatism) arguments often used to argue that the courts should respect all contractual restrictions. Because freedom.
More specific to the HOA situation, I would say that the addition of democratic-like elements aren't enough to justify suspension of basic property rights. Specifically, "ownership" should in fact be a rather binary thing. You get to do what you want with things you own, period. I'm pretty uncomfortable with contractual rights trumping fundamental property rights, particularly when the property in question is a highly limited and non-fungible one like land. If people really want HOAs to exist then they should probably be changed to have more of a shared stake holder type of structure (so that one is buying into a company with shared ownership of all houses, not buying into a single house) or maybe a rental structure, but I'd have to think about it and research a little more.
The external implications here are just as important as the internal implications for each HOA member--an HOA would be forced to declare themselves as a single entity owning multiple lots, subject to zoning restrictions and taxation based on size. This could be an organic way of keeping HOA sizes down (so that one is primarily dealing with nearby neighbors) and keeping some non-HOA options available for prospective home buyers. I also think that having "YOU ARE NOT PURCHASING THIS HOME. YOU ARE BUYING INTO XYZ HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATION" at the top of some forms would be helpful, because some people clearly do not understand what they are getting into.
To recap: the overarching principle should be that you get to choose to do what you want with the stuff you own, and if you aren't allowed to do what you want with your house then it follows that legal structure should be changed so that you do not, in fact, directly own your house. Some interesting related issues here are violations of first sale doctrine, particularly regarding OEM software and digital goods.
I probably gave you too much room to hide in that wall of text so as a reminder:
1. The original topic here is about an alternative to Windows 10 for general desktop usage, implicitly for someone who has traditional desktop needs and previous desktop usage.
2. The topic is NOT about the perfect desktop OS for someone who is in love with their tablet and has never used a desktop computer before.
3. There every reason to suspect that many Android applications will be very cumbersome to use with a mouse. Some may even be unusable.
4. This is a very small, unofficial, closed source project with a highly questionable future that is being compared against *all* modern desktop Linux distros.
5. The topic is about today and this project, not whether Android will defeat traditional distros in the long term.
I knew all of these things *existed* for Android; the question is whether or not they are noob-friendly, replacement-friendly or if they can even be plausibly considered to be replacements at all.
Especially for non-technical users i think choosing something like remix-os is a no-brainer.
I don't know if you genuinely believe this or if you're some kind of (forgive me) shill, but as a description of the current state of affairs this is not a no-brainer... it is brainless. Anyone who is genuinely looking for an alternative to Windows 10 on their desktop does not need to go and adopt the first non-open source, unofficial port of a tablet os produced by a relatively small and obscure team that comes tumbling down the pipeline. Ubuntu and Linux Mint have been established for the better part of a decade, have massive online communities and require no technical skill or CLI usage whatsoever to install with working flash, video playback, document editing, etc. functioning right out of the box. And these platforms will receive updates from both the community and a major commercial Linux provider for the next five years, as well as offering clear (optional) upgrade paths at the two year and four year marks.
Long term, of course Android is a threat. The public has showed an astounding willingness to tolerate a tsunami of slings and arrows to avoid leaving their precious walled garden, but that battle is going to be won (or lost, depending on one's side) based on slow encroachment, not little piddling projects like this one that overturn the apple cart by making a better desktop overnight. I haven't had the chance to play with this thing yet, but it's almost certainly more breakable, less secure and is a less reliable install as compared to the latest LTS from Linux Mint. That's not its fault--it is in fact a small, unofficial project with (reportedly) no source code available. I'm simply in favor of recognizing it as such.
At the end of each one of these "voluntary association" contracts, the vast majority of which are non-negotiable
Yes they are, you had the option to NOT buy the property...
That is not what negotiable means. Go look up "contract of adhesion". Your sophistry to the contrary, non-negotiable contracts are already treated differently than other types of contracts in common law. This is because (in part) the lack of negotiation strongly implies that one side has a monopolistic advantage over the other one, and I would go a step further and claim that when the details are examined it's usually the case that it's a monopoly that the government helped create.
do you think people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery?
Sure, but I don't acknowledge the government's right to arbitrate over any transfer of that ownership.
These pro-contract law 'freedom' libertarians really need to come up with a new name for themselves. Fascio-libertarians is actually rather fitting (though I realize it has a strong pejorative cast), seeing as how classical fascism is often described as big business backed up by the police.
but it is extremely illiberal to deny a group of people the right to voluntarily associate in a manner than they all find beneficial.
As a "deregulation libertarian" (for lack of a better term), I really despise this all-too-common perversion of the word "liberalism", whereby one is deemed illiberal if one don't agree with the unlimited privatization of the law and freedom of association is conflated with an unlimited "freedom" for deep-pocketed corporate entities (not actual, singular human beings) to unilaterally foist contracts of adhesion on individuals.
The perverted (but commonly accepted) libertarian or classical liberal argument is that every contractual restriction that the courts deem invalid is a gross example of big government trampling on individual freedom. I tend to believe exactly the opposite: that every enforcible contract provision, beyond the minimum necessary for societies and essential institutions to function, represents an enlargement of government and should be considered by default undesirable unless there is a compelling argument to the contrary. This is particularly evident in any situation where contracts are neither simple (like the sale of goods) nor negotiable. It also should be particularly evident when one person is signing a multi-page contract with a fictitious legal "person" who has access to a half dozen layers.
At the end of each one of these "voluntary association" contracts, the vast majority of which are non-negotiable, there are the police with guns drawn to enforce the terms. You can call that many things, but it is not small government, and it is not the pinnacle of freedom.
Corporations forcing consumers to use shitty, pro-corporate watered down versions of the court system with zero right of appeal (due to binding arbitration clauses) is not liberal. And as the grandparent said: allowing HOAs to snap up all the good land (a limited resource that government traditionally aims to ensure equitable access to) and then set up their own capricious set of permissible usage rules that are ultimately enforced by public police paid for with my tax dollars is not a particularly liberal state of affairs.
If you still disagree, then I have a simple question for you: do you think people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery? If not, where do you think the line should be drawn regarding the rights people are allowed to "voluntarily" sign away? It is just on this side of slavery, or are there perhaps other areas that the government shouldn't be sticking their noses into, regardless of what any piece of paper says?
Android has games that are 60GB to download and use all of the latest graphics tech? Since when? Did I miss out on something where someone managed to build a graphics card that requires very little power or cooling? It guess it's possible I missed out on some major development; I grew completely bored with the limitations of tablets about 3-5 years ago.
People have ported Eclipse and Visual Studio and all that crap to Android? And it's exactly the same, feature for feature, as the x86 version? The glibc library is available and in common use? I'm not saying it's impossible in principle; I'm talking about today, right now, re: the original poster's assertion that this unofficial, closed-source Android port is better than Windows 10 and Linux Mint for general desktop usage RIGHT NOW .
I'm not saying this project is worthless. If you want to argue this is a Chromebook killer or a handy way to get a keyboard and extra CPU power for your Android on the cheap, that is another discussion entirely. If Google starts officially supporting an x86 Android and encouraging people to develop for that, that's another discussion entirely.
Also, I don't know if you're the same person who's replied to me three times but "the point", as you say, has been rather different with every response. Is it avoiding CLI, is it the software library, or is it having a windowed desktop gui? And are we talking about a Win10 alternative or aren't we?
My response is that CLI isn't necessary at all with Mint and the windowed desktop gui surely isn't going to be *better* than all modern desktop linux GUIs. That leaves only the second point on a differing software library, and *as a dropin replacement for x86 Windows 10* it seems very clear that a distro like Mint would be better suited to the task.
If someone is fine with more tablet-y usages but just wants a more powerful processor and keyboard (on the cheap), well, that's another matter entirely.
Does it have the drivers to support typical desktop peripherals? Are Android's versions of full-featured IDEs, Office Suites, web browsers, photo editors, etc. on par with Debian's?
I'm not saying it's utterly impossible to use it as a desktop replacement; I'm saying that the idea it would be better than an XFCE LTS release for a noob is a strange one. Even if this port were utterly flawless and addressed all UI concerns (for apps that assume multitouch instead of mouse input), it seems unlikely that Google Play has the same level of heavy duty apps that Debian repos have. Even the games would be spotty. Android has more social gaming, but it would presumably be missing all of the modern-graphics high res games (at least some of which are available via the desktop linux Steam client.)
Android is not ready to magically take over the desktop and be automagically better than all existing linux desktop distros just because someone ported it. May (not all) Android apps, as you may or may not have noticed, tend to be smaller and more simplified compared to what equivalent x86 desktop apps can do.
The person I was replying to said "CLI issues", not "software library", and he was claiming that this x86 Android port would be a superior alternative (vs. desktop Linux) for someone seeking to avoid Windows 10. I don't really know what Android looks like these days, but I'm assuming it's not exactly a drop-in replacement for x86 Windows 10. It's not better vs. worse so much as apples and oranges.
Quick, somebody get the GPL-bashers in here to remind us all about how this is so much better, how we all have so much more freedom ever since Google embarked on their "no GPL in userspace" crusade!
I understand the corporate guys are justing doing what they're told, but I can never understand why the volunteer devs contribute thousands of hours of their life to a permissive-licensed projects. Do the BSD guys feel a great swelling of pride in their chests when they think back to how their tireless work laid the foundations for Apple's OS X era renaissance, or how they helped Microsoft fix early revisions of Windows NT's networking (and hey, weren't "winmodems" introduced at around the same time?)
Remix OS's source code might turn out to be of little importance, but it should serve to remind us all that AOSP isn't guaranteed to last forever. Tthe only reason big corporations promote permissive licenses (as opposed to proprietary licenses) is because they're afraid of GPLed components gaining any more traction. It's much harder to slam the floodgates on a GPL project.
Nice try but, I have to say that's a fairly poor XKCD and a mediocre invocation.
XKCD didn't invent the concept of the rubber hose cryptographic attack (or wrench variant) and he rather bungles the joke by the RSA reference. No one uses RSA for full disk encryption. He's also overlooking the multiple cryptographic solutions (most famously, the overrated but noob-friendly Truecrypt) that used multiple nested containers so that (if you set it up properly) the attacker can't know whether you've decrypted the "real" container or not. Other comic writers might get a pass for this laziness, but not Munroe.
All that said, although I think this device is pretty damn impractical and I'm not certain what the target market is (uhhh.... Silk Road 3.0 operators? Rich people who really, REALLY don't trust their evil maids?), it does seems like it's a pretty good defense against the torture attack. Unless your attacker knows in advance you're using one of these, he's most likely going to trigger it before he gets around to torturing you for the passphrase.
I can't fathom this being any easier for a noob than (for instance) Xubuntu / Linux Mint XFCE edition, unless someone has literally grown up knowing only tablets and has never used Windows or OS X in their life. As you imply, the fact that many apps require or assume various gestures (some of which use more than one finger) means that a mouse-driven experience will be less than seamless.
That said, it's an interesting option for old netbooks and I'm particularly curious to see if it will perform well in Virtualbox or Xen. Also could be interesting if the x86 machine in question has a touchscreen.
Or, on even further reading, maybe at this point it is officially a RHAT product but not a "Red Hat" product. I really can't be bothered. The implied subject was Fedora.
On closer inspection, it appears RHAT hates them slightly less nowadays. The last time I tinkered with them there were still references to the 'prominent north american' somethingoranother (RHAT's lawyers didn't want them using Red Hat's name in any fashion).
Still, it isn't a Red Hat product. Fedora is more popular and was the topic at hand.
CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise is quite different, yes. But it also isn't nearly as popular as Fedora, the last time I checked. I was talking about the more popular Fedora product specifically, though I guess I didn't make that clear.
However, "Red Hat's desktop product" should have been clear enough. I was specifically addressing the actions and motives of Red Hat and the CentOS rebranding is most certainly not something Red Hat directly supports or encourages. But that's not to say it isn't stable or that it doesn't receive security updates.
As for ignorance, well, I suspect there are a host of reasons for not choosing CentOS, starting with the aforementioned fact that the company that does all of the legwork for it pretty much hates its existence.
Debian dependencies are not always the same as Ubuntu dependencies. (I've recently did a comparison with my default install and multiple packages had different names, for instance.) Yes, with enough luck or hackery everything Ubuntu will work on Debian (or vice versa) but Ubuntu offers the hosting (as you point out), and implementing the add ppa command, and the ppa being presumably configured for usage with Ubuntu's repos (although maybe you could host a Debian PPA on Ubuntu servers? But I've never seen one advertised), makes ppa usage easy and reliable on Ubuntu specifically.
Wait a second you said as a BLIND user. I just got that. I thought you meant metaphorical.
Nevermind then, carry on.
A Gnome 2 release? Sure. But that wasn't the question. Even then, I'm not sure a Gnome 2 release from 10 years ago would be in any way better than today's XFCE4. Vintage Nautilus might be better than today's Thunar, but other than that I think XFCE4 would win out.
Fedora is a very upstream distribution, and also does very little modification to the bundled software.
Like Debian, Gentoo or Arch? Maybe I'm misinformed but I thought Ubuntu was the only one well known for that sort of thing.
I just realized I overlooked Debian's rebrandings due to FOSS concerns. But I think at least some of those issues were ironed out--or at least, firefox-esr has recently replaced iceweasel.