it wasn’t the right GPL. pretty sure GPLv3 was a reaction to Linux adopting GPLv2

comparing Linux to Windows is hilarious.

let me introduce you to Richard Stallman, the OG Linux hater. the author and advocate for GPLv3 thought Linux was too corporate, too compromising to corporate interests.

this world of technology is about compromise. life itself is about compromise. if you want to create your own OS, your own programming language, your own set of standards, go ahead. no one is stopping you.

except, you don’t actually want that. you want text editors, browsers, email, and video games. those things depend on standards, and those standards are shared by other interests, whether you like them or agree with them or are morally aligned with them or not. that’s the sacrifice we make to fly on an airplane or drive a car on public roads or use publicly created software.

look into Free Open Source Software. not OSS, FOSS. there’s a difference. you should be cognizant of the tradeoffs.

heck maybe read some Marx/Engels.

will recommend. just use Tailscale. you may distrust any of these OIDC providers, but that doesn’t mean they can see your traffic. long term if you’re paranoid move to Wireguard or Headscale, but this is so simple it’s a no-brainer

i mean there’s a ton of alternative Python runtimes. i think Rust and Zig are compelling alternatives to C++, and these projects never felt like cash grabs to me. C++ is being systematically removed from high profile systems software for a good reason: it’s a nightmare to maintain. and Typescript support is much appreciated; JavaScript toolchains are nightmarish. all in all i think these alternative runtimes solve real problems.

i understand the cynicism, but these are software products that have to be funded to be successful.

dang. i kind of viewed Deno as the Firefox of JS runtimes, especially after what happened to Bun. the headline was initially encouraging; Cloudflare is doing some good work in the Rust networking systems space. i hate that they’re shutting it down though. let’s be realistic: without a core team working on feature parity with Node.js the project is effectively dead.

no shame in getting a VPS. it might cost you more over the long term if you want to run any real workloads or store anything on it.

what i would do is get your hands on some sort of computer you can attach storage to.

what i do is i have a small VPS that i expose to the internet that routes traffic to my home server(s) over my Tailscale VPN. that way i get the benefit of having a stable public IP, some traffic protection from the provider, and a stable failsafe in case my home internet or power or whatever goes out, and it’s a lot cheaper to run workloads and store files on my local machines than to rent all that out. my workloads can be pretty heavy, so i would end up paying hundreds if not over $1k per year, which is easily enough for a machine that can do most anything you need.

my hot take is that a distro at the end of the day is just a package manager and an install script.

the question i would ask is: what do you want out of your package manager?

this would be an odd question for your given non-Linux user because their package manager before was called “fuck it YOLO”.

i’ll go through some that i use or have used.

apt/rpm/etc: stable. designed for the Linux of the 90s. uptime is king. i end up using these usually out of network effects. some popular package uses it in their Docker file or my VPS only supports these. they’re boring, but that’s on purpose. updates are purposeful and vetted (relatively). these are your Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc flavors.

pacman: seriously just a great design philosophy imo next to the others. rolling release. no versions. fix forward. also with the AUR, you get your “fuck it YOLO” packages back in a way that they can actually be maintained, updated, or nuked as appropriate. if you ever caught yourself waiting for a CUDA release on apt, this is for you. Arch, Mankato,… i think there’s a ton of vibe coded configs that all pretty much amount to Arch.

nix(/maybe guix?): a software engineer’s package manager. everything is declarative, reproducible, and version controllable. what was that thing i installed last weekend? it’s in the commit log. need 3 different C compilers/graphic drivers/toolchain dependencies installed? handled by the OS, and cleaned up when those versions change. this is my current rig cuz it helps me keep a bunch of machines in sync for my home projects.

Gentoo and LFS and anything else would be a bit much.