libre

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Welcome to libre

A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.

The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.

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Resources

Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in $CURRENT_YEAR, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
Social Media Recommendations:

The Linux Experiment: Weekly news host for Linux/libre software related news.
Nicco Loves Linux: Developer for KDE who makes interesting videos.
David Revoy: An incredible artist with a cool webcomic, all done with GNU/Linux.
Michael Horn: Makes videos about his various experiences with Linux.

Rules

Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm.
Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
All site-wide rules still apply

Artwork

Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft

founded 3 years ago

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COSMIC: More Alpha, More Fun! (blog.system76.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

TL;DR: System76's COSMIC first alpha is going to be in late May with new COSMIC desktop apps. The planned stable release will still be in late summer with POP!_OS 24.04.

I've been following this since it started like 2 years ago so it's unbelievable that an alpha is going to be upon us so soon. This is largely the most ambitious undertaking that any libre software group has taken in a long while (apart from Asahi Linux and graphics work).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Gawd damn, it's just GNOME. Why did they make this again??

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Not quite, there are some big notables

The entire software stack is built using Rust leveraging powerful Rust crates like smithay and iced, it's all one language rather than a mix of borrowed tooling decided by upstream.
Moreover, this means that System76 has full control over the desktop, this is a huge improvement compared to COSMIC being just GNOME 42 + Extensions.
S76 also is a hardware manufacturer, so they want to be 100% responsible for the software that comes with their machines for their clients (they deal with very new hardware)
GNOME upstream moved away/moved too slowly for System76, GNOME has its own identity that didn't line up with what S76 wanted.
More free software! Everything S76 develops is open source and contributes back to the community (see cosmic-text becoming the de-facto standard of font rendering in Rust).

If you're not convinced, see the COSMIC store (cosmic version of GNOME software and KDE Discover)

It uses very little memory compared to the Pop Shop. Searches can be performed live as they are done in parallel. Searching for "e" takes 5.5 ms on my desktop and returns 4601 results.

Personally I think the window titlebars look a bit jank and the light theme needs some work but it seems like development is speeding up greatly.