This is why I only use & support Free & Open Source Software in my personal life. This man is going to prison. Prison.
"A California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected his claim that the “restore disks” he made to extend the lives of computers had no financial value, instead ruling that he had infringed Microsoft’s products to the tune of $700,000."
“I don’t think anybody in that courtroom understood what a restore disk was,” Lundgren said.
This is key. Most folks don't understand tech. The whole "You wouldn't steal a car!" ad campaign is an example.
If that car was open sourced, and I could download it and print, yes... I'd "steal" a car. But that isn't stealing.
A jury of your peers means your average lay person. They think in a corporate mindset. Arbitrary "losses" equal prison time.
@tinker I think the description as a corporate mindset fits way too well:
The other day I was talking with someone about linux stuff and their opinion was that there should be only one distribution, one desktop, one solution. What they didn't get was that the #FLOSS / #FOSS movement is not a corporation trying to sell you a product but a movement trying to give you the tools to overcome the digital immaturity. (I also welcome discussion on that view.)
@uniporn @tinker Afterall there are great free desktops. From my experience I think the issue is that we're not good as a community at onboarding people. I've seen too many get stuck at which distro to use.
Personally in terms of desktops I'm very partial to elementary OS's Pantheon, and I'm sure they've outshone both Microsoft and Apple in the design department.
@tinker
if you want to be left out the discussion speak up, I will keep you in otherwise.
@alcinnz
Yeah, I see this as an interesting problem especially since the choice made with the distro has rather small impact on the userXP compared to the DE which only limits first choice when getting "exotic" like something very new or something very few people use.
So using the wording of UI patterns the decision of building "your" linux setup basically lacks consistency to be intuitiv to newbies.
@alcinnz @tinker
sounds very reasonable, though I like to point out to people the ability to switch between various DEs and the main reason I see between major distros is the PM and the repos. Wherefor I usually recommend Manjaro since it is quite easy to install, brings sane repos and updates in one command. For the rest I myself am too happy with i3 (which apart from exceptions I know not to be very beginner-friendly) to play around with various DEs :D
@uniporn @tinker True. It depends on who we’re talking to whether the system’s defaults, repos, and/or package managers speaks most to them. Or if they don’t like defaults, Debian’s a good choice.
Personally I find elementary’s defaults just perfect for me, but it’s the software freedom I value recommending to others.
P.S. I wonder how well the GNOME3 or Pantheon apps play with i3? Because I’m aware of a design difference there that’d need to be configured away.
@uniporn @tinker It’s across all their apps (Noise, Epiphany, GNOME Maps, Audience, etc).
And the potential issue (though I might not understand things well enough) is that they’ve decided to merge the title bar and toolbar by leaving rendering of the window controls (minimise, maximise, close, etc buttons) to the app. As I understand i3 these controls could look ugly in i3.
@uniporn @tinker Weird, but I guess I can see that. To achieve this programmatically GNOME & Pantheon’s toolbar/titlebar’s are added entirely separately from everything else.
This definitely needs to be figured between them.