Libre (from French) is sometimes used to solve the ambiguity of the word free in the English language, but it sounds kinda awkward in English and there’s certainly no consensus that this should be the official replacement, or that the term free even needs replacement.

Furthermore, the FSF who originally came up with the idea of “free software” still exists and is still called the Free Software Foundation, though Stallman uses both terms interchangeably.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

That’s not necessarily the fault of systemd.

No, but the error being hard to debug, and not being able to cancel the timeout as it’s occurring, is though.

Anyway that is been fixed on modern systems

No, I’ve had it happen more recently (I wanna say less than a month ago) with network mounts and random systemd controlled desktop processes that refuse to die.

Everybody gangsta until A stop job is running for…

As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?

Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?

Let’s say you want to start ssh-agent when you login to your desktop environment. Well, there’s a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you’d have to do it another way (autostart script or something).

So you’re considering the 22H2 builds et al. separate versions, I just consider them service packs. They come with the regular updates, and the user experience doesn’t significantly change. I couldn’t ever tell you what “build” of Windows 10 or 11 I was on, but I usually know pretty well which distro version I am on.

But I guess it’s true that they contain more feature updates than typical Linux updates.

I think you misunderstood. Windows 10 was released in 2015, and will have general support for all versions until October 2025. That’s 10 years.

The current version of Mint, 22.1, was released in January 2025, and will receive support until April 2029. That’s 4 years.

Had you installed the latest version of Mint in 2015, it would have been EOL in 2019. Had you installed Windows 10 in 2015, it would only be EOL later this year.

but when you explicitly state you are against it in the README of your project that is just wild

It’s called a dogwhistle: they’re letting other racist scumbags know that they are also racist scumbags and that their racist scumbag views are welcome, without saying anything overtly racist scumbag-y.

I use Arch myself (BTW :p), but I wouldn’t really recommend that for users who freshly migrated over from Windows.

Yes, there are ways to get extended support (on Windows too btw), but a thing that should also be kept in mind is that “support” only means security patches and bugfixes, and not feature upgrades. There is also no guaranteed continued hardware support, nor guaranteed support from third party applications. On Ubuntu there’s at least the HWE kernel, but that’s also limited in time.

It’s not criticism btw, it’s just worth mentioning that the support model on Linux looks a bit different than what you get with Windows, and users should generally be encouraged to keep up with the latest release of their chosen distribution.

True, but often the distributions have an upgrade plan (for free). In example you can install an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade 4 years later to the next major LTS release. However, sometimes this has problems, because so much time and changes are in between. This is for sure.

Yes you can and should upgrade, which is what I was trying to say really. It’s less set and forget as in “just let it update and it will keep on trucking for 10 years”.

There are distributions with longer support period. Debian comes to my mind. But I don’t know how long and there were 10 year supported distributions too.

I think only the enterprise distributions (RHEL etc) do 10 year support, but they are not very usable for a desktop system, and I can tell from experience you start to run into compatibility and support issues with software if you actually use it for that long.

Debian is ± 5 years by the way.

foot is such a lovely little program. It has everything I want for a terminal emulator: it launches instantly, it has zero lag, no fluff, excellent font rendering, excellent copy/paste handling, excellent compatibility, and it’s easily configurable and themable via a sensible, well documented config file.

TFW I realize I am a foot fetishist … 😮

If you install Linux Mint today, you’ll still be able to update it in october and beyond, for the foreseeable future

One caveat: Linux distributions, even LTS variants, usually have a shorter support period than Windows, after which you have to upgrade your distribution, which is much like doing a Windows upgrade.

A particular version of Linux Mint, the example you mentioned, is supported for 4 years, whereas Windows 10 was supported for 10 years.

Not really the same scenario. PCs that could run Windows 7 could usually upgrade to 10, people were just reluctant to do so, partly also because 8 and 8.1 were such disasters. Eventually, everyone just moved on.

Today, a lot of 10 users would upgrade to 11 if they could, but their older-but-still-fine hardware is simply being cut off from Windows support.

Counterpoint: To install this program curl ... | sudo bash

Just run DDU bro.

Just run scansfx /now bro.

Just run oobe\bypassnro bro.

Just run Chris Titus Tech Tool bro.

No Linux is too hard bro.

Harmful is just code for “threatens the bottom line of multibillion dollar companies”. There is no relation to anything that matters to real people.

the installer completely shit itself and the screen went black, could not recover from it

I don’t think that this is the standard experience people have. I’ve installed Windows 11 more than a few times for family members and for my gaming pc, and while I find Windows insufferably annoying, black screens were not part of the experience.

weird issues with my rgb and fan control software

That’s the motherboard manufacturers, that’s not on Windows.

All motherboard manufacturer software plain sucks. MSI, Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte … the lot of them. Just don’t install that garbage.

Oh, by the way, road works, 80km/h. Aaaand you’re free again! Have f- oh no, roadworks again, 80 pls. Ok done. Now you can really hit the gas! Joke, roadworks again haha, 80! Finally done, now we promise we don’t have roadworks anymore, enjoy! Aaaand welcome to the Netherlands, 100 please.

If that isn’t the most accurate description of driving through Germany, I don’t know what is :D

I always found driving in the Netherlands much more relaxing.

Ah yes, NL = Nur Links … I understand why you feel more at home there :D