I’m interested in finding out what people think when they see something GNU. What do you associate with it? Do you tend to be more or less interested in the project if.it is GNU or not? What is your perspective?
- 53 minutes
It’s going to have terrible UX, a complete pain to build, the contribution process is going to be some git send-email mailing list nonsense, it’s going to expect you to have read the manual (probably in
infojust to be difficult) cover to cover before you even consider using it.But on the other hand it probably has at least decent documentation, it probably works reasonably well, and there’s zero chance of rug pulls, closed source add-ons, etc.
Overall I would say it has negative connotations. If you said “check out this package manager, Fooly”, I’d think “ok might be good, might not”. If you said “check out this package manager, GNU Fooly”, I would say hell no. It’ll be awful.
It’s the software equivalent of books that have “how to read this book” sections.
- HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish2 hours
GNU and libre have the highest level of good thoughts when I see them in relation to technology.
- 5 hours
Are we talking about the license or about the software collection? GNU is a huge part of Linux operating systems and open source history. I don’t have a problem with GNU and don’t know why anyone would.
- 3 hours
Linux is only the kernel for the OS. GNU is most everything else that makes Linux (GNU Linux) an OS.
- 3 hours
That’s why I said “GNU is a huge part of Linux operating systems”. Both parts are important for the history of Linux based operating systems.
- 2 hours
Oh, I wasn’t arguing. I was clarifying for anyone reading the thread and out of the loop.
- 6 hours
I think of it as being made by one of few really trustworthy organizations in tech.
- 6 hours
I generally think of GNU as being foundational (or, old) and principled.
I really appreciate the contributions they’ve made to both core utilities and especially philosophy.
But I don’t see them as lighting up the world or adding anything new lately. I think of vaporware like Hurd with 1000 year dev cycles. I think of them recommending Linux distributions like Trisquel that let perfect be the enemy of pretty good.
Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
4 hoursTo be fair, Hurd recently made a decent splash. And strictly speaking, it’s troubles weren’t specifically GNU. Without all the legal quagmire around BSD we would all be on it. Linux would just be some niche hobby project just like Hurd. It was unfortunately a victim of timing. Both in that sense and the direction computing took in the future. Heavy IPC across multiple discrete CPU cores is a bad idea for performance. It works but it’s slooooow
- 5 hours
Honestly hard to say. Very much have respect for existing ubiquitous tools and for their copyleft and open source advocacy but they come across as very ‘elitist’ and reluctant to move to more common open source patterns (for better or worse). Like it seems that contributing to a GNU project seems challenging in needing to get involved with mailing lists and emailing patches etc. Although it seems GUIX uses Codeberg so maybe that stance has softened a bit.
- 7 hours
I don’t know much about it. All I know is GNU software is somehow important to how Linux works on the low-level layers.




