@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:26 PM@hal_pomeranz If it's up to me to pontificate, I think it will happen sooner than people might expect. It will either an explicitly anti-AI OS like NetBSD or a pure fork that focuses on a welcoming community and modern tooling.
@mhoye @hal_pomeranz hardware support is I guess the biggest stumbling block. A few years back someone in .. I think? .. the redox community was talking about running linux in a VM to use its drivers with hardware passthrough, then copying data back and forth. The *BSD world seems to have the "rump kernel" idea as a similar thing. I'd love to see something like that, I wish I still had the energy & skills to attempt to contribute :(
@hal_pomeranz @mhoye BSDs are a shame, honestly. Fragmentation in the Linux world is bad, but fragmentation in the BSD world is on another level.
@hal_pomeranz @mhoye indeed, the moat of Linux was always hardware support, which was there because people got paid to make it happen. Community isn’t a competitive advantage until you have software most folks can even run on their machines. Linux being anti-community is nothing new, as you pointed out. It’s being run as a business, and from what I can tell quite a profitable one. Perl of course had nothing like that.
That’s not to defend any of that. It’s just… what it is.