“For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session”

So happy to read this as there is always somebody still claiming that “Wayland does not work” and “nobody wants to switch to Wayland” just because they have not.

Also great to see that the plan is for Wayland on FreeBSD as well so the Open Source desktops can stay aligned. GNOME on FreeBSD is more problematic, not because of Wayland but because of Systemd.

I got a laugh at the end as I have also experienced that the hardest part about converting parents to Linux is them not knowing their passwords.

Reading all the comments (between Kent and Linux), the problem is that the bcachefs dev thinks that his project (the filesystem) is the critically important one and that the Linux kernel needs to bend to his will.

I am a bcachefs user but it is pretty damn obvious to me that the production Linux kernel is more important than an experimental filesystem.

There is no reason that Kent Overstreet needed to do this.

I love bcachefs but I am so angry at him for making this happen.

Ok. So now both Apple and Microsoft are distributors of the Linux kernel. What a timeline.

Trump took office on January 2025. Boycott started in February 2025. Ya, you really got us with those 2024 numbers. “Mike drop” indeed.

All that does is highlight how much they have to lose. Canadians were 20% of their tourism in 2024. Let’s get that down to zero.

He is totally correct and it is great to see him finally step in to settle this drama. Hopefully it will reduce the level of noise going forward.

I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.

Jellyfin has been rock solid for me, especially since the move to .NET 8. Looking forward to this release.

Wayland is the future. It has already surpassed X11 in many ways. My favourite comment on Phoronix was “When is X11 getting HDR? I mean, it was released 40 years ago now.”

That said, the fact that this pull request came from Valve should carry some weight. Perhaps Wayland really is not ready for SDL.

I do not see why we need to break things unnecessarily as we transition. This is on the app side. Sticking with X11 for SDL ( for now ) does not harm the Wayland transition in any way. These applications will still work fine via Xwayland.

Sure, a major release like 3.0 seems like a good place to make the switch. In the end though, it is either ready or it is not. If the best path for SDL is to keep the default at X11 then so be it ( for now ).

Microsoft must make 40% of their revenue off of Azure at this point. I would not be surprised if more than 50% of that is on Linux. Windows is probably down to 10% ( around the same as gaming ).

https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/

Sure there are people in the Windows division who want to kill Linux and some dev dev folks will still prefer Windows. At this point though, a huge chunk of Microsoft could not care less about Windows and may actually prefer Linux. Linux is certainly a better place for K8S and OCI stuff. All the GPT and Cognitive Services stuff is likely more Linux than not.

Do people not know that Microsoft has their own Linux distro? I mean an installation guide is not exactly their biggest move in Linux?

If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.

Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.

What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.

In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.

The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.

While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.

In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).

People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.

The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).

Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.

As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.

If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.

Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.