RMS, not being a judge, is incapable of "authoritatively" or otherwise determining whether this notice is legally binding.
If it is something that needs to be "confirmed" by someone "authoritatively" then you should ask a lawyer for advice. You should not ask a programmer for a "ruling".
What RMS might be saying is "we won't seek to enforce it". That is completely different.
>His opinion wasn’t necessary, but since he wrote the license, it is authoritative.
No it isn't. Licences, like most legal documents, are construed objectively. The subjective intention of the author is totally irrelevant to the meaning.
I don't think there's any inherent reason that Mobile Debian couldn't be as popular as a proportion of phones as Debian is as a proportion of desktops. Debian itself is niche. Linux use represents what, like 1% of all desktops? Yet even with the effort spread thinly over dozens of distros it's still excellent.
And it is, remember, an absolutely tiny group of people that actually contribute to something like Debian. What percentage of users has even filed a bug report, let alone contributed a fix? It must be well under 1%. You don't actually need that many people. All it takes is a dedicated few.
The fact that even then a 'foss phone' doesn't seem to be viable speaks volumes. It would probably only take half a dozen skilled people to get pissed off and channel their pissed-off energy into it, and that doesn't seem to have happened. Either it's way harder than it has any right to be, or it actually isn't that desirable. Revealed preferences and all that...
I don't really care whether you have issues with something Wayland-related. You can't "enable Wayland" anyway because Wayland isn't software, it's just a protocol. If you have a problem with Wayland it's like having a problem when you enable HTTP/2 on your web server. The problem is with the particular server, or the particular browser, or something in between. If you have a Wayland issue, you don't have a Wayland issue, you actually have a Gnome issue or a Firefox issue or something.
Regardless there is no 'Wayland debacle' that Linux is 'going through' with 'no clear path forwards'. There is a clear path forwards, and it isn't really controversial at all. Wayland is the clear path forwards, and in the long-run is the clearly better choice. But it is a big change and in an "ecosystem" that is so decentralised that kind of change takes a long, long time. Enabling Wayland in your particular environment might not be the best choice yet, whether because of bugs with your desktop environment or the applications you use, or because of features that aren't there yet or just general instability. But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better. No more screen tearing, no more buggy insecure X display server. It says something powerful that people whinged and moaned at first about it, but that their revealed preferences tell a different story: nobody was so annoyed that they were prepared to maintain X going forward. Clearly it can't actually be that important to them.
When I use a real operating system instead of an entertainment kiosk I use dmenu to open programs. But most people find using the mouse more intuitive than the keyboard.
I think it's actually quite good that you get back to the desktop by clicking the 'minimise everything' button. It reduces cognitive load to switch tasks by making everything currently open "go away" and then starting a new task, rather than just loading up every new task on top of the old one. It's like opening a new window for a new task vs just opening 500 tabs in one window. Better yet are systems with multiple desktops where you start a new activity ("Okay checking my emails is done, time to do some budgeting") by going to a new desktop and then clicking Excel or GnuCash or whatever.
The desktop is for most people just a generic collection of random stuff. That seems chaotic and bad and messy, but I think it's actually really powerful. It's like the filesystem. Probably for every type of document there is a better way to browse it. Photos are best browsed in a photo browser. Videos in a video browser. Documents in a document browser. But a traditional file browser is the best generic browser of things. Similarly, an overlay application launcher is probably better for quickly starting a program, and a 'recent files' launcher might be better for that, and a 'favourite folders' thing might be better for that, etc. etc. But in practice people tend towards a kind of 'managed chaos' that intentionally-designed systems don't handle very well. It's the backup, the default, the catchall. Every system needs something like that. That's what your desktop ends up being.
Go to an office. Is everything filed perfectly? No, most stuff is and then there's always, inevitably, a 'miscellaneous' section. Everyone has that little jar with random screws and twist-ties and rubber bands and those little tags things that go around bread bags when they're twisted and a couple of coins. Everyone has that drawer which has USB cables and old phones and permanent markers and foreign coins from that time you went overseas. You need a 'random miscellaneous shit' category.
There's no "debacle with Wayland". There was some controversy a few years ago, and some people will stick with X forever for the same reason that there are still people that will resolutely stick with sysvinit. But Wayland is not controversial in the mainstream any more than systemd is.
Snaps, on the other hand? Yeah there's certainly some controversy there. The clear aim there is a walled garden distribution. But the good thing is that you can just not use Ubuntu. Nobody is forced to use Ubuntu.
I don't know anyone with a Sonos. Yamaha's multi-room audio hasn't had any problems for me.
>Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor)
A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead.
On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time.
Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe?
I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't.
Signing up for an account with your personal details is not "doxxing yourself". Doxxing is when someone else publicly reveals your personal information on the internet.
I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is:
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card.
2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup.
3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents.
>How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to?
All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day.
And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state.
These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago.
They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter".
They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers.
So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript.
Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel is designed around a mouse and keyboard. The tiny little cells, the dragging things to be wider and narrower, typing everything - everything is designed around using a very accurate pointer and a keyboard. I have no idea how you'd use Excel productively on a phone. Even if the cells are the same size as they are on a desktop, the screen is tiny, so you'd not be able to see anything. And if the cells are smaller, then they're even harder to use. They actually need to be bigger to be a decent touch interface, and then you'd be constantly scrolling around.
The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.
If it is something that needs to be "confirmed" by someone "authoritatively" then you should ask a lawyer for advice. You should not ask a programmer for a "ruling".
What RMS might be saying is "we won't seek to enforce it". That is completely different.