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What is your opinion on FOSS?


Mazino

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FOSS is the acronym for Free Open Source Software. (Free or Open Source Software if you google it up)

During the past years there has been a rise of open source software and programmers across the world have dedicated their time to develop it through platforms such as Github. Blender 2.8 was released a few weeks ago, while it was considered the only capable free option for 3D artists has now caught the interest of many big companies and the latter one being Epic Games with a donation of 1.2M. How is this in any way related to anime, you ask? Khara, the anime producer behind Evangelion and Darling in the Franxx are moving to Blender. they are currently working on “EVANGELION:3.0+1.0” which will be released in 2020. Anyway, you can read more about this here.

Spoiler

khara_01.jpg

Blender is probably the most known FOSS but there are way more of them like G.I.M.P (the free photoshop version I use to say), Kirita, Godot-engine (game engine) and the list goes so on.

Do you use or know any FOSS software that you would like to mention? What is your opinion on FOSS? FOSS or proprietary software like Photoshop and Maya?

Edited by Muco
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I've been running FOSS almost exclusively since forever.  Back in my college days I bought my first computer, a Commodore Amiga 1000, which I eventually upgraded to a 3000.  But then the chicken-lips company self-destructed and folded, leaving me with some very capable but orphaned hardware.  I took a look at MSFT's W3.1 and Apple's System 7 - the latest and greatest commercial OSs at the time - and decided there had to be something better.  Both seemed like a big step backwards from the Amiga's native OS (and hardware).

Then I looked into BSD unix, and eventually found a CD containing source code for OpenBSD.  It took me 2 weeks to figure out how to bootstrap the system back then, and then 3 days to compile a working kernel for my hardware, but I did it.  Wonderful learning experience, and I've been a fan of FOSS ever since.

Some time around the 486->Pentium transition a CD of Yggdrasil Linux found it's way into my possession and I built my first  "PC" system to run it.  Since then I've been running Linux as my main OS on most of my personal systems.  (The exceptions being a couple Mac laptops, once Apple saw the light and switched to Darwin "underneath" their MacOS X.)  Over the years I've also tried RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Manjaro at one time or another.  I seem to recall I also had a couple iterations of NetBSD in there somewhere.  I've actually never even owned a Windows system.  :)

Currently I'm running Ubuntu on a (AMD) 2700X CPU in a system w/32GB RAM and an "old" Radeon RX 480 GPU.  Recently I got them to install some new Linux systems at work too, replacing some old Sun systems.  

 

Edited by efaardvark
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I have been using Linux for around 3-4 years. My IT teacher was using Arch Linux on his laptop which he brought to school every time. Curiosity took the better of me and when I asked him which OS he uses - his eyes widened and his face turned in full excitement like "DO YOU REALLY MEAN IT?!". It must be pretty reassuring to find out someone showing interest in his class that he would voluntarily come to him and ask questions. Of course I was not using Linux right off the bat as I felt uncomfortable with the command line and the interface. There was simply no "exe" file you could click upon installing but over the time (I installed ubuntu on my laptop) I got used to it. Obviously all software on linux are FOSS. I wish there will an increase of development regarding gaming on Linux, unfortunately it's the only point why i am not installing it on my PC as well. Wine and Steam are pretty limited in terms of games, which is a shame. 

I gave away my laptop with 64-bit and now using Ubuntu Mate on my 32-bit notebook - hopefully they don't ditch 32bit support like Gnome did for the upcoming releases. (support only for 14.4 and 16.4 afaik)

Linux - The Grandfather of FOSS

Edited by Muco
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Not everything on Linux is open-source.  AMD has an open driver for their gfx cards (which is one reason I have an AMD GFX card), but Nvidia is still shipping their driver as a proprietary binary blob even as we speak.  I've run close-source display drivers from X.org  on both redhat and SuSE in the past.  I've also used proprietary drivers for things like RAID cards on both Linux and BSD.  The "philosophically pure" crowd would obviously want to run FOSS at all levels, and there are certainly benefits to that, but it is also certainly possible to run closed-source stuff on an open-source platform like Linux.

Also, BSD unix is open, and far predates Linux.  Bell Labs created BSD IN 1977(?) for mainframe hardware. Linux never ran on anything before the Intel 386 came along in '85, and really wasn't anything but Torvald's student computer science project until the 486 CPU's better memory model came along in the late 80s and made it more useful/practical as a general-purpose operating system.

That's why I started with BSD, because my old Amiga 3000 used Motorola 68030 processor.  The '030 had 32-bit memory addressing and a "proper" MMU that enabled things like a protected supervisor mode for the OS back when the rest of the PC world was still dealing with 16-bit memory accesses through segments and offsets and user programs that could directly access (and thus corrupt) OS memory.

Edited by efaardvark
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1 hour ago, Kohloo said:

Apache OpenOffice is what I use instead of Microsoft Office (I'm not willing to pay for a subscription for something like that)

I often use it too.  Well, on the latest Ubuntu it is called "LibreOffice", but whatever... same code base.  :) I'm actually not a big fan of such huge, complicated apps, but it is certainly comparable to MSFT's Office suite if you're doing typical word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation stuff.

I also use tons of other "open" software.  Far more I'm sure than anyone (including me) would be interested in enough to see a full list, but things like ffmpeg, imagemagick, ghostview, gimp, gcc (and the rest of the binutils), and mysql/mariadb come to mind offhand.  

Most of this kind of stuff comes with any recent Linux distribution as a standard install option, but it is generally available separately for windows and macs as well.

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