Everything stems back to that it is open source; meaning you, the user, have control over the software that runs on your system, not some corporation.
There are thousands of other benefits that result from that.
Don’t like the way some piece of software works? Fix, fork, or replace the project.
The software ecosystem on Linux has virtually no spyware or adware outside cross-platform apps from big tech companies, so you don’t need to do dozens of workarounds just to prevent your system from narcing on you to the NSA.
Given that CPU cycles aren’t being wasted on shit that benefits corporations like adware and telemetry, your system will probably run a lot faster on Linux.
There isn’t really a single piece of software that makes Linux better; it is the fact that GPL licensing makes it too toxic for corporations to build their make adware platforms on.
On Windows, MacOS, iOS, or Android, you can generally assume any software with internet permission is pretty much spyware. Linux software is generally built to work offline unless it must interface with remote servers for its functionality.
A perfect example would be Hexbear. Lemmy was a free software project. Hexbear needed some custom functionality and had different immediate priorities to the Lemmy project, so we took the code and made our own custom changes. Things like this happen frequently in the Free Software world. Another example is Chocolate Doom vs. Crispy Doom. The former has the deliberate goal of simulating the original DOS experience to the point of reproducing bugs, while the latter intends to add a lot of quality of life features. Both of which are actually indirect forks of the original GPL Doom source code release.
Most of the time, if you make some personal improvements to a piece of software, you can submit them to the original authors and have them included, but in many instances the changes might not be appropriate. Maybe it improves performance in once case while making it worse in another. Maybe it is not polished enough. Maybe it goes beyond the scope of the original project (adds a lot of complexity the original authors would rather not worry about). Maybe the original project is no longer maintained and there is no one to submit changes to in the first place. Could be any number of reasons.
Everything stems back to that it is open source; meaning you, the user, have control over the software that runs on your system, not some corporation.
There are thousands of other benefits that result from that.
Don’t like the way some piece of software works? Fix, fork, or replace the project.
The software ecosystem on Linux has virtually no spyware or adware outside cross-platform apps from big tech companies, so you don’t need to do dozens of workarounds just to prevent your system from narcing on you to the NSA.
Given that CPU cycles aren’t being wasted on shit that benefits corporations like adware and telemetry, your system will probably run a lot faster on Linux.
There isn’t really a single piece of software that makes Linux better; it is the fact that GPL licensing makes it too toxic for corporations to build their make adware platforms on.
On Windows, MacOS, iOS, or Android, you can generally assume any software with internet permission is pretty much spyware. Linux software is generally built to work offline unless it must interface with remote servers for its functionality.
hmm, yes I see, of course…what’s a fork?
Forking is what you do when you take an open source project and create a new parallel version that implements some behavior you want.
Usually you try to merge your changes into the original project, but if they won’t accept them, you create a fork of the project.
A perfect example would be Hexbear. Lemmy was a free software project. Hexbear needed some custom functionality and had different immediate priorities to the Lemmy project, so we took the code and made our own custom changes. Things like this happen frequently in the Free Software world. Another example is Chocolate Doom vs. Crispy Doom. The former has the deliberate goal of simulating the original DOS experience to the point of reproducing bugs, while the latter intends to add a lot of quality of life features. Both of which are actually indirect forks of the original GPL Doom source code release.
Most of the time, if you make some personal improvements to a piece of software, you can submit them to the original authors and have them included, but in many instances the changes might not be appropriate. Maybe it improves performance in once case while making it worse in another. Maybe it is not polished enough. Maybe it goes beyond the scope of the original project (adds a lot of complexity the original authors would rather not worry about). Maybe the original project is no longer maintained and there is no one to submit changes to in the first place. Could be any number of reasons.