instead of usb booting a custom Tails instance every time to defend their glorious revolution
if you don’t run Red Star OS you are deeply unserious
Wouldn’t it be better if they did use some custom linux build?
Yes, but nobody makes end user business software for linux machines, only Windows. Linux only gets stuff for servers and sometimes developing but even people who work on Linux systems all code on a Macbook. Linux Torvald himself uses a Macbook to develop linux ironically enough
Possibly, I could be wrong but also note I’m not using “nobody” and “all” like literally literally
Linux Torvald himself uses a Macbook to develop linux ironically enough
He uses Asahi Linux, a project designed to painstakingly reverse engineer Apple ARM-based Silicon to run a free operating system (whose labor is virtually all volunteer work). It is a GNU/Linux operating system that has both a Arch and Fedora distribution and the goal is to upstream everything to the Linux kernel so everyone can use Linux on Apple ARM.
Not going to disagree with your sentiment. Mainstream consumer desktops is a dominated market by the USA because it’s easier to extract profit from individuals with little to no power by themselves than it is with large enterprises who can actually negotiate using free operating systems or a stripped down version of Windows exactly to their liking. Freedom and human rights is taboo in Western societies so obviously you’re not going to get mainstream conversation around FOSS and instead petty bourgeois complaining about “enshittification.”
He uses Asahi Linux
And even then, in his 2022 email where he unveiled his usage of it, he wrote:
Not that I’ve used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging
clearly meaning he still uses (I assume) his 2020 AMD build, unless it has changed in the last 2 years.
Edit: It has changed in the last 2 years!
And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I’ve been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too. The M2 laptop I have has been more of a “test builds weekly” rather than “continuously”.
Actually the armchair western tech nerds on an insular leftist forum know the needs of experienced engineers better than the engineers themselves
using windows is an evil that has been forced on 99% of the world and blaming anyone for using it is victim blaming
But also not working towards liberating yourself from nonfree software is also counterproductive. China has the best opportunity to obtain digital sovereignty and it does have a responsibility as a socialist state to do so and not squander it for western silicon valley cash.
that requires the construction of what amounts to an entirely new supply chain though
China has been doing that before and since they started banning Western tech companies from operating in China who don’t comply with their laws. Domestic tech industries were able to grow and develop, growing the tech and IT sector in China organically. Sure Chinese companies still participate in the same unequal exchange supply chains that stem from illegal mining in Africa to factory workers in Chinese Taipei, but that’s just today. Things like belt and road have shown that new supply chains not based on uni-polar control are possible and should be worked towards.
Apple is popular in China now, but the US capitalist-imperialist class will inevitably fumble their own bag and manage to get their leverage banned in China and that hole won’t be left as a wound for China but as an opportunity (just how they are fumbling with Chinese EVs, paper-thin sanctions on Nvidia GPUs, and managing to get all their programs banned or neutered in China).
Most Global South nations are nowhere close to this level of sovereignty. If Whatsapp stopped business in South America or Europe, entire industries would halt, China would feel it and then hit back with WeChat or whatever technology their now highly trained and independent engineers can create. Of course, that’s just a hypothetical to show that large parts of the world technological infrastructure depends on nonfree software maintained in the US.
Obviously the USA wouldn’t promote free software and all the GNU good stuff because nonfree software is one of the ways they make the rest of the world bend the knee to them.
