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[CW: RACISM] Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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HyperbolaBSD and its kernel HyperBK (derivative of the BSD kernel) are expected to be in alpha soon-ish. This is heavily principled, everything remotely proprietary straight to the trash stuff, so the end result is you're sacrificing access to a lot of common software.
https://www.hyperbola.info/
A few years back I tried Hyperbola on the linux kernel for maybe a year. Essentially all of the issues I had were with not having access to software I wanted. If I'm sticking to software in the repositories I had no real problems with it.
What basically every issue boiled down to was: Common software X has some issue in its licensing (I never understood the technicalities of any of this stuff, so please don't ask) that maintainers of common distros are fine ignoring because they consider the the licensing issues minor and lots of things require X as a dependency. Software Y is much earlier in development, but can functionally replace most of the features we want from software X, and has no problems in its licensing. We'll use software Y and adapt the software in our repositories around that. But even if those adaptations are generally not big changes, as you get more and more software in the repos, the effort required from maintainers adds up. Because they're limited on time and funding, the end result is a lot of repository pruning.
I would bet someone with a little technical knowledge could get a lot of software outside of the repos working without a lot of effort, but I am not that someone. Honestly, it was a good OS, I did okay with what software they had available until texlive was removed from the repos. I type up math notes, so that was a backbreaker for me.
I will say that their firefox derivative, IceWeaselUXP, was maybe the best experience I've had with a web browser, but I've read from a few people that getting it working on other distros is too much effort.