this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, Gentoo, Guix or the many, many offerings out there.
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- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
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The things some linux users are mad about kinda baffle me. Hostility towards gnome is one of them. I don't like the default experience but haven't had any issues with extensions, but I don't get updates to gnome as soon as they are released. It's annoying that system76 fed into that to promote their own stuff. Cosmic looks cool for the tiling options, and it would be nice if it's more efficient, but otherwise it doesn't seem that remarkable.
Flatpaks are another area of hated that confuse me. The amount of misinfo about how they work is baffling to me. People will install and troubleshoot arch and act like it's the easiest thing in the world and then throw their hands up and walk away if they have to open flatseal for some reason. It can be annoying if the flatpak doesn't work right or is shoddy, but sandboxed apps are good. Having everything installed system wide is a bad practice. Having to use unnofficial repositories if you want a newer version of an app is a security risk. Having app developers have to support every popular distribution and their current libraries is burden they shouldn't have to deal with.
The hostility towards gnome comes from the fact that gnome is visible, successful, evolving and innovating (also they are woke). People hate flatpak because flatpak is adjacent to gnome and normalizing the desktop. Also elitist Linux users are terminally online and ramble about the "good old days" or whatever about things nobody cares or knows about or moved past from.
"There are languages people complain about and there are languages nobody uses." Type shit.
People should be mad about the tortured economics of trying to provide a free desktop to people, instead they choose to be mad about software not following the emacs school of software design and "muh Unix philosophy"
The recent "disable middle click paste by default" thing that just popped up is another example. You'll get several comments about how users use it all the time and turning it off by default is the next step to disabling the feature altogether and a whole bunch of crap about how user hostile gnome devs are because they'll have to enter a command in the terminal to re-enable it.
It blows my mind that people will spend hours tweaking kde or hyperland or editing config files directly, and then act completely flummoxed that they have to download gnome-tweaks to get a gui for advanced customization.
"Applications should decide what middle click does"
"Have you considered you are the literally hitler of linux for doing this?!"