I hope we see a lot more of this soon. It's disappointing to see so many hackers using proprietary OSes/editors/etc. to build systems based on free software.
Eh, that's a false trade-off. I'm more productive on a free OS, which I can customize to my needs (since I can choose a the best window manager for me from tens of good alternatives and so on).
It takes time and effort to make a good choice "from tens of good alternatives". Its great to have that freedom, but to many, spending that time and effort is an inconvenience. That is the trade off.
I don't care much about licenses or which parts of my stack are OS and which are not. I just want to create things and if using [Proprietary OS] instead of [Linux Distro] lets me work more efficient so be it.
That's a good way to have something blow up on you once you realize that you've based everything on something with the wrong licensing, and now you're on the hook for a lot of money.
Software often has very strong lock-in effects - what you choose today may what you'll be stuck with for the next 5, 10, 20 years.
I'd really love to switch to linux (tiling WMs rock). But I'm developing OS X desktop software ... so switching will probably stay a wish for the next few years :/
You could run the Inferno VM over OSX to use its variant of unixy commands, "os" to run OSX commands, and edit files and run commands from the tiling windows in Acme. That way you'd get the best of both worlds. This works for me in Windows and Linux (only the commands I run with "os" change, the rest of my environment is cross-platform), and I hear it works in OSX.
I can relate. Switching to Linux and then having a project crop up for Windows/Mac can be pretty disheartening. I suppose you can always run a VM for Windows, but it seems to be a "cheap" solution to the problem you initially decided to try and solve.
yes, not only that but I'm getting bored by people pretending they're doing anything good just because they've (finally) realized that using non-free software suffers from collaterals
I'm bored by people pretending they've gone free just because they managed to replace OSX with some exotic gnu/linux distro (and with exotic I mean whatever which isn't mainstream)
And I'm bored by people upvothing posts like this
And I know someone will tell is me who is wrong (and boring) but listen, that is just your opinion, as this is mine. One thing isn't opinionable though, svbtle isn't free, so this post really isn't a good one, for me
And if your story is about "how you reinstalled some random gnu/linux", well that is a 20 years old story; what is an hacker (news reader) interested in? the .Xmodmap settings?
The fight for freedom today seems to me to have been moved for the great part somewhere else, on the webapps. How about we "return to freedom" by debating on how we get rid of all these non-free web applications?
sure it is better than doing nothing, except in my perception HN isn't a place for average non-tech guys so I get bored by this kind of posts
About me, I'm planning (and practicing) not to release any non-free code and also looking for alternatives to a few web apps which I'm still unable to replace (as per first post). That would be a much nicer topic to discuss for me.
Installing gnu/linux, no really. Again that is 20years old story.
> sure it is better than doing nothing, except in my perception HN isn't a place for average non-tech guys so I get bored by this kind of posts
I agree. There's a lot of avoidance of criticism for fear of "negativity" on HN. Not only does this hurt the (very positive) constructive criticism by regression-to-the-mean, it also causes us to lower our collective bar, from a "collection of smart people" into something more average.
The only non-free software I can't find a replacement for is a good sound/wave editor, something with an intuitive interface. Audacity's navigation controls are just terrible.
indeed that is what in these days I would consider interesting and eventually title "Returning to Free Software" ... have you got experiences to share on the matter?
And speaking about practical solutions, I know of identi.ca and libre.fm , do you know of others?
Ah thanks. Yeah Crunchbang might look exotic now but I think it is an up and comer. It is currently #16 here http://distrowatch.com/ just above Slackware and basically offers a minimal UI on top of Debian.
Svbtle, while not free software, is on my domain, and Dustin will give a dump of my data at any time.
There is some level of irony, but this isn't about being a zealot. I have enough control over Svbtle for my needs. Blogging software is way different than my operating system.
The "point" of FSM. Watch RMS's talks. Sure they're a bit ranty, but if you're going to claim to "use as much free software" as possible then actually do it.
That means gNewSense (or whatever else is FSF approved) and no proprietary drivers.
If you're going to umm and ahh about this then don't be misleading, just say you're moving to open source, not free software.
This kind of post is counter-productive. If someone is starting to use more free software, it's very discouraging when people start getting nitpicky about stuff like binary blobs. Yes, a distro without that stuff is technically more free (and safer from spying governments), but let people come one step at a time. By switching to a GNU/Linux distro, steveklabnik is much better off than he was.
Sure, I agree, but when you refer to the distro if you're going to go to the lengths of specifically calling it GNU/Linux, then specifically call is an open alternative rather than a free alternative.
Except you don't say moving towards, you say returning, which I'm guessing is also wrong because you never used "as much free software as possible" before.
Sorry, 'moving towards' is how I've been describing it, but the title did end up 'returning.'
To be clear: this is a process. You can't do it all in one day. I have different priorities for different bits of software. Other than Ghostery, all the software on my machine is Free. Web services are a much trickier issue, and frankly, I'm more concerned about my usage of Gmail than I am Svbtle.
An awesome free-software webmail client is something that is sorely missing. sup or notmuch serve my needs well for a console e-mail client with good search/labels/conversations/etc., but most people are understandably going to want webmail. Many of the other google apps (calendar) need decent free software replacements too.
> An awesome free-software webmail client is something that is sorely missing.
Roundcube[0] has a nice list of features and a decent UI. As we (an ISP) move our mail infrastructure from Windows to Linux, we intend to replace our current (proprietary) webmail client with Roundcube.
I haven't tried it but, in theory, you should even be able to use Roundcube as a front-end for Gmail. You'd have to host it yourself (unless you find a misconfigured installation somewhere that you can "hijack") and point it at Google's IMAP servers but it should work (although I'm not sure how well).
No. If your blog post is anything to go by, almost none of the software on your machine is Free. Especially your OS!
Every program must fulfill the following requirements:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
If you can listen to an MP3 on your machine, chances are it is using a licensed codec, breaking freedom 3. If anything more restrictive than GNU GPL is used for any of the hardware drivers then it is in breach of freedom 1!
Sorry, I am very confused. Debian only includes Free Software in their repositories, right? I'm even using Iceweasel over Firefox. That's one reason I chose it in the first place.
EDIT: checking my sources.list, I do have an additional Crunchbang-specific source. So it's possible that has non-free software in it, I guess.
So, I'm wondering: are you using a Lemote? If so, why not? You seem quite... passionate about absolutism on this issue.
See, this is what people like me who have been using exclusively OSS (and FOSS) for years have had to deal with! ;)
P.S. Don't forget to enable SELinux. :)
Edit: To be fair to your co-debater, by using open-source software with minor exceptions here and there (unFree firmware in the kernel, a smattering of non-Free software, patent-protected multimedia drivers, etc.) is in the mind of Free Software activists kind of like saying that you should have strong privacy rights, except perhaps for a little bit of metadata here and there, maybe some quibbling about analysis/capture just to make it easier on everyone. Why be a zealot about one of those but not about the other?
I personally believe people are free to choose what to be activists about but that's the perspective I see.
I'd suggest that either you: a) actually list free software alternatives in this post or b) remove any reference to free software at all and replace it with whatever you want (open source has a pretty flippant definition, so perhaps that would be the best option)
And no I don't use a Leemote, nor do I use Linux or any free software at all. However I do recognize the FSF and its beliefs and people who misrepresent them annoy me. Someone will come along and read your blog and believe that the set up really is Free Software, write a blog post of their own, probably skewing the definition even more. Where does is stop. Why does no-one do research anymore!
I wasn't suggesting you don't get it. I was just highlighting a contradiction, although one that I think illustrates a point; that there is generally a tradeoff between freedom and convenience. Different people have different levels of expertise, amounts of time and tolerance of inconvenience that influences their software choices.
One other point, in the article you say:
The PRISM debacle of the last week confirmed my fears and reasoning, and so I made the decision to accelerate the schedule.
If it is government spying you are worried about then using non-free web apps is surely a much greater risk than non-free native software. At least you can stick a proxy in front of your Windows box and block/monitor where it is connecting to and what data it sends. With web apps your data could have been siphoned off to some NSA data centre without you ever knowing about it.
Also I find it mildly depressing that being able to retrieve your own data is seen as the mark of a really 'free and open' webapp. Even with the most proprietary of native software I typically still control my data. Webapps took us a step backwards in that regard and partial reversal on that front is not a sign of great progress, it's a sign that we are struggling to even maintain the status quo.
Steve, great post, but you know that Ghostery's function is a part of Adblock Plus? Just add EasyList and EasyPrivacy and disable Fanboy's.
The company that makes Ghostery is cool but alas, it's nice to keep bloat away from the browser. I'd also recommend checking out Firefox Aurora or Nightly instead of Iceweasel.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that using software full disk encryption on an SSD is a really bad idea. It increases wear dramatically, completely invalidates TRIM and works against the controller every step of the way. LVM has an option that supposedly passes TRIM through but in my case I'm pretty sure it didn't do anything.
Right. The thing is, when you wear out an SSD, you get these enormous (multiple seconds) pauses that, if you're doing anything I/O bound slow you down to a crawl. Even opening a heavy web page can trigger them. Buy a fast HDD if you want consistent long term behaviour with FDE.
The reason FDE breaks SSDs is that the implementation in LVM works at the block level. To send TRIM, the filesystem says "this block is empty, tell the controller" but depending on a thousand things, among which are cipher mode, cipher block size and other minutiae, LVM will invalidate the TRIM command. Without TRIM, SSDs deteriorate rather quickly.
Personally, I understand why FDE is needed but I'm of the opinion that selective encryption (with possible plausible deniability measures) is a much neater, if more difficult, approach.
I'm running FreeBSD on a 4 + year old netbook for close to a year now, and before that it was various unix-like OS choices, from Xubuntu, to Kuki, to Tiny Core, to Fedora, along with too many others to list as I sought an OS to suit my needs.
I wiped WinXP (eXPloitable) off my hdd years ago, and haven't looked back ever since.
My only caveat is Netflix, but this is easily fixed by booting into a persistent Debian USB flash drive installation and running compholio's netflix-desktop.
As for those who complain about having to configure their unix-like systems, you can't really claim to be much of a "hacker" if configuring your own system is a task too onerous.
After all, if a moron such as myself can do it, genius such as yours should have absolutely no problem using unix-like systems.
> One thing that I have yet to explore (but I’d like to) is to use a tool like Chef to set up my personal machine, so that I can periodically wipe everything and re-build from scratch.
I'm in the same boat. Does anyone know a good tutorial to learn how to do this with Chef or Puppet? I don't have much of an interested in learning the tools, I just want to set it up and forget it (and occasionally update it).
Do people make their Chef/Puppet configuration files public (e.g. on GitHub) just like they do with their dotfiles?
What does the NSA/privacy issue have to do with your switch? I'm curious to know how using free software could possibly protect you from the current NSA issues that have been brought to light. You are still using the public Internet (services such as email, web/http etcetera), which has nothing to do with free software. You are using telephony (well, perhaps you don't have a phone) systems provided by private companies which provide the info to the NSA. Security is still a two way street in every case. Sure, everything I use might be 'secure' but how do you know that every one you collaborate with is just as 'secure' as you? Once you send data to anyone, it's out of your hands.
I'm just asking questions. I respect the switch. I've tried several times, but I still like OS X too much to dump it. I know freedom can come at a price, such as having a lessened user experience (in some cases). I really don't feel, and have not been shown, that Apple has been reading all my data and sending it to third parties. So, on the security aspect, I've no reason to get rid of the OS that I work on and that contributes heavily to my income. Now, I use an awful lot of free software but I just can't give up OS X at this time.
As I said in the post, I made the decision to switch beforehand. One of the issues that made me finally do it was mysterious load spikes that would happen on my machine, and I couldn't figure out what was up. Like, "Why are my fans running? Top says my load is at 2, but no process is using more than 2% CPU."
With software that is Free, I can be pretty damn sure that there isn't something that's sending something somewhere behind my back.
That said, it would not help _directly_ with the NSA situation. They're related because everyone was asking me to write this post up, because they care a lot more about privacy and information freedom in light of recent events. Taking control of my own computer is just one step, it's not 'foolproof' or 'secure' by any means.
If anything, the NSA situation just confirmed what I already knew: the executive branch doesn't give a care in the world as to the intent of the law, only the letter. As someone who has... generally unacceptable political views, and expresses them in front of a reasonably large audience on a regular basis, I constantly wonder about things like some of the other stories on the front page.
I see it the same way. It's completely irrelevant that you don't have a NSA-backdoors, when you are "cached" (see in wikipedia: Room 641A), i.e. all Internet traffic (at least in the U.S.) and all phone calls are collected. We even don't know if they can't crack PGP...do we?
I have been using archlinux exclusively since 2006. I would be lost and furious without a central repository for all the updates, compiz goodies, and the free-of-malware/viruses peace of mind that only linux gives me.
I'm not sure the X1 Carbon is such a great idea. I heard that Lenovo laptops are way cheaper in US than in Europe, but here, getting MBA instead would give you cheaper computer with better screen, and way better touchpad, while going for rMBP 13 would give you computer with better performance, more memory, way better screen and way better touchpad, while still being cheaper than the X1.
Now more expensive than Apple product, while worse ... that requires actual effort!
I'm planning to do just the same with Linux, though I'm waiting for Haswell Zenbook.
EDIT: I hope I recall correctly on X1 having TN screen.
If you want to run Linux, Macbooks are not that great, as it takes ages to get support for each generation. You could buy a second hand or refurb one perhaps. I bought an old cheap discontinued model Lenovo (X201i) a few years back and put an SSD in. It could use more memory, although you tend to use VMs less on Linux than on OSX as you can run code natively. Should be good for a few more years.
Chromebook Pixel is actually a really nice laptop that "just works". Even the touch screen has driver support. You can chroot Ubuntu, or, wipe and go all-in.
It's quite possible waiting for Haswell would make sense, but when I need a computer, I just buy one; there's always something new coming around the corner. Others with different tolerances may choose differently.
I think the definition here was Free Software, which considering it doesn't seem to have a public repository with the source code, means that it is nonfree.
Just in case that's not clear, when people capitalise "Free Software", they're generally referring to the definition used by the Free Software Foundation.
For me, it is a matter of moving in the right direction. I can't run on all free software. For example, I had to dig my old Windows laptop out of my junk closet today to do a homework assignment (without warning, the last assignment for the Cousera Data Science class requires Windows :-( )
Also, I prefer Android (not free software, but at least more open) but the are a few apps on my iPad I really like so I am not giving away my iPad anytime soon.
GNU/Linux really isn't an option for laptops until the battery life improves. Yes, yes I know PowerTOP helps, but 3 hours under even the most minimal distro vs. 8 hours under Windows is unacceptable.
(Note: I know it's the hardware manufacturers fault for not releasing power related drivers, but as if the end user cares!)
It does take some tinkering to get things setup right, but on my Asus Zenbook UX32VD I do get ~5 hours of battery life for simple usage, which is the same as the advertised battery life with Windows. This is running Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest linux kernel (3.9.6 atm), laptop-mode, bbswitch to turn off the discrete graphics card, power saving mode on for the wifi card etc.
IMO its paramount to be running recent kernels, both for good battery life as well as compatibility with the latest hardware.
Agreed. With just a bit of tweaking I have my x220 using around 8 watts with average use, getting 10+ hours. Windows only gets around 8 hours on the same system.
This looks like a post from years ago. I'm suspicious that this guy is just a windows apologist looking to spread FUD.
I bought Samsung's 900X and installed FreeBSD on it. I could tweak it and get 4+ hours of play on it. But it involved tweaking with the config params a lot and worrying what I'm about to run, will it have enough power, what settings to turn on, what to disable.
So yes, I'd like to have a good laptop, with a long battery life that supports open source/free software OSs but I'd also like some convenience too.
I have an IBM x60, x61 tablet and several recent Asus lappys, all had terrible battery life out of the box under several different distros. After fiddling they all had _better_ life but nowhere near what I got under xp 7 or 8.
It's great if the HN community can config their OSes to get every watt out of it, but the truth is the lay man doesn't know, doesn't care and doesn't want to know how to do that...
> It's great if the HN community can config their OSes to get every watt out of it, but the truth is the lay man doesn't know, doesn't care and doesn't want to know how to do that...
How is this even relevant? We are the HN community, right? Where are these lay men? I don't think the OP as targeted at lay men.
I'm starting to think all this talk of "the end user doesn't care" or "the lay man doesn't want to know" are all just euphemisms for "I want it to be easier for me".
Which is fine, but then just admit it, instead of hiding behind a hypothetical end-user.
I have got an x200 too, and i am between 5 and 10 hours depending mainly on screen brightness and software run. I have no idea how much i'd get on windows, as i never used it on this hardware.
If you want another one, my trimmed-down Arch install gets better battery life than Windows on my Lenovo T410. Around 6 hours versus 4 with the extended batter, without a lot of nitpicky optimizations.
Which hardware is that? I get roughly same battery life from the original Windows Vista and from CentOS on this Thinkpad x200s.
As you say it is question of drivers/hardware control so building up knowledge of the machines to avoid would help as the original article suggested. Older hardware usually means more support in GNU/Linux because there is time for the drivers to catch up.
Does anyone have a pointer to Linux laptop tuning-related advice? I've got a Dell Vostro V131. I never run Windows on the battery and I didn't know that four hours was short!
My current stance is that I'm fine with using any device not internally linked to an online identity. I.e., not associating my user account with an apple ID.
I still think of OS X as an open platform since I can use entirely free software alongside Apple's amazing apps. I also still trust that the Mac's limited market share makes known backdoors less valuable to the powers that be, and more dangerous to Apple's reputation if discovered by anyone else.
Using iOS, on the other hand, necessarily waives the right to privately install software. That's one I won't give up.
vim, tmux, zsh, mutt (ppl & ldap for addressing), vimperator, qemu, pass, homebrew, seahorse, general programming languages, general unix utils, pandoc (& LaTeX), ffmpeg, kdenlive, lots of associated plugins and helper scripts, keyremap4macbook, tarsnap, rtorrent, nginx, plex. Probably much more in the future (homebrew's repo is huge); I'm just recently making the switch from Arch.
I'll need a better free & open cloud sync solution, but I was using Dropbox on Linux anyway.
This isn't true unless you limit yourself to key exchanges that are entirely online. Offline key/certificate exchanges will still be resilient to online MITM. Attack vectors on implementation notwithstanding.
Of course SSL-type stuff is out. My guess is that many governments have their hands in the CA cookie jar for a long time now.
How would you ever prevent whoever gets the information to pass it to secret services agency?
That is why as European I find the whole PRISM discussion overblown as if people weren't aware secret service agencies have been doing this for years all over the world.
> How would you ever prevent whoever gets the information to pass it to secret services agency?
I think it is about third parties. If I can't trust the person I am communicating to, why would I want to tell this person any secrets?
> That is why as European I find the whole PRISM discussion overblown as if people weren't aware secret service agencies have been doing this for years all over the world.
No matter how much "free" software you will still be tracked. The government has access to all the data you use on their internet via service providers as well as the internet hubs.
Besides the government the data that the companies collect is used to improve their software, so is that really bad? I agree I do not like being snooped on, but the government is the only body I really have any interest in because it is in the constitution not to snoop on me without cause, the company (usually) doesn't provide such assurances/promises.
I primarily use gnu/linux and I'm planning to upgrade my laptop. Any recommendation? rMBP, Zenbook, Carbon X1...? Long battery life and performance are the primary criteria.
I have a lenovo x230 that works great for me... It's not as high-res as an X1, but it is super easy to swap in 16G of ram and an SSD. I think the X1's ram is soldered. I also have an extra battery that snaps onto the bottom which will give me ~10-12hrs of total battery life when I'm going about my usual business.
I still have improvements to make, but what I have works well so far. Please let me know what you think, and suggest ways to make this setup even better.
A crunchbanger for 2+ years, recent convert to elementary: http://elementaryos.org , especially if you are looking for 'polish'. Do check it out once its out.
Well, I <3 eOS, and I am developing for it, and chat to the devs on the daily (#elementary-dev on Freenode). Great guys, great OS.
Thing is, it _does_ take away a lot of the "choice". It's very Mac influenced, and has a "convention over configuration" and "opinionated" view on how things should work.
This is not a bad thing, if it fits you (like it does for me!). However, a lot of hackers on here won't be keen, considering their opinions on Unity anyway ;)
Do give it a spin in a VM and see what you think, however!
Personally, I have a Samsung Series-5 ultrabook 13", running Ubuntu 13.04 - it's brilliant. I've used Linux as my daily on my laptops since 2005 :)
Lot of comments on what exactly constitutes free software (and the snarky insinuation that somehow only the FSF can determine what exactly that means).
Look software either is or isn't free. The four laws were created by Richard himself for the FSF! What this blog talks about isn't free software. It is open source software.
It's like saying that you're a vegetarian but you eat meat every third meal. You're just not a vegetarian.
For the record I don't even like free software but I find people who use it is a buzz word as annoying as kids who claim to 420 blaze everyday.
You have it backwards. Free with provisions (I.E. "You can do all of the above, except deprive X") is not free. Open isn't just what the blog talks about. The title of the thing is "Returning to Free Software".
BTW. I'm not a fan of GPL because I feel that too is restrictive.
Even the distro he suggests is not free. They bundle drivers and codecs which have proprietary licenses. By doing that they exclude themselves completely from the "Free Software" category.
Don't knock "Free with provisions" so easily. The license is dual-hatted as a license for the end-user and a license for the software distributor.
To keep freedom for the end user it is required to place restrictions on the distributor. To keep freedom for the distributor/author it is required to place restrictions on the end user.
So "Freedom" is in the eye of the beholder, and people forget that FSF and RMS are on a political, not an engineering mission, which requires licenses like GPL.
If you're just trying to do an open development process because such software "works better" then your view of freedom will never be the same as FSF's, and then licenses like BSD or even MsPL might be just fine.
1) In Firefox get the "DownloadHelper" helper plugin.
2) Visit the page (hopefully you still don't have Flash plugin in the first place or have completely extricated it from your system)
3) DownloadHelper icon will start animating. From the dropdown select your resolution and download.
4) The video format you have downloaded is patented and must be erased quickly. Therefore, download Handbrake ( http://handbrake.fr ) which is open source and convert it to a free format.
5) Run a disk eraser program to ensure that the deleted offending technologies are in fact deleted off your hard drive.
Coming from OSX, how do you handle the cmd + * to ctrl + * switch?
After years of cmd key combinations I always find hard to switch to ctrl key combinations.
The app switching with alt instead of cmd kills me too.
Remapping is very easy. Many resources recommend the xmodmap command, but I've had much more success on recent distros by setting xkbmap options in the Xorg config.
A big list of possible rules are located at
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst
Changing alt+tab to ctrl+tab is easy with most window managers.
(I find the alt/command physical key much more ergonomic than the physical control key.)
You tough it out like a grown adult hacker, and don't whine about it during the 2-3 days it might give you trouble (cursing is fine, and in fact encouraged).
I've used OS X since it was called 'System 6,' and used GNU/Linux on and off for years, so it's generally just a few days of 'dammit.... Dammit. Dammit.' and then I'm fine.
