WTH happened to the freedom to choose for yourself in Linux and why isn't anybody doing anything about bringing it back? Linux is beginning to feel more and more like Winblows. At this rate we might as well rename it to Winux! Change is a good thing but when it comes voluntarily, not by force!
In the past few years many things were forced on the users and while simply accept what was forced upon them, I won't!
• Firefox started behaving like Gnome forcing their views about how the browser should look like and behave to the point that nowadays it's a step short of digital dictatorship.
• The linux kernel (from 6.12) started forcing things and aggressive policies that keep the CPU in something similar to turbo mode which means 40°C or higher in idle mode.
• Gnome started forcing rounded corners, GTK4 and themes with closed access to the assets, thus you can't change their themes. What's worse, when you cange something in the code of one of their programs, they move the code to that thing a library so deep, so that you can't find it again and can't change it. Been there, done that, that's why I'm mentioning it. Not to mention about banning from their forum all the unhappy users - that's also a form of forcing. And now they're about to force Wayland without giving you a choice. Either Wayland or nothing.
• Cinnamon also did a forcing of their own - removed metacity thus removed the freedom to use decorations of your choice. Without metacity you can only choose a theme and window decorations they choose for you. The excuse that "metacity is too hard to support" was too flat and tasteless, considering metacity simply "hangs" there and does almost nothing. Plus, keeping the package as a dependency to cinnamon but lying about its support is another lie it's hard to support it. If it's so hard to support it, then why keep it in the dependencies list and the desktop keeps using it? This is another forcing of the user. Cinnamon team is slowly but surely turning the desktop into a Gnome clone but keep denying it. And yet the look of Cinnamon 6.x shows exactly that.
• Pipewire - someone decided to force a new sound server to replace pulseaudio and guess what? Nobody asked the user if they wanted it, it just happened. Which naturally worsened the sound quality in linux and led to muffled sound (imagine an old Russian cassette tape recorder with the brand VEF which was mono), crackling here and there, especially on games. So with pipewire one has to choose between soundless games or crackling games, especially with old games like "Kingdoms of Amalur", "Mass Effect Andromeda", etc. Some choice, eh? I found a way to get rid of it and remembered what crystal clear sound in linux sounded like.
• Somewhere along the way (IDK which version exactly) linux kernels started rewriting and/or entirely deleting kernel options set by the user. On Feb 24th I decided to do a full system upgrade and a few things immeduately disappeared - cpupower config file which at the time was simply a file without an extension. Considering the new cpupower.conf contains exactly the same thing as the extensionless file, they could have just renamed the file to cpupower.conf. But no, someone decided it was a great idea to delete that file. On top of that the new kernel removed these options I had entered myself and I used for years:
They had left me only with "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" just so I'm not 100% screwed up but that was probably a miss by whoever decided to replace user settings because they didn't know about the existence of this specific option. My options were replaced by a bunch of useless BS options which led to a WAY hotter idling CPU (44°C when idling compared to 28-30°C when idling WITH my custom options) which was working at maximum frequency even when doing nothing. Clearly someone "up there" (in kernel.org) didn't want me to be able to properly shut down or suspend my computer or to be able to view the hardware temperatures properly in conky or to properly unload the memory. When you remove "acpi_enforce_resources=lax" conky stops being able to read the sensors; removing "transparent_hugepage=never" leads to both the system and conky show a huge amount of RAM being used when in fact it's not. Like, run just GEdit and it would read 12 GiB were taken and even if you close GEdit, the taken amount of RAM doesn't drop. With the removal of "intel_pstate=disable" the Intel's PowerState starts managing the CPU but it's too glitchy and ineffective, that's why it has to be disabled and let cpupower manage the CPU states. Unfortunately for whoever did this "change", I'm a backup maniac which means that my backup has a backup of the backup of the backup, so it wasn't hard to restore my kernel settings.
But the $1 mil questions is "why at all they had to go this far at all?". The new kernels work just fine with these options, so there's no good reason for removing them. There is one possible explanation but even if I said, you wouldn't believe me - at least not until it's too late.
• And now everyone's doing everything they can to kill X11, thus forcing us to use the Wayland which isn't ready at all, considering many apps weren't made to work under Wayland. X11 might be old but it's a battle tested veteran which works flawlessly and it's stable.
• Even Arch Linux went to force things on the users. Just because "nvidia recommended something", let's force it on the users and not give them a choice. You see, because nvidia recommended the nvidia-open driver, the Arch Linux team decided to force it on us. Not on me, though. On top of that, instead of making the transition easy, they decided to split gcc-libs into a dozen smaller packages which makes the installation of nvidia-open not only hard but also full of conflicts that lead to a BSOD with kernel panic. And everything would have been A LOT easier if those small packages were integrated into gcc-libs and then the user would have to replace the package nvidia with nvidia-open (or nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms). But no, they had to split gcc-libs into a dozen other packages and on top of that created a new package named libgcc which conflicts with gcc-libs and when you attempt to replace it, it either cries about files that already exist in the filesystem, or directly goes to deleting pretty much everything and 5 minutes later - happy kernel panic, guys! Currently the only options one has (if they're so insistant to have the latest glitchy and not ready for daily use open driver of nvidia - I tried it, it sucks on so many levels I could write a book about its flaws) is to either fully reinstall Arch or dissect it like a frog, remove its spine and then put it back upgraded by chrooting into it. But that's a heavy surgery not everyone can do or is willing to do. I might attempt it some day in the distant future, but for now - back to 6.11.9 and 555.58, the perfect combo of kernel and nvidia driver which behave as if they were written for each other that don't turn my system into an oven and don't remove options from the linux line in grub.cfg.
So I'm asking again - where the hell did the linux freedom go and who's gonna bring it back? Cuz I'm sick and tired of all the forcing of hands which is typical for a certain corporation from Redmond, WA and I wouldn't be surprised if all that forcing is their doing.
You may call me crazy or whatever you want, I don't care. But I know what I'm seeing and it's not for the first time I smelled danger and nobody believed me. I can read the fine invisible print most people can't even see. Those of us who can - we'll be prepared when the third "E" ("Embrace", "Exsanguinate", "Extinguish") is completed while the rest simly cry or protest. RN we're at the second "E".
In the past few years many things were forced on the users and while simply accept what was forced upon them, I won't!
• Firefox started behaving like Gnome forcing their views about how the browser should look like and behave to the point that nowadays it's a step short of digital dictatorship.
• The linux kernel (from 6.12) started forcing things and aggressive policies that keep the CPU in something similar to turbo mode which means 40°C or higher in idle mode.
• Gnome started forcing rounded corners, GTK4 and themes with closed access to the assets, thus you can't change their themes. What's worse, when you cange something in the code of one of their programs, they move the code to that thing a library so deep, so that you can't find it again and can't change it. Been there, done that, that's why I'm mentioning it. Not to mention about banning from their forum all the unhappy users - that's also a form of forcing. And now they're about to force Wayland without giving you a choice. Either Wayland or nothing.
• Cinnamon also did a forcing of their own - removed metacity thus removed the freedom to use decorations of your choice. Without metacity you can only choose a theme and window decorations they choose for you. The excuse that "metacity is too hard to support" was too flat and tasteless, considering metacity simply "hangs" there and does almost nothing. Plus, keeping the package as a dependency to cinnamon but lying about its support is another lie it's hard to support it. If it's so hard to support it, then why keep it in the dependencies list and the desktop keeps using it? This is another forcing of the user. Cinnamon team is slowly but surely turning the desktop into a Gnome clone but keep denying it. And yet the look of Cinnamon 6.x shows exactly that.
• Pipewire - someone decided to force a new sound server to replace pulseaudio and guess what? Nobody asked the user if they wanted it, it just happened. Which naturally worsened the sound quality in linux and led to muffled sound (imagine an old Russian cassette tape recorder with the brand VEF which was mono), crackling here and there, especially on games. So with pipewire one has to choose between soundless games or crackling games, especially with old games like "Kingdoms of Amalur", "Mass Effect Andromeda", etc. Some choice, eh? I found a way to get rid of it and remembered what crystal clear sound in linux sounded like.
• Somewhere along the way (IDK which version exactly) linux kernels started rewriting and/or entirely deleting kernel options set by the user. On Feb 24th I decided to do a full system upgrade and a few things immeduately disappeared - cpupower config file which at the time was simply a file without an extension. Considering the new cpupower.conf contains exactly the same thing as the extensionless file, they could have just renamed the file to cpupower.conf. But no, someone decided it was a great idea to delete that file. On top of that the new kernel removed these options I had entered myself and I used for years:
Code:
acpi=force acpi_enforce_resources=lax intel_pstate=disable transparent_hugepage=neverBut the $1 mil questions is "why at all they had to go this far at all?". The new kernels work just fine with these options, so there's no good reason for removing them. There is one possible explanation but even if I said, you wouldn't believe me - at least not until it's too late.
• And now everyone's doing everything they can to kill X11, thus forcing us to use the Wayland which isn't ready at all, considering many apps weren't made to work under Wayland. X11 might be old but it's a battle tested veteran which works flawlessly and it's stable.
• Even Arch Linux went to force things on the users. Just because "nvidia recommended something", let's force it on the users and not give them a choice. You see, because nvidia recommended the nvidia-open driver, the Arch Linux team decided to force it on us. Not on me, though. On top of that, instead of making the transition easy, they decided to split gcc-libs into a dozen smaller packages which makes the installation of nvidia-open not only hard but also full of conflicts that lead to a BSOD with kernel panic. And everything would have been A LOT easier if those small packages were integrated into gcc-libs and then the user would have to replace the package nvidia with nvidia-open (or nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms). But no, they had to split gcc-libs into a dozen other packages and on top of that created a new package named libgcc which conflicts with gcc-libs and when you attempt to replace it, it either cries about files that already exist in the filesystem, or directly goes to deleting pretty much everything and 5 minutes later - happy kernel panic, guys! Currently the only options one has (if they're so insistant to have the latest glitchy and not ready for daily use open driver of nvidia - I tried it, it sucks on so many levels I could write a book about its flaws) is to either fully reinstall Arch or dissect it like a frog, remove its spine and then put it back upgraded by chrooting into it. But that's a heavy surgery not everyone can do or is willing to do. I might attempt it some day in the distant future, but for now - back to 6.11.9 and 555.58, the perfect combo of kernel and nvidia driver which behave as if they were written for each other that don't turn my system into an oven and don't remove options from the linux line in grub.cfg.
So I'm asking again - where the hell did the linux freedom go and who's gonna bring it back? Cuz I'm sick and tired of all the forcing of hands which is typical for a certain corporation from Redmond, WA and I wouldn't be surprised if all that forcing is their doing.
You may call me crazy or whatever you want, I don't care. But I know what I'm seeing and it's not for the first time I smelled danger and nobody believed me. I can read the fine invisible print most people can't even see. Those of us who can - we'll be prepared when the third "E" ("Embrace", "Exsanguinate", "Extinguish") is completed while the rest simly cry or protest. RN we're at the second "E".
