A devastated Software Systems student, libre software promoter. Sometimes I draw pixel art. Very fond of classical Computer Science and Touhou project.

Autism® Inside™

  • 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 28th, 2023

help-circle











  • raubarno@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhich is better: Linux or GNU/Linux
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    As the others made a good point, Linux is the kernel (program that connects hardware altogether and manages processes). GNU is an organisation beginning in 1983 that made some vital userland programs (Bash, GCC, readline, GNOME, GTK, GIMP, etc.) as a replacement of the proprietary ones found in UNIX and Windows. Linux is created by a Finnish student Linus Torvalds and is not a part of the GNU project but it’s been licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the first free software license.

    Linux is used by a lot of companies, and some of the products that have Linux inside refuse to accept the paradigm of software freedom. Examples of this are: Chrome OS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Google Android and some (but not all) appliances (like routers) that are locked-in and contain proprietary blobs.

    Therefore, in technical discussions, I use the word “Linux” to refer to the OS, as “this software is compatible with Linux”. But, when I want to stress out software freedom, given a large influence of the GNU project, I say “GNU/Linux”.







  • There are programs (LyX, TexMacs) that implement WYSIWYG for LaTeX, TexMacs is exceptionally good. I don’t know about the standards, though.

    Another problem with LaTeX and most of the other document formats is that they are so bloated and depend on many other tasks that it is hardly possible to embed the tool into a larger document. That’s a bit of criticism for UNIX design philosophy, as well. And LaTeX code is especially hard to make portable.

    There used to be a similar situation with PDFs, it was really hard to display a PDF embedded in application. Finally, Firefox pdf.js came in and solved that issue.

    The only embedded and easy-to-implement standard that describes a ‘document’ is HTML, for now (with Javascript for scripting). Only that it’s not aware of page layout. If only there’s an extension standard that could make a HTML page into a document…