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Comment on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account

The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD

In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.

I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.

Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.

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tiramichu@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sure, if it wasn’t Linux then another project may have got the love and attention.

I’m not glad it was Linux specifically, just glad there is a credible FOSS alternative of some kind, and in our universe that’s Linux.

You might think there’s no such world where we wouldn’t have had some credible alternative, and as reasonable as that is - because freedom and independence are things people intrinsically want - I’m sure if you flap the butterfly wings enough times there’d be a universe where we all just collectively decided that commercial operating systems were the answer.

Glad I don’t live there.

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- WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah. Look at the shitheap we had to settle with when Reddit enshittified beyond redemption. We’re really lucky to have such a well-polished alternative to Windows right now, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that Windows was awful from the beginning. If a halfway-decent operating system like OS/2 had become the default then we might be really scrambling right now.
  
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- gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I mean, we already do live in that universe, just for the mobile space.
  
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dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.

As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.

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