in the case of Android, it comes down to the proprietary driver modules that are compiled for certain kernel versions. As newer versions of android are released with newer kernels, the closed source modules fall out of step. If the drivers for these components were open source anyone could recompile them for any Linux kernel. It’s usually up to the device manufacturer working with the likes of the chip makers to release newer module versions for their hardware. OEMs dont want to support their hardware beyond few years, so you’ll hopefully buy a new phone.

The postmarketOS community (and some of the android community) works pretty hard trying to bring mainline kernel support to devices, which enables them to run generic Linux kernels, or conceivably newer versions of android than the OEM has released. But this involves reverse engineering support for this hardware.

the whole spec list and image was probably an ai prompt output

Its not like they’re blocking all contributions, if it was more than niche, they wouldnt ignore the needs of other big players. I’m not fully across it, but the BSDs still make more use of xorg and maintain their own trees IIRC.

I really only saw headlines about Xlibre, hadnt followed up on it

The way they promoted PulseAudio, SystemD, Gnome 3, now Wayland. All that.

I agree Gnome 3+ is bad, but we do need modern components and honestly when the next biggest player in these things in Canonical with there NIH / throw it over the fence and like it attitude, I know which I’d prefer. Especially when these components truly are upstream projects, and they do indeed take community contributions.

almost no development of Xorg, but they don’t surrender the control of the project to someone who’d want to.

Yeah the xorg thing is shit for those that feel they still need it, but no one else really had the resources to maintain it. Its critical infrstructure, they can’t just hand it off until they’re done with it (RH10). Xlibre is happening by one of the biggest community contributors, but honestly it’ll end up like KwinFT.

I refuse to use Fedora (because it’s basically their testing bed)

interesting take

RedHat also does work to sink projects which don’t fit their strategy for Linux development

I’m interested in any examples you can provide of this

its really only /bin /usr, much of /etc is editable like normal. People hear read only system and freak out like its locked down. Most things I use are flatpak, or in a distrobox and there are now sys-exts that do a lot of what anyone could need

I started fiddling with toolbox and distrobox and really liked being able to install random stuff and build dependencies in those containers and then purge them when I was done. It keeps the system clean. The ostree distros take that mentality to the whole system.

I also then found I liked the appliance like nature and the ability to rebase. I will sometimes rebase to the rawhide branch to try new stuff out, and then rebase back to stable. I see some people feel the read only file system is going to be an issue, but I have not had to screw with it since the very early days. I truly believe this is where most distros should be headed.

I used Fedora KDE from 2012 to 2023, then I moved to Fedora Kinoite because I like the idea of atomic distros. Don’t know if that counts though since its mostly the same software, just delivered slightly differently (however you could argue that is the case for all distros)

its only an issue if people dont use the codecs out of rpmfusion, the fedora adjacent nonfree repos