With free software you can validate the code quality and tweak and share code as you wish. With AI slop becoming more prevalent this means choosing quality software is much easier. This is especially true given that many proprietary software companies are switching to AI which will harm them in the long run.
In short, free software is human focused. It doesn’t have economic incentives for the most part so it will always be as good as the community around it.
This precisely.
I consider myself a power-user. I’m going to push my system as far as j can and if I break it I either fix it or deal with it.
I also can’t code anything past “hello world” in C++ and Java, which means my ability to validate code for anything is pretty much nil. I might be able to parse a function here or there if I really dedicate to reading through every single character, but chances of my understanding the how and why of that specific function are slimmer than my chances of understanding it in the first place.
If we really want digital security, air-gapped machines running pre-2024 versions of everything is going to be the only real option. But now we’re kneecapping ourselves.
So I guess, uh, who wants to go back to Fortran cards?