I do not like being accused of attacking Manjaro but since you asked….

1. the project has had lots of governance and quality problems. Maybe those are all in the past. Maybe.

2. By design, Manjaro is not compatible with the Arch repos or the AUR. One of the biggest problems is that they hold their software back a few weeks. In theory this is for quality (not my experience). Regardless, many people have had problems, especially with the AUR. I am one. Others say they have not. Some even claim the rest of us have not either. Manajaro has “brought down” AUR itself (compared to a DDOS attack but really just quality again).

I used Manjaro for over 2 years and would never touch it again. And if what you want is an Arch based distro with an easy install, there is EOS. I have used EndeavousOS for I think maybe 5 years and I love it. Recently I have moved to Chimera Linux, which is not for everyone (it is awesome but I am not recommending it). It is not because of anything wrong with EOS.

EndeavourOS. The default desktop is KDE these days.

Easy to install.

Attractive desktops out of the box. KDE is the default. A few nice quality of life utilities.

It uses the Arch repos and kernel. The AUR (yay) is installed out-of-the-box. So, the biggest package selection in the Linux world. Always up-to-date. Updates fast.

Great community in the EOS forums. Some of the best Linux docs on the web in the Arch wiki. The Arch wiki is an amazing resource for learning.

Very stable. Breakages are rare, especially if you use an LTS kernel. The current LTS kernel is the same one that Debian 13 will release with “soon”. So, not exactly ancient.

Biggest “downside” is that there is no GUI software installer out-of-the-box.

If that is really a deal-breaker, just install one like pamac or octopi. “yay -S octopi” should do it.

Or install a menu driven text based package manager like pacseek. “yay -S pacseek”

Or just take a few minutes to learn how to use pacman or yay at the command-line. You said you wanted to learn.

You can think of Docker and Podman as an almost zero overhead (CPU and RAM) way of running one distribution on another. So, you can run an application in Docker that expects to be running on a different distro from what you use (say Ubuntu Jenkins but actually running on Debian). The environment that the applications run in are called “containers”. Mostly they contain the filesystem layout and application libraries that the app expects.

Docker itself is designed to sandbox the application away from your host system. A related technology, Distrobox, uses the same containers but in a way that the applications know they are running on your system with full access to your display manager and home directory.

I run an Arch Distrobox on every distro that I use. This allows me full access to all the Arch repos and the AUR even on other distros ( eg. Alpine, Chinese Linux, or Debian).

Flatpak also uses containers and so you can consider Distrobox as a Flatpak alternative. Flatpak containers are not the same as those that Docker uses but they rely on the same underlying Linux kernel features to do what they do. In Flatpak, you are essentially running the Freedesktop distro on top of your host distro (so much like Distrobox with the guest distro chosen for you).

I am not sure how you arrived at “none” from your second sentence. The second sentence is exactly my point.

Alternatively then, can I just use the Microsoft source code and claim that I got it from AI? That seems to be your point here.

The road continues on to Arch from there.

Debian is becoming more and more viable as a desktop OS in the era of Flatpak and Distrobox. Trixie looks like a really nice release.

I thought the whole point of this setting is not having to specify the features of the CPU. You can compile native versions now if you set things yourself.

Big O

Can Open Source defend against copyright claims for AI contributions?

If I submit code to ReactOS that was trained on leaked Microsoft Windows code, what are the legal implications?

That is WINE.

It does run WINE.

Again, it is because it is part of a series.

They already had WoW (Windows on Windows) which was Win16 on Win32. The new one is Win32 on Win64.

And if say “Windows on Windows 64” it makes sense. It is Windows emulation on top of Windows 64 (64 bit Windows). When they named it, all Windows was 32 bit Windows and 64 bit Windows was the future thing. So “emulating current Windows on Win64” was what WoW64 was doing.

It did not age well though. I agree.

I am not defending Microsoft but I have a different take.

Microsoft has already lost a the enterprise to Linux. They know it but no longer care that much. This is because the real money is in Azure (the Cloud and “the agentic web”). Microsoft makes a tonne of money off Linux and Kubernetes in the cloud. They hope to make even more money off AI. They are ok that this stuff is all Linux based. They get plenty of lock-in from volume contracts and Azure only APIs and services (especially AI sandboxes ).

However, Microsoft knows the importance of developer mindshare and influence. It is still “developers, developers, developers”. They know they cannot really stop devs from using containers and Linux but they want devs using MS software. So, they are building Linux into the Windows desktop.

They hope, I believe, that the devs will prefer the “best of both worlds” Windows experience over the “all in on Linux only” Linux one.

In some ways, they are competing more with macOS. Devs using Linux on the server had been flocking to macOS on the desktop because it is “also UNIX” but with commercial software support and a nice UX. If Linux had won on the server, Microsoft is defending the Pro desktop.

I totally agree it is wrong. It is historical.

When Windows NT was new, they had this idea that it would be compatible with many different application ecosystems via “sub-systems”. So there were going to be many different “Windows sub-systems” for various things.

There was the “Windows sub-system for OS/2” for example. And the “Windows sub-system for POSIX”. The names still sound backwards to me but I guess it makes sense if you think “This is a Windows sub-system, which one is it?”. And if you have 50 Windows sub-systems, saying “for Windows” at the end of all of them also seems a little weird.

So that naming convention was already in place when they added support for Linux. Hence the “Windows Subsystem for Linux”.

Yes.

There are two downsides if Microsoft takes it proprietary again in the future.

1. we would have to fork it and maintain the fork. Honestly, what kind of “community” are we if this is what we are complaining about?

2. Microsoft could include out contributions in their future commercial product.

Again, Microsoft cannot take away access to our own code. They just get to use it. That “freedom” really pisses some people off.

Sure. Let’s make sure that people know what this really means though.

Microsoft cannot “undo” the current license. If such a “rug pull” happens in the future, we all retain access to the code that exists at that time including all contributions from Microsoft. We can also all continue to not only use it but contribute to it under an Open Source license and keep it a vibrant, useful project if we want. Microsoft is powerless to stop us. We could fork it then or even now without the copyright assignment requirement. We have that freedom.

What the “rug pull” allows Microsoft to do is to decide, in the future, to change their policy and to make further changes themselves and not give us access to those future changes. They have that freedom.

Again, even if Microsoft did this, we could fork and carry-on. Look at Valkey and Reddis as an example.

So, the situation is that Microsoft is Open Sourcing a bunch of work that they did. The maximum possible downside is that they could stop giving us even more in the future. Our reaction is “meh”.

What concerns us is not that Microsoft can take away our freedom. They cannot. What upsets us is that they may retain or receive freedom we do not want them to have.

That is all fine. We are all allowed to think about it as we like and I guess we al value “freedom” in different ways. Sometimes though I think people misunderstand and think somehow that all the code could be “taken back”’. It cannot. Similarly, we might worry that our freedom (even the 4 freedoms) could be lost. For this code, that is not the case.

I would like to see Flatpak ported to Windows. WSL provides everything you need to support Flatpak including a Linux kernel to run on and deep GUI and network integration.

From the point of view of a user, a Flatpak app (built for Linux) could install and run natively on Windows. Flathub could be just neither App Store.

Small app developers could choose to target Flatpak instead of Win32 and have their app run on both Windows and Linux. Only one app bundle to distribute and support.

Thank of all the applications this could bring to Linux. And, once everything runs on Linux, why use Windows?

There are free RDP implentataiions

Pretty cool to see all the X Elite (Snapdragon ARM) stuff supported out-of-the-box.

Even those distros are only possible if you arbitrarily decide the firmware is not software. If you want to be more honest about having free software all way down, you have to avoid AMD and Intel CPUs at the very least and most GPUs too. And, if you are not going to do that, why fuss about the BIOS?

Unless you are using a totally Free Software stack on on Open Source CPU with an Open Source ISA, it is just a question of where you draw the line between convenience and “principles”.

There are truly Open Source RISC-V CPUs. It could be done. That is not what those “libre” distros are doing.

Since none of us are using a 100% free stack, I think distros like Debian strike the right balance between “free” and “useful”.

If you do not want to use software written by Red Hat, you have to stop using Linux. Quite frankly also much of the GNU suite such as Glibc and GCC. You would absolutely have to stop using either Xorg or Wayland. Systemd is just an example of something Red Hat created but they are massive contributors to a lot of other surf too.

I you want to avoid software written by profit motivated companies, you are down to about 15% of the open source ecosystem.