Hacker News Reader

The most critical problem: Hacker News is closed source, right? By any definition that includes Facebook and Twitter, certainly. That'll be a tricky one to let go of.

Personally, it's always drivers etc that I find it difficult to get good open-source options for. Even if you're running Linux the open-source graphics card drivers are pretty terrible, so you take quite a performance hit if you're not prepared to include any proprietary code at all.

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That's a good point - I remembered when Reddit open-sourced a good chunk of their codebase and had figured Hacker News and Reddit shared some of their foundations, but looking into it I appear to have been mistaken.

I think restricting myself to only open-source hardware would make something like this impossible. I don't think I'm running any proprietary drivers on my Linux desktop now, though. It's stock Xubuntu using the hdmi and vga ports built into my motherboard and I haven't had any issues with it. I don't do any gaming though - the most GPU-intensive stuff I've done on Linux is running RViz and Gazebo when I was using ROS for robotics.

I was realizing how horrible the ideology of "free software" is for a while now, especially when taken too far (for example microcode updates).

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