About — The Synthesist

Hi! My name is Gopi Krishna Menon. I am a Free Software advocate interested in researching and developing Systems software (Primarily OS design and development).

The Four Essential Freedoms

From GNU, A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

My Interests

Hacking on Free/Libre Software
Linux Kernel Hacking (USB, Filesystems, MM, Device Drivers etc).
Stoicism

Dev Setup

Hardware

Surface Laptop Go3 (Good sys but abuses user freedom. Cant run libreboot!)
Desktop (Core i5 12600K, 32GB RAM, GTX 1660 super (Meh), GT-710 (FLOSS))
Miniserver (Celeron N4500 (NUC - Asus), 16GB RAM)
Couple of phones a a tab all running Lineage (F you proprietary blobs)

Software

OS : Guix with GNOME
Search Engine : SearXNG Private Instance
Editor : GNU Emacs
DM : Matrix
Matrix Clients : Nheko, Element X
Kernel : Linux Libre
Browser : GNU Icecat
Terminal : Ptyxis
Music : Navidrome
Email : GNOME Evolution, Thunderbird

Thoughts and Stuff I find interesting

Earning money from software is not wrong. But earning by stripping away user's freedom, and damaging society is wrong. Shame on the companies that do that.
Both Free as well as Open Source Software is fun to work with, can be hacked to your will and is actually of high quality. So please consider using Free software based alternatives.
[Copyleft] (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html) licenses like GPL, AGPL, GFDL, help preserve user's freedom. Weak/Permissive licenses helps companies take away the user's freedom through derivative works. So we prefer these licenses wherever we can.
Proprietary software is inferior and is often Malware.
DRM
Windows
I support Codeberg instead of Github (due to MS, ICE Contracts, AI slop, Privacy, Transparency and the list goes on….)
Linkedin is just crap BrowserGate
Had respect for Google earlier but never knew it was this evil. AOSP, Developer registration with google, reCAPTCHA

Essays worth reading from GNU

PGP : DCC33B6BD8CEEC09