Hacker News Reader

Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

> I realised in the next months that the perceived "freedom to tinker" on Android is something hugely overrated.

I've never really wanted to tinker much with my smartphone. I want it to do a handful of simple tasks (calls, texts, maps, music, light web browsing), and otherwise get out of the way.

Similarly, I switched to Mac OS X awhile back after years on Linux and BSD, because I realized that I would never want to tinker with (the source code of) my web browser or word processor, and there was a whole tinker-friendly Unix system sitting right next door. Pace, Stallman, but I don't need the freedom to tinker everywhere.

View on HN

While I admire people like Richard Stallman and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, IMO they fail to understand that most people simply don't care -- they have a life, job, family and stuff they like to do in their free time and they want technology to enable them and save them time, not get in the way and take their free time.

I used Debian as a main driver for several years and lost patience around 2010. Using a MacBook Pro with an external monitor and working to get an iMac Pro with maxed out settings (~14_000 EUR) to have as a main driver for the next 9-10 years.

Customisation and freedom to tinker with the details is great but only when you need it. Not all the time.

Yes same here. I was on ubuntu from 2003-2010 and quit for osx because I didn't have time to tinker and fix basic-level services like audio and display settings. I only recently got ubuntu 16.04 on my desktop (dual boot) and am enjoying it, but I still drive osx on my laptop.

They don't fail to understand it. They just realize that if people don't push back, they won't have freedom to tinker even when they need it.

Also, for those believing in free markets: freedom to tinker for you is also the freedom to ask your friend or pay a local professional to tinker on your behalf. It doesn't mean everyone has to be a tinkerer, only that everyone can be. The opposite of that is requiring to go through the official vendor for every little thing you need to tweak.

I don't believe in free markets. I am too much of a realist for that. :)

I ask you what can we realistically do though?

It's very apparent that budget Androids that lag like hell and break down often aren't to the general populace's taste if they have a choice -- in my "poor" country (Bulgaria) people get loans so they can buy the Galaxy S10 or Huawei P30, en masse. Most people I've known in my life buying budget Androids only did so because of money constraints. I only knew 2 people who bought cheap Androids to tinker -- and it was because they loved tinkering with tech more than having sex with their wives, or spending time with their kids, or go jogging.

I already said I am not OK with Apple lobbying against the right to repair.

But I have no recourse as a customer. My iPhone is legitimately saving me time and frustration for a no small amount of leisure and work activities. If it didn't, I'd be using a budget Xiaomi for life. But here we are.

What would you do? Would you sacrifice your free time so you can punish the big evil corporations? And how?

Given that all Androids offer you the "freedom to tinker", you can always shell out for the Galaxy instead of iPhone if that's what you care about. I understand either choice on individual level. Myself, I'm on Galaxy S7 now, previously on S4. Before that, I bought a cheap Android phone and learned the hard way that what you save in money, you'll repay back with interest in mental health. The "death from a thousand cuts" isn't worth it, and I recommend everyone around me too to save up for a better phone instead of taking the cheapest one.

If the only Android phones where the cheap, shitty ones, I'd probably be on an iPhone now.

Seems we are in agreement.

I loved Samsung while I was using Androids but they were starting to lag at the 6-9 months mark, without an exception (I owned 5 of their devices over a course of 4 years). Eventually it pissed me off.

Only Android device I legitimately loved was the Xiaomi Mi 6 (the high-end version with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage). Truthfully a masterpiece!

In the end though, my need for full and easy integration between my mobile devices and laptop (soon a desktop as well) prevailed. I arrived at the conclusion that "tinker at all costs" is not for me. There are plenty of people who do only that, I am passing the torch to them.

I had this argument 10-15 years ago, and agree about the potential for lock-in. But even at the time, I realized that I would rather not build Konqueror, Kate, or the Gimp from source, and would never make a significant change. They had become so complex that learning and keeping up with them enough to contribute would be a part-time job.

The current toss-it-over-the-wall-ware model is good enough. Android and Chromium technically "work" without Google, and their code is online. There are multiple Firefox forks. I don't know about OSS programs for Excel spreadsheets and Word docs, but I'm happy to sacrifice some freedom in order to never have to go down that rabbit-hole.

Yep. We all have jobs to do and free time to enjoy. I am frankly burned out on tinkering and I am pursuing getting better at my workplace plus work on a few hobby projects every now and then. Beyond that I throw my hands in the air and give up. I have a life. And I like it.

"What if"-s and theoreticals don't help any discussion. It's very evident by now that people en masse don't push back. And there are no signs that this is changing as well.

Instead of being hung up "but if the people just do this...", how about we formulate a new strategy based on the facts observed so far?

IMHO open source already does that. Most of the new opensource projects do make ease of use a major point. You see that in frameworks, nearly every framework has a "Get started in 5 mins" and samples. But the problem is that the money has to come from somewhere, so either you get sponsored, sell data, raise pricing or die. Too few people pay for tech stuff, since most of is is free and then we end up in situations like today.

Wish I had your optimism. I used 8 languages in my life actively -- and 3 more as a quick hobby and evaluation of features -- and almost never seen a well-documented AND easy to use library or a framework. Almost every author falls in love with their own idea and convenient abstractions and even if they explain those to somebody else, it still doesn't make sense to a chunk of the programmer users.

Trust me, I'd like some of my ideas to be funded as well. But it doesn't seem to be the world we are living in. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com