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Comment by m712 | Hacker News Reader

If you are hinting to proprietary systems in your last sentence, you can go ahead and pay someone to lock you into their ecosystem. This is how Free Software works and I wouldn't have it any other way. People work on their own and bring it together into one whole system, and that can cause incompatibilities. However lock-step design is also one of the key ways to destroy innovation. If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

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I hope this doesn't sound rude, but that is exactly why desktop Linux and friends are a piss-poor experience compared to their proprietary counterparts.

There is a negative feedback look here. With enough of that kind of "customization freaks only, casuals need not apply, enjoy your non-innovative proprietary shitware" talk, user bases stay small and niche, people get alienated, and don't contribute to or use free OSes.

It's perfectly reasonable to want to trade customizability for usability. Chasing people who think that away from free software helps nobody.

There's plenty of free polished out-of-the-box experiences, from Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/whatever to hardware from Purism and system76.

There's definitely some "customization freaks only" assholes on the internet too, but…

very very often, it seems like some people perceive that when a non-out-of-the-box OS just exists and people like using it just personally for themselves.

There is definitely progress here since the early '00s. However, there's a very long way to go until even the most polished home-user Linux distros approach the level of usability (and supportability, even more critical) of proprietary OSes for non-power-users.

And I wasn't trying to paint everyone who wants to tinker with the same "gatekeeping" brush, sorry if I came off that way. GP equated proprietary software with "pay[ing] someone to lock you into their ecosystem" and "destroy[ing] innovation", and ended with

> If you lack the desire to learn how to configure your system, then you will probably not want to use a Free system. That's just how it is.

That's the sentiment I had trouble with. Not the existence of knobs (which should continue existing! Just with better tuning experience for casual users, and saner defaults).

I just want software that works well. In some ways, Free Software is that, and in some ways, it isn't.

I reject the idea that this is how it has to be. There is no reason Free Software has to be user-unfriendly.

You can use Ubuntu/Mint/elementary/etc. and it's very user-friendly. You can pay Purism or system76 to deliver you a literal physical out-of-the-box experience.

But, like, let tinkerers tinker. Nobody said that this should be the way to go for everyone or that user-friendly unix does not exist. You brought the assumption that all Free Software is like that into a thread about a specific less-popular explicitly-not-desktop-oriented OS ;)

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