Comment by dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp | Hacker News Reader

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I'll be the contrarian: Has the author ever heard of Linux?

I'm being glib, and share many of the author's frustrations with the state of things, but really the trends covered in the article have been happening for well over a decade. In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals. Likewise with scientific computing frameworks like R and Python. The author even managed to get a personal website up for all of us to read. The options for personal computing are wide, wide open, even if some markets or products remain closed and proprietary and tough to hack.

Also,

> I suppose one can argue that if we all have nothing but dumb terminals running software from a ROM (which cannot be written to), then no malware can get onto our computers. But, do we want to go back to the dumb terminal days of the 1980's? Is this the "modern" operating system that we want?

For certain stuff like online banking, yes.

> In that time Raspberry pi's have hit the market and the microcontroller market has never been better for hobbyists and professionals.

That's great if you want a microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi. What about computers with PC-level capabilities, or laptop form factors? What's going to happen when those devices fall under the arbitrary distinction of being "too insecure" for individuals to have full control of?

A couple of years ago, during a public Q&A, I asked Steve Wozniak what he thought about the architecture of control that Apple mandates on their "i-device" hardware. My question was to the effect of "What do you think about how I don't own my iPhone or iPad the way I owned my Apple II?" His answer took the form of the "we have to give up some of our ownership in order to have nice things" trope. When Steve Wozniak, of all people, answered the question that way I knew that the era of individual ownership (and the control that implies) of general purpose computers really was on the way out.

Interesting. He's given an answer about Apple's walled garden that sounds more like him in the past: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/107253/20151117/steve-woz...

I was a little shocked (and really, really sad to hear one of my childhood heroes answer like that). I recorded the interaction-- albeit via my iPhone in my pocket-- so the audio quality probably isn't very good. I'll look to see if I can dig up the recording. (This was from his October 30, 2017 visit to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I didn't find a recording available online with a quick search...)

Edit: Found it - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lLz56N2PKCmPIGrzt1WT9n4B08P...

My phone was in my breast pocket so the audio quality isn't very good, but I did my best to clean it up.

Oh, I believe you. Maybe just getting a bit older (he's 70 now) and not up to fighting the prevailing winds. I can sympathize with that.

You know what they say about meeting your heroes.

(I'm happy to have extracted that audio, though. I wanted to get that done since the night I recorded it but this motivated me...)

If only the desktop (read: personal) computing experience on Linux wasn't so awful[0]. I realize that's a subjective statement, but come on, I've been hearing "Year of the Linux Desktop" rhetoric for 20 years now and it's still a platform[1] so utterly unorganized and chaotic that even a whole lot of people like me, who believe strongly in personal computing and value the ideas of openness, don't want to use it[2].

[0] I can, and have, gone on at length about why I think this and I won't repeat it here.

[1] One of the big problems of course being that Linux Desktop isn't a platform so much as a loose umbrella label describing a bunch of kludges.

[2] I've been using Linux Desktops for 2 decades and until recently I ran Linux on 4 out of 5 of the personal computing devices in my possession. I have written Linux software, contributed to FOSS projects, put together my own distro, and was even president of a LUG for a while. I have tried to give Linux Desktop a chance and it and its community have driven me away time and time again.

I suspect it's a function of your use cases. I've used Linux on the desktop since the late 90s, and I still use it every day. My employer makes me use MacOS for work, and it's a constant source of frustration for me, but Linux is consistently wonderful.

Vague criticism is useless though. My frustration with MacOS is mostly that stuff is either broken or unintuitive. I use Emacs, and after upgrading to Catalina, Emacs could no longer open files on my Downloads folder, even after manually assigning it permissions to read the entire disk. This turns out to be because Emacs has a Ruby script it gets launched through that has distinct permissions from the executable itself, so I have to hand-tune the launch scripts to make reading from disk work correctly.

There's lots of stuff like this. Mouse avoidance mode on Emacs is broken when it is set to 'banish, completely breaking the ability to drag the Emacs window around the desktop. Took me a few weeks to track down.

I want to tile a window to the side, so I have to click and hold on the full screen button, then select a side, at which point MacOS goes into some weird full screen mode and forces me to select some other window for the other sid, which I didn't want. I just wanted to tile a window on one side. If this feature were launched in Linux, I fear the derision would never end. Pop!_OS did it better.

For some reason, MacOS can't remember that I type Dvorak. After I log in, it remembers, but on the log in screen, I have to manually select Dvorak every time so I can type my password. If I've already selected my account, there's no reason it can't do that for me. Linux does, except Elementary OS, which is broken in dozens of other ways as well.

If I touch the play/pause button on my headphones by accident, my entire desktop gets buried beneath iTunes (I guess Apple Music now). I had to remove execute permission to avoid this, but updates seem to revert the behavior from time to time.

And this is just me trying to run Slack, Emacs and a browser. I'm not even doing anything fancy. So when I hear that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, it just doesn't resonate with me. I've used it for decades as my daily driver, and I plan to continue.

Good for you, but the statistics on desktop OS usage are pretty clear that you're in the minority.

Statistics on desktop OS usage reflect OEM preloading, marketing, and momentum of familiarity, not anything inherent to the operating systems or environments.

Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so, with the only notable exceptions being one gamer and one Excel power user.

> Statistics on desktop OS usage reflect OEM preloading, marketing, and momentum of familiarity, not anything inherent to the operating systems or environments.

Yeah, Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying that forever and yet, as I mentioned, even a lot of people like me who both are capable of and have reasons to desire a different OS find Linux Desktop too broken to deal with.

The community chooses the narrative that protects their ego.

> Anecdotally with friends and family, Fedora has been "normie"-friendly since 2007 or so

Anecdotally I know a lot of people who do some kind of work with their computers and are programmers and general nerds who hate Linux Desktops because they are so broken.

You really seem to have a personal vendetta against linux but it has no bearing on the fact that linux runs, it's up to you to set it up. Don't like your distro? Build one. LFS. I'd rather the majority stay on Windows and don't have a fetish for caring about majority/minority. In fact, I'd prefer minimal cli installs that most don't or can't use.

> Don't like your distro? Build one.

I did, and said so in the first post. Problem is there is only so much you can do with the garbage components that make up "Linux Desktop". I'd pretty much have to re-write everything above the kernel at this point. No coincidence, so did Android!

> I'd rather the majority stay on Windows and don't have a fetish for caring about majority/minority.

Well that's fine. I'm speaking mostly to Linux Desktop evangelists who seem to really want wider Linux adoption, but without actually having to do any of the things that will move the needle towards that goal.

> If only the desktop (read: personal) computing experience on Linux wasn't so awful[0]. I realize that's a subjective statement, but come on, I've been hearing "Year of the Linux Desktop" rhetoric for 20 years now and it's still a platform[1] so utterly unorganized and chaotic that even a whole lot of people like me, who believe strongly in personal computing and value the ideas of openness, don't want to use it[2].

Well, who's going to pay to make it better? Yes, there are for-profit companies behind many Linux distros with paid developers, but they don't have anywhere near the resources Apple or Microsoft does, so it's simply not realistic to expect a Linux distro to be as polished as Windows or iOS.

The Linux world is unorganized and chaotic because it's full of developers who can get what they want out of the OS, while Apple and MS are organized because they are driven by a top-down vision.

Maybe, just maybe, some Linux company gets a large enough contract, maybe from a nation-state or two, and over a decade is able to polish up a product which slowly starts to gobble up a market segment. That's not impossible, but not likely either.

EDIT: also, normally when people cite things, they're citing something someone else said :). If it's all just going to be your opinion, you could just write it as such.

When people cite things here it is the fashion to put the citation in a footnote. But footnotes need not be limited to citations.

The author does give ChromeOS some credit for allowing Linux apps to run, so it sounds like he gets that bit.

But, he's focusing on what is typically available to consumers. And he's right that MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS all are on some path to be more locked down.

You can’t run Linux if you can’t modify the bootloader (as called out in the article).

The biggest change between Alexa Echo Dot gen1 and gen2 is not that the subwoover is bigger: the eMMC debug pins got cut from the design.

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