No Config for Old Men
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
Using computers is significantly less enjoyable for me now than it used to me. Updates being installed without my consent, telemetry and surveillance being forced upon me, loss of functionality when features I use aren't popular enough to warrant continued inclusion in products, and software developers who are actively hostile toward allowing "power users" configuration options all detract from the enjoyment I used to have.
And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple.
We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked.
The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.
Silos like Facebook rank content that isn't hosted internally lower, so the open web has atrophied.
And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.
I don't hate computers. I hate the grifters and gaslighters that have taken the good parts away and told us our way of thinking is the problem.
a) their updates require consent
b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things
c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917
d) generally add functionality
?
So i can either install any app i want into my factory installed spyware ridden forced updating android phone and windows desktop machine, or give up the ability to control what software I can install my machine in order to gain privacy by switching to apple.
We want both damn it.
And in my case I'll begrudgingly take windows and android over apple, but I don't like it.
But it's easier to just think of iThings as appliances with lots of cool use cases instead of general computing machines.
Whenever I hear all this lamenting about Apple this, Microsoft that, Google rablerablerable ... we have been told about all of this sine at least 1989! I'm full-time, work and private, on a Free desktop OS since 10 years +. Just put your money and effort into the Free alternative.
It still can't make phone calls without cycling airplane mode between calls.
The one before that would crash if I paired a bluetooth device while connected to one already.
Both of them bootloop at the power off battery charge screen, which basically means i couldn't turn my phone on while plugged in, and unless its a fast charger, the act of repeatedly booting up keeping the phone screen on ends up draining power faster then it can charge.
So. Tell me again about these free and open options.
It is interesting how it works for some people, and for other people their device literally explodes.
There are occasional issues, but nothing showstopping for me.
On the whole I have been very happy with LineageOS as it has allowed me to continue to use my phone for years longer than I would have with the simply bad manufacturer updates that almost completely filled the internal disk space and stopped updating something like 2015 with Android 5. Less unnecessary expense, less eWaste, thumbs up.
For me, I would definitely go with a phone manufacturer that supports rooting their device and put LineageOS on it if I think I need it. I may not install it, but the option for the future is the main thing.
Wasn't the problem originaly that Android phones didn't have any updates?
However, that's still not something being common among Android phones; if the original poster pointed out specific vendors, that would be OK. But saying that it is a common trait shared by all Androids is incorrect.
I, a person with a modest net worth, am picking on trillion dollar Apple? That's so backwards it's funny.
This is a company that erodes computing freedom and ownership. They've co-opted the commons, and they built it all on the back of open source. And I'm picking on them?
Apple fans will say that Apple created billions of dollars of commerce opportunity. But it would have happened anyway without Apple.
We'd be in a better world if we had an open app standard that worked cross-device and consumers had choice in distribution channels.
We don't need to be "protected" by a company or big brother. Especially if such protection is just a cover story for controlling commerce.
And I do feel that we should focus on the biggest offenders (i.e. Google and Facebook) first, because if there's a precedent the others will get the message quite fast.
Apple is the worst of the lot, by far the most culpable, as they're directly attacking the notion of ownership and computing freedom. They're their own government that has somehow snuck under the radar of the DOJ. They behave like the mafia and offer "protection".
Google is next for the harm they've done to the web. I think we can agree how bad they've bloodied it up.
How can you put Facebook ahead of Apple? They're creepy and invasive, but they're not redefining what we can and cannot do, and they're the easiest to remove from our daily lives and industry.
I want to distribute software and I still have to pay the Apple tax and jump through their hoops, and I'm left without a relationship with my customers. On the other side of the coin, as an owner I can't repair my device or run my own software. Facebook has little impact on my life, meanwhile Apple is a gravitational distortion in our industry.
You complaining about paying 99 bucks per year and comparing it with the above is seriously mind-bending. No wonder our privacy's so fucked...
Apple is just as evil in tracking and even more evil in taking freedom away.
I didn't say Google was blameless. Google is horrifically evil. You're just mad I'm also implicating Apple.
You love Apple. And you love it enough to overlook the incredible harm they're doing.
Stop loving a company that doesn't give a shit about anything but profit. The feelings and pleasure you derive is just Apple fitting to the gradient slopes of profit maximization within the market they've carved out. It's engineered, and you're falling for it.
Use your device for what it is, and be happy in the capabilities it gives you, but be a good citizen to your fellow persons. Not a company. Don't overlook their grievances. Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive.
Edit: Downvotes from Apple fans making it further in the thread than those that overwhelmingly agree with my parent comments.
Downvotes from those that disagree with "Hope for a better, more equitable tomorrow so that everyone in our industry can thrive and can do so without being extractive."
Astonishing.
The argument is not “did Apple create a walled garden and rule it like the actual Chinese Communist Party” because yes it did. The question is, are they alone in doing it, or just successful?
I think the latter, you think the former it seems.
Also don't pretend to know what people feel just because they buy products from a company. It's ridiculous how you're claiming what I love when you don't even know me.
We should do the same to Apple, Google, and the others. It clearly doesn't erode stock value.
I wish people stopped buying phones with non-removable battery. I sure as hell will not buy a phone if I cannot replace its battery. On the other hand, I think it makes the device thinner, and weighs less, so some people prefers that over being able to replace the battery. Not sure what to do here than to accept their preference.
Key word is repairability here, not necessarily user swapable. You can go buy chunky construction worker edition if you want all the swapabillity if you want to.
How are they worse than Microsoft?
That is exactly the point of permissive open source licenses. Freelancers and commercial companies can build stuff on top of it that makes them money and brings real benefits to paying users.
Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.
The Linux and *BSD communities wouldn't be where they are today without those contributions, no. But they would be somewhere else. Not as far down the road, but down a different road; who's to say that would've been worse?
The open source part doesn't change anything. Windows has so many hooks that 1984 (the book, not the year) is now a reality in 2020 with DLP software watching employees. Apple's walled garden is not there to encourage growth inside the walls but to extract profit from those that flourish inside of it. And linux is so fragmented because everyone has a great new idea which requires a new X where X is a UI, library, window manager, etc.
Interesting that back in 1980's the Apple II line was frankly pretty darn well open. Sure Apple had copyrights on the assembly, but if you looked at the magazines at the time there were lots of articles giving annotated disassembly of Apple's object code. And yet, Apple sold a bunch of computers anyway. Wow. Fucking genius.
Sure Apple is fighting the Good Fight with privacy (and I've yet to see that it's anything different than pure marketing). But I ask why should Apple need to market "privacy first" when they can just open up their software and show us directly? Let's start by open sourcing any telemetry they send back to the mothership. Is that reasonable perhaps?
Sure DOS was akin to open source and formed the basis of Windows way back when but the decades of development have left little left (except what exists to support backwards compatability)
Apple won't approve software that uses non-apple-approved services, like payment providers. Apple won't approve software that dares to inform users of these limitations. Apple won't approve third party browsers. Apple demands payment in order for them to approve software. Etc.
Apple apparently has been silently and without permission or an off switch sending the name of the developer of literally every app you launch to Apple. This is far more invasive than anything I've heard of Google or Microsoft doing - not that I'm a fan of their telemetry either. Microsoft in particular also gives you tools to examine what they're sending in detail: https://www.howtogeek.com/348699/how-to-see-what-data-window...
On Apple devices which allow power user options (the minority of devices), they are still limited. For example Apple was (is?) making their own traffic bypass Little Snitch.
Apple generally seems to remove functionality in the name of "design" and "safety" as far as I can see... I'm not sure how you think they're generally adding functionality.
It's not like Apple forced you to buy a Mac or an iPhone. If anything you have to go out of your way to get one, because you see some appeal in them - as otherwise they're more expensive, with limited model choice, less bang for the buck, and a minority market share wise compared to most PC/Android stuff.
So, perhaps those buying them know what they're doing? Walled garden (aka "curation") for many is part of the appeal.
Who decides?
iDevices always worked like you're describing. You can get a dev cert and install whatever you like, but these devices are not general computing devices. They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.
You obviously didn't even read my link because there it says exactly how Apple offers a power user option which allows an older version of Little Snitch to capture that traffic.
I have a Windows machine and I've looked at how they behaved with their telemetry from the beginning. They were so secretive and malicious that it beggars belief. An EU government even had to reverse engineer their telemetry communication because they wouldn't say what's in it. You're coming after the dust has settled and draw conclusions from there.
Google... where to even begin. What a complete waste of time this was.
You mean $buy$ a dev cert, yearly.
> They're a different kind of device for those that don't want to admin their phone and instead want Apple to take care of it.
And if you want both, FUCK yourself right ?
Your way of thinking is the problem. You’re a minority of users and not entitled to mass production of goods that fit your intentions alone.
Reality moved on as physics obliges it to do.
Go buy a Dell and install Linux. Go buy an Rpi. When did MS or Apple ever cater to open source opinions on computing?
Did a golden age end or were you all distracted and simply forgot these companies were awful back then too?
Better juice those stocks gains though!
And yet TFA's entire point seemed to apply equally to a self-built machine running any OS (including any Linux) that you could name. So this really seems to have almost nothing to do with Apple or MS.
Wow, putting it like that makes me realize it's just part of the larger societal trend toward authoritarianism. I guess this is one of those 'Stallman was right' moments.
RE the wider trend toward authoritarianism, I'm not yet sure I see it clearly, at least outside the privacy space. But I do feel trends towards taking away end-user control and turning everything into a service, which are very much market-driven, though perhaps they also are a subset of authoritarianism.
I came of age during a time when we on the left believed fiercely in personal freedoms, especially freedom of speech. We would blast music that would say things like, "F--k you I won't do what you tell me." [1]
Now the same left I loved can't erupt in protest fast enough when social media aren't censoring idiots. We used to all know that censoring of anybody was wrong, but also that it didn't work. Censoring was what corporations and authoritarian states did to people, and we hated it.
That's just one example of the change people have gone through.
[1] https://genius.com/Rage-against-the-machine-killing-in-the-n...
And also, step back a bit and look at the state of digitally distributed disinformation. We've elected politicians that look like characters from an absurdist satire, loony conspiracy theories are going mainstream, climate change isn't real, the pandemic is a lie, a significant percentage of the US population thinks the presidental election was completely fraudulent... and so on.
Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society. I'd love to think that if you let people figure things out for themselves they'll eventually manage it. That they'll eventually stop believing wild claims based on no evidence.
But we don't have time to test that theory.
Should the big platforms have the power over the digital public square that they do? Definitely not. But they do have it. Pressuring them to deal with misinformation is something I completely support.
The alternative is tech illiterate legislation because the misinformation problem isn't going to go away on it's own.
I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.
The people creating propaganda are also interested in enforcing censorship if they are in the position to do so.
Propaganda and censorship work far better together than individually for groups that want to brainwash society into certain beliefs.
But since you go on about advertising, that is a way for groups that want it, is to be able to force people to listen to their message. This robs people of their agency to listen to what they choose to. Censorship also doesn't allow people to listen to what they choose to. This makes advertising and censorship very alike. They both result in a persons loss of freedom to choose what information they get.
The trick is simply keeping people like that out of power.
Allowing the lunatics to spread their message via effective platforms that are designed to promote your brand of bullshit to the people most likely to be vulnerable to it does NOT stop it from festering it actually maximizes the spread of the cancer. If it spreads fast enough you wont have a society to inform anymore because fascists only believe in free speech when its their speech if they gain enough power they will quickly take yours from you.
I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good faith" argument would win.
I think our problem is that, as you know, humans are subject to a ton of logical fallacies and 'hack vectors' of rhetoric (see also Shopenhauer's 38 strategems). If we, participating in or viewing an argument, fight to overcome these, we're able to have debates of rhetoric - the "truth" wins out in a debate.
But it's a lot worse than a situation where some number of people didn't learn this in school, or can't be bothered to cut through the logical fallacies. Rather, the problem is that these particular kind of lies have a seductive capacity - they 'feel right', because they operate in the part of human speech and human logic that's driven by our instinct, rather than driven by learned behavior. People aren't neutral, and evenly likely to pick the lies versus the truth - they're overwhelmingly more likely to pick the lies, unless they've both deliberately trained themselves not to, and also personally value objective truth over feeling good. Most people don't - even scientists struggle with this.
Not all lies are seductive like this - but the kind that slot into "tricks of debate" absolutely are. They're the bread and butter of con men.
This is why every formal "forum of debate" - in the sciences or academia et al, has it as just a basic rule that they can just get shown the door immediately if they're caught lying. If you just straight-up-lie on a paper getting submitted to i.e. Nature, it can ruin your career. It's why perjury is a crime - because lies of that type just have far stronger evolutionary fitness compared to truth. It's because the rule-setters in these fields care more about reaching the objective truth than they do about feeling good - and they know how dangerous this is, so they treat it with a scorched earth policy.
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I believe we've been able to get away with free speech because - thus far - most of our media wasn't censored, so much as it was mandated to be "true". You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was plausibly true - people fudged stuff all the time but it generally couldn't be bald-faced lies. As long as that was enforced, then what you said about "good speech being the antidote to bad speech" could work.
But for a few decades, we've had no such enforcement of truth in lots of our media, especially the internet, and I believe the number of people believing outright falsehoods has gotten an awful lot worse. Dangerously so.
That said, you seem to have presupposed that the people doing the censoring are always (or mostly) right. Why? Because they happen to be in power?
Twitter (and I think Facebook) censored the New York Post, even disabling their account, over a major news story that turned out to be true. It went against thev censor's preconceived ideas of how the world is, and they smashed that button as fast as they could.
What makes you think the people doing the censoring are somehow unbiased righteous purveyors of truth, absent their own instinctive biases that mislead then into censoring unfairly? Surely history has shown that to rarely if ever be the case.
I totally agree with your analysis of the problem, but I follow it to a much different conclusion: humans can't be trusted to wield power of speech over others. They are too subject to their own instinctive and emotional reactions to information they don't like.
This idea, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it. In fact, surely we're owed some justification for the principle - does exposing widespread misinformation correct the bad effects before it was exposed? Some harm has already been done, and I'm not sure how that is justified by the principle.
I think that principle is lacking in empirical evidence, and theoretical justification for the harms it allows, which seem to be based on a shaky idea of the greater good.
The most egregious I can think of is the Russian government after the Bolshevik revolution. It had the death penalty for being in possession of certain books. In the end these censorship loving people (for other people, not them) killed tens of millions of people they governed (gulags, deliberate starvation of masses of people for instance), yet it is hardly talked about.
These bad effects of not censoring that people talk about seem so pitiful and small compared to what has happened when people willing to censor other people have got into power. Seriously, people stating things like 'sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it' are promoting things that totalitarian groups are very pleased to have, and despite asking for evidence, they provide no evidence that what they are trying to push is not far worse than what they are purportedly against. Along with the destruction of freedom that censorship brings to all the people that it applies to. Those that promote censorship can not be hypocritical and start with themselves first, but they won't, I'm sure they will scream loudest about how horrible censorship is if some other group got the power to censor what they may want to say.
The internet has made outcomes immediate. The internet has also removed the human element of social interaction. I think these two mix in a terrible way. I have no idea what can or should be done about it though.
The recent push to censor and silence dissent isn't an anomaly: the several hundreds years post enlightenment that gave us the ideas of individual rights and freedoms were the anomaly.
I also do not believe anyone advocating the censoring of others has been themselves censored, or put in a minority position where they were afraid to express dissent. Because if you have that experience, it tends to give one a dim view of censorship.
[citation needed]
The problem with your statement isn't the claim that tribal behaviours are a natural tendency in humans. Of course they are. The problem is your claim that they are somehow primary. There are many other tendencies of comparable weight, and how strongly they are expressed relative to each other depends very much on the individual.
Not to mention that when it comes to tribal instincts, there's a huge difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be. Their nuclear family? Their town/state/country? Their profession? Participants in their hobby? Their "race"? All of humanity?
Pretty much the whole of human history? There's no shortage of examples. To the contrary, it's more difficult to find examples that do not demonstrate tribalism.
> difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be
This is a recent luxury that hasn't existed for more than a century. Other than a few cultures here and there that encouraged blended demographics (usually as a consequence of conquest, think Rome).
It's not perfect there but most of the world is currently functioning.
Now what we are seeing with social media platforms (and I ould argue it started already earlier with the raise of fox news) at the moment is that we see that there are elements of society who found that facts and truth don't matter and freedom of speech doesn't matter if you have big enough pockets and use the right psychological strategies. Essentially the way society and particulary social media is set up is, that the richest voice gets heard (at least by some people) and the truth of what is being said is not important anymore. In other words the platform are used for controlling us (not by the government, but vested interests) and destroying society, freedom of speech is not helping against this if anything it's a hindrance because it assumes all speech is equal, which it isn't.
I don't have a solution and I would like a way to defend us without destroying freedom of speech, but I don't have a good solution.
Also these platforms have been "censoring" for a long time, nobody was batting an eyelid when Isis accounts and videos were removed. In fact many of the outlets who are now screaming about censorship were shouting that twitter et al. were not doing enough. That tells you a lot about howmuch they care about freedom of speech.
Some of them have taken the cues and actually committed such murders. The problem is there is money and importance to be earned by trivial to construct lies that a functioning marketplace of ideas would trivially discard but it turns out ours really doesn't work so well and freedom without responsibility is a clusterfuck.
We let the liars run wild and ended up with a reality TV star killing hundreds of thousands of people with his incompetence and working hard to start a war that would kill hundreds of thousands more in the last days of his regime. Perhaps visualize every one of those corpses stacked one in a reeking pile and realize that censorship may be the lesser of two evils.
They also suspended an account of a sitting state senator in Pennsylvania who was holding a hearing on alleged election fraud: https://www.ntd.com/twitter-suspends-account-of-state-senato...
There is no valid theory of morality which allows one to simply disregard predicable consequences of ones actions in preference for purely theoretical considerations.
This is why many other publications refused to run with this story because merely presenting "both sides" would not in fact be morally neutral it would have been wrong.
In the same vein Sen. Doug Mastriano was not presenting legitimate concerns about election fraud. There isn't any evidence for such it is literally a smokescreen for a desired takeover of the American government by a hostile minority.
The nypost and Mastriano are traitors in the old and simple constitutional sense of conspirators against the legitimate form of government on which all other freedoms hinge. It isn't that they are attacking Biden he like all leaders will be a transitory feature in our system of government here today and gone tomorrow. What they are attacking is a democratic form of government by polluting the essential contest by which we choose our leaders with lies about candidates and lies about the process in order to undermine the whole thing.
The fact that such actions aren't sufficiently clear cut to rise to prosecutable crimes doesn't mean we ought to forget their betrayal. It is OK if twitter doesn't lend its microphone to Mastriano or the nypost. Let them rent their own website if they prefer. Ntd.com is incidentally a laughable source that nobody ought to credit. For gods sake the story you linked is actually them reporting on a story from the epoch times. For the record the real and complete story is that twitter NEVER suspended the senators government account and says that it suspended the personal account because someone reported it for impersonating the senator and it was reinstated.
Presumably a more reliable source would have included the entire story.
Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.
They are also free to play and usually not in a minor way. Some of the latest Gacha games have a dozen hours of storyline (or more) before starting the infinite grind.
> when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun
People have hated games forever so that isn't much of a barometer. Not commenting on whether P2W is more problematic but people have been listing forever the things that got in the way of their fun.
But your point is well taken in that the way the computer and the stream of data isn't owned by the average user has a serious impact on society. The way the Youtube algorithm pushes people towards extremism is the most extreme, obvious example.
People with the weakest filters seem like they're the victim of this stuff. But overall, the problem is the situation doesn't teach people to have filters.
Filtering and ranking (and their visual presentation to the user) are the most prized aspects of Google, Twitter and Facebook for their impact in advertising and activism. Everyone wants attention, attention is money and power. Attention is the value system on the internet.
So of course they don't want to share it, not even with the user. But we want to have a say about content evaluation as well, we have our own values.
Perhaps the best way to neuter Google, FB and Twitter is to spin out the ranking/filtering/presentation part and make many of them. I don't care about the indexer too much, it can stay in one piece. But for ranking and filtering I'd like to select other settings than they allow. Maybe settings proposed by EFF or other NGO's I trust more than a for profit company.
It used to be that we only had the option of a few channels to watch and newspapers to read. You could switch but they would be very restrictive in the choice of content. Internet gave us freedom and a high variety of options, but now ranking and filtering take them back. They want to take choice from us and impose theirs.
All of the really good hardware is cryptographically locked to software that you can't alter.
This is the case with virtually everything these days. Stallman is/was right about this. You only rent the movies on Netflix, the games on Steam, the books on Amazon Kindle, and so forth. Everything could be taken away from you for absurd reasons. Who would have thought that your account could be disabled for reasons that it could get disabled today? It is not going to get better. You cannot even play a single player game offline, without running Steam. Torrents/Warez will never go away thankfully. Screw DRM anyways.
youtube-dl is amazing. It supports a lot of platforms, and you can download entire playlists by just using the URL to the playlist itself.
Its selection is small but it has a few exclusives - Alien Trilogy was released recently-ish there. Also they're the only place where you can find the original Duke Nukem 3D with all of its expansions due to some perpetual contracts they had with 3D Realms before the IP was acquired by Gearbox.
Edit: according to this post on the forum the feature is not maintained or supported (as of 2016).
https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt/how_can_i_...
But Galaxy is optional, you can download the offline installers directly from the site. I have around 680 games on GOG and all of them are in my external HDD in their offline installers - i never installed Galaxy on my PC.
Only buy, fix and support those who have your ideals.
Against the ToS? Perhaps. But it's my book, damnit.
This situation is entirely the fault of web developers at large tech firms who have been pushing "the web as app publishing platform".
It used to be that you'd install a program and run it locally but of course javascript developers didn't want to learn C++ and here we are.
Citation needed. I can think of precious few applications that are better in the browser than native.
MS Office and Libre Office are significantly better than the horrid google docs experience.
Not a single web-based text or code editor is worth a damn.
Games are better, more featureful and more performant as native than in the browser.
Web based CAD is a joke.
Almost every major application is inferior as a web app. Gmail on desktop is about the only thing that's better than the native experience, at least that I can think of.
I dunno, number of clicks seems like a weak argument in favour of web to me.
Start -> type "f-i-r-e" -> click Firefox -> click bookmark in the menubar
That's still 3 clicks. Doublclicking the icon on the desktop maybe but that's 3 as well. Launching a native app would be no different.
codesandbox.io is actually very good for web development. If I didn't have access to a native code editor I would be pretty content with just using codesandbox. I think it uses a modified version of VS Code.
Imagine you’re a small business owner without an IT staff. Do you spend your time dealing with corrupted installations, malware, reinstalling after hardware fails, backup data and then verifying backups, or do you pay someone else a monthly fee to deal with all that and just worry about having an iPad with a working internet connection?
If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.
Of course, the downside is you have ceded some control over to someone else and are now paying them rent and possibly getting locked in, but you have limited resources to allocate, and you decide going to see your kids’ performance is more important.
- corrupted installs aren't really a thing any more
- hardware failures happen at about the same rate as hardware goes obsolete. If the hardware fails you're buying a new ipad anyways, and unlike a commodity windows PC the iPad can't be repaired.
- malware is still a threat if you have a spyware solution like O365
- as google demonstrates on a regular basis, you can't trust that you'll have access to your cloud backups. If you have data that you actually need, then you need to back it up yourself. Restoring backups takes maybe a few hours a year. Not an issue.
- an iPad is not a substitute for a desktop workstation
>If your device breaks, you toss it, switch to another machine, go to a browser, type in the website, login, and you’re good to go again within seconds. That seems a lot better and faster than paying for in house IT.
Sure until google locks you out of your account for no reason or you realize you're paying insanely high fees per year when your strategy could be to buy a prebuilt system from Dell once or twice a year and copy your backup data from a USB hard drive. For a business of 30 people or so this is perfectly viable.
Instead of having an onsite server running property management system software that has to synchronize inventory with the central reservation system, a web based property management system you can access via a browser has the following benefits for the hotel owner:
1) Don't have to worry about server HDD failures, or any other hardware failures.
2) If power goes out, just browse to the website with a mobile device.
3) Never any inventory issues since there is no synchronization that needs to be done.
4) Revolving door of minimum wage front desk workers who install malware on your Windows computers can't do that anymore if using an iPad or iPad like device, and if they do, it wouldn't result in liability due to theft of people's data. See Marriott/IHG data leaks a few years ago.
5) Lowers labor costs since you don't need someone to troubleshoot technical stuff, other than get a device with an internet connection and a browser.
6) Can move towards a self check in check out system where the guest can basically do it all via an app or the hotel's website, further reducing labor costs.
7) Features can be updated and implemented far more easily when hardware features don't have to be worried about.
I stand by my earlier point that few applications are actually superior on web compared to native.
Edit: autocorrect
Gnome is shit for sure.
HN is interesting sometimes. So many on here make a crap ton of money, way more than most other industries, and then go on to complain about FB, MSoft, Apple, Google, etc. But they all want their money and gladly take it, many working for these same companies.
No one wants to make decentralized software because there's no money in that, and no money means no fancy Tesla, or expensive restaurants, or nice condos.
Now "we" bloody haven't! You may have, I and others have not and will not. Decades ago people were literally fighting fascism and dying for it, these days whiners can't manage to install linux, VMs or blocklists.
You chose. You can unchoose.
However, I see this as something of a new development that didn't actually remove what was before. You can still run Linux if you like, just as you could 10-20 years ago. You don't have access to UHD Netflix, but... you never had. They didn't take this away, it was never given in the first place.
Granted, the fact that Apple goes downhill is, I think, a net negative for the computing world. Ditto for the tracking embedded in windows 10.
Regarding Linux, there's the UEFI / SecureBoot situation, but even on "enterprise" HP hardware this can not only be disabled but I can actually load my own keys, so I don't perceive this as a threat for the moment.
The deeper problem, to me, is that all this works because there are enough people who, for some reason, don't care. Maybe they're not educated enough / don't know better, maybe they actually want it, maybe they're not aware. But the fact remains that there are many, many people who buy the iPhone, who use windows 10, who use facebook, who buy echos, etc. So, aside from "doing the right thing", what incentives do these companies have to stop doing what they do?
[] I actually do own an iPhone but I treat it like an appliance. I install next to no apps, so I really don't care about who can install what on it. I do care that my 4 yo phone got the latest major upgrade and it works as well as the day I brought it home.
However, I am pissed that LittleSnitch is unable to filter all traffic on my Big Sur Mac. But I basically no longer use the Mac, so I'm doing something about it.
This hasn't been true for several years. Yes, distributing an app requires a paid membership, but you can build and run your app on your own device just fine.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/running_your...
> We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia.
Tell this to the young kids coming up - I'm in my mid-30's now - and explain that there existed a time when most sites were served over plain-old, unencrypted HTTP. They either won't believe you, will be horrified at the security hole here, or both.
> The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking.
In retrospect, it isn't surprising that Google - a company that makes its real money off of ads - went down this road. It stinks, but I don't know if they had any better options to protect this revenue stream in the face of tech that lets people subvert it getting better all the time.
> And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps.
In some ways, I do wish that Apple put more effort into the web app side of things, but the key victory of the App Store can't be ignored.
If you make software easier to acquire, install, and remove, people will use more of it. With few exceptions, I would posit that most people who aren't nerds didn't use much software because these guardrails weren't there, and that they might "screw up their phone/computer."
As a result of this progress, that fear has been largely eliminated, even if it means people give up some access to the nuts and bolts of how the software stack works.
Jeus Fcking Ch*ist THIS.
Especially with trivial things like a lite-mode vs this strange fad of dark-mode by default. Dark mode was created to save energy in CRTs. And anyways it gives some people headaches, like me.
Video editing, music creation tools almost never used "the standard platform GUI toolkit" (even Apple has/had their own internal kit used for apps like Logic).
It also stopped being true (or became less true) when cross-platform development became important to some developers and some users, meaning that deeply integrating your application with whatever system a particular platform had was less important than making sure it ran reasonably consistently across platforms.
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9...
It's about whether or not the application uses custom elements (or even just puts everything in a Canvas and draws everything itself).
What people asked for: choose between black on white or white on black.
What people got: dark gray on off color gray mode, or light gray on off color gray mode.
Simply having + honoring a system color scheme is a 100% solution, but then the designers and marketing folks wouldn’t have anything to focus on while they avoid improving the actual product.
It's one possible use. But the recent trend is about esthetics / usability, not energy savings. Some people prefer light some dark. It probably mostly depends on their work desk environment/lighting. Ideally apps should support both and take the cue from the system settings - we've got proper APIs for that.
I think apple started the trend because their devices were going OLED to improve battery life. I think dark and light mode are good and basically all apps should have both. That way if you hate one or the other you can always turn on the mode you like.
I think the dark mode theming capacity will probably be more permanent this time through, but it could still fizzle out within ten years.
I'm with you on this. And not just because of the reasons you listed. Everything surrounding computers has become so focused on making money that it really, really bothers me. There isn't a single thing on my computer anymore that hasn't been optimized to the n'th degree either to weasel more money out of me (F' you, Apple TV, Apple Music), or built in a way which optimized as much money out of the process as possible (F' you, Mozilla, every single one of you Electron apps out there).
We've become so utterly focused on money and optimizations that the fun and value has been sucked right out of the software - both front and back.
They were business tools! Omgurd! You’re just trying to get kids addicted to media!
It’s pretty fascinating being older and watching these arguments repeat themselves.
In case you haven’t noticed, political life is all about ownership. You’re sold disposable garbage on a cadence by people that own the machines that make it.
Your agency was sold to suppliers. Computing as a system of doing has matured.
And purchasing, well, it's the lesser of evils these days. Purchasing at least gave you vitually cart blanche access to software on your computer with time limits imposed only by processing architectures.
Now, in contrast, everything is moving towards subscriptions. 1Password. Microsoft Office. Photoshop. Sublime Text (professional). Apple Music (or Spotify, et.al.). Apple TV (or Netflix, et.al.). Novlr (a word processor).
All expect me to shell out anything from $1 to upwards of $50 a month in perpetuity for the right to borrow their software. And that's not even mentioning microtransactions, for things like alternate brushes in PS.
It’s hardware that does the real work. The software fetish of tricking a limited machine into variety is now full of variety by default as the hardware is much less limited.
No matter the language it’s physics.
Unix is still there. You’re acting entitled to have others sell only what you want.
Just like an old person. Let’s bring back pagan gods and horse and buggy, too, eh? There’s freedoms being trampled somewhere because those aren’t being fetishized at scale.
It’s the arithmetic of a society.
I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm).
My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine.
I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me?
I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart.
NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.
In my younger days I had the patience to install Ubuntu over and over again. In my 30s I simply no longer have the heart for it. My M1 mac just works out the box and I can spend more time working on my games and music.
I still enjoy building PCs from time to time, but even then I just install Windows and move on with my day
For many peoples workflows including my own, Windows would pose a far greater headache to get to a productive state. macOS works great, up to the point where you want to enjoy freedom to use your computer as you see fit, certainly less hassle for development (in general) than Windows though imo :)
99.9% of what you use the computer for is online and websites work great on Linux. Seriously, it's one of the best times in my life to have a computer in my control.
I've never had to make fewer sacrifices to run what I like than today.
Even the phone scene is starting to look like it's going to be opening up in the next few years.
I've gone back to running OpenBSD/FreeBSD on the hardware and relegating Linux to VMs only, with all the hardware pains that used to plague Linux 15 years ago. But at least my OS is predictable and reliable again, and doesn't patronize me.
I found this article on Stallman's website and it was enlightening for me:
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
> This approach leads to some great products on screen and IRL, but alienates as well.
> Robotics doesn’t give us a chance to fall in love with the computer if it is not anthropomorphic. Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces.
> It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and — going to a more pragmatic level — we are not able to use personal computers anymore.
> For government agencies, the destruction of hardware is a routine procedure. From their perspective, the case of deletion is thoroughly dealt with when the media holding the data is physically gone. They are smart enough to not trust the “empty trash” function.
> Of course the destruction made no sense in this case, since copies of the files in question were located elsewhere, but it is a great symbol for what is left for users to do, what is the last power users have over their systems: They can only access them on the hardware level, destroy them.
> Since there is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software, you’ll tend to destroy your hard drive voluntarily every time you want to really delete something.
> Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer.
> The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”
Maybe you need to change OS.
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre...
They have a killer feature: infrared send and receive. Making a network of weird flashy lights is all the joy of computing without any of the “this feels like my job” crap[8].
Press a button and the device appears as a USB drive. You build your project at https://makecode.adafruit.com/ into a firmware file ending in .UF2 and upload it the device.
[1] ...and some battery packs, cable ties, USB A to micro B leads if you don’t have twelve billion already.
[8] You might be tempted by the third party firmware/UF2 called “Circuit Python”, which lets you then code on the device directly in a cutdown version of Python3. For me, that felt too much like my day job :)
This is not true. You explicitly consented to it by voluntarily installing software that has this (horrific) feature.
In a way, Pangaea has split. Massively profitable giants have emerged as the foundations of the industry have hardened. The industry is mature, but the amount of truly exciting work has dwindled. Microsoft at it’s peak never felt as well-entrenched as today’s tech giants.
I briefly came out of retirement a few years ago to work on a blockchain-related company, which presented an energy akin to the Macintosh or Java, but ultimately it was clear that the industry as a whole has shifted priorities by so much - beyond the point of no return- for better or for worse.
When I am on Windows or Mac, both of which I loved for a long time, and still do in certain versions, I feel like I never know what's coming next.
One moment you like me, next time you don't. One day you want to be the quiet nerdy kid who's always got my back, that's really nice. But the next day you want to please everyone, rearrange all my shit, and gossip about me to all your MLM friends.
One moment you want to be predictable, dependable, usable. Then the next day you want to interrupt my work while you do your hair.
And I get it, you're trying to figure yourself out, you've got bills to pay, that's totally fine. However, I just won't be able to spend as much time with you anymore, because I'm trying to get some work done. It's not you, it's me.
Maybe we can still hang out sometimes? I'll make some space for you in a VM.
I do not. The IT department is the super user. Everything is a battle. Nothing gets changed without a multi-hour / -day back and forth with the “IT service team”. To be charitable they could be described as a very resource limited team who are forced to ruthlessly prioritize requests. Realistically they are power drunk gatekeepers. The answer is usually always “no”.
It’s a whole new world of bullshit that I’d forgotten existed. The last time I encountered this was in the education sector in 2004.
In your situation, my advice is to make management very aware that it's wasting time, hurting productivity, and ultimately the company's bottom line. Something that impacts profitability is going to get more attention.
It’s all fun and games until IT ticks the “filesharing sites” option in their censorware proxy config, and poof, no Dropbox, no Drive, no Gmail...
A powerful and dysfunctional IT department is indeed a horrible business practice.
The transactions between IT and staff are glibly treated as some sort of internal vendor/client relationship. But the vendor (IT) isn’t responsible to the client (me.) The vendor’s performance is reviewed by their management, and their management’s management.
At some point up the tree the reporting structures do converge, but that nexus is sufficiently distant that any technical feedback is weeks old and diluted.
Luckily, the battle with IT is such a tiny part of my job that I’ve decided to just check out completely. For part of my work I provide my own devices, network, and software and I’m quite open (constructively, with my manager) about the fact that I do so, and why.
I’m stoic about how the org chooses to interpret me voting with my feet like this. Meanwhile I can focus on doing work, which is mostly what I care about.
Sometimes though, the idea of working at such a dysfunctional org makes me feel a deep unease. My employer might also feel unease. We may choose, unilaterally or bilaterally, to terminate our relationship and find partners that are a better fit. Life’s too short to fight all the time.
I made the mistake of asking for a windows laptop once even though it was supposedly for research and I had admin access (and they promised not to install anything unless I asked for it). They still installed some remote monitoring/admin crap on it that reinstalls virus protection and other crap whenever I remove it.
On Linux. Given that businesses run Windows or macOS, at least those with an IT dept., root in a VM has little more privileges than any other user mode executable.
The general level of programmer ability is lower than it used to be (and this is a good thing IMHO) at the same time the number of degrees of freedom has increased. Thus the more customization points, the more opportunities for something to go wrong because of some unwitting assumption made elsewhere. Just look at how many problems we still have with i18n: not enough room allocated for strings; grammar assumptions, and let's not get into BIDI. So reduced options will reduce the percentage and total number of user problems.
A corollary to this is the deployment of servers: once every server was a snowflake with its own lovingly-chosen name. Nowadays servers are spun up, configured, and then erased and repurposed in an instant with nobody thinking about it.
Then there's the spam and attack vectors: no longer to we craft amusing response text to server handshakes ("username accepted -- socket to me!"). You can't just operate an open SMTP server as a favor to someone who might need it. And the fact is >99% of all people cannot defend themselves against a phishing attack or avoid downloading malware that will attack someone else.
Finally: the number of possible customization points has actually increased dramatically on the highly personal devices like phones: in those cases rather than expose the options (which can interact in weird ways) they are just continuously automatically tuned based on observing my use. It's all in the name of being more custom to me but I don't like it.
====
All that being said, I agree with the author that it's a shame. But my response has been different: taking a cue from the servers, I try to use as little customization as possible, both so I can switch from machine to machine easily and to avoid the problems of poorly-coded machinery. Even my emacs init file is surprisingly short (and in the 1970s my EMACS init file was a binary image memory mapped into EMACS and (as I later learned) used by a lot of people. Well those days are over.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes
From which I learned that no less than Tom Lehrer, someone else youngsters should know about, thought it was “the most sanctimonious song ever written”. And he was right.
On the plus side, great children’s tune and the simplicity of the lyrics match the melody and provide a nice counterpoint to the message.
It perfectly captures the sour, smug, almost elitist cultural tone set by US 60s coastal urban intellectuals that hasn’t aged well over the years. I suppose you had to have been there.
Surprised no one has written a parody lampooning the cultural elites of the era with the same song and lyrical structure.
That song was about San Francisco specifically (as you drive out on 280).
This resonates with me a lot.
I started my first "proper" job this year, and the dev env we use is pretty run-off-the-mill: docker, TS, AWS... But there is one big issue and that is that I had to switch to Windows a while back for driver reasons (looking at you, Dell and Intel) and this is the first time in over 9 year that I have used Windows proper. Not a fault of my employer I should add.
In academia, and at home, I have been running Linux for ~14 years by now, so I had skipped Windows 8 and this is my first contact with Windows 10. And while I appreciate how much more stable this system is than my XP from way back when, it feels horrible, and pretty much for the reasons described here.
It's not that Linux was always smooth sailing, or that it was easy, or user friendly in the conventional sense. But there is a huge difference in my relationship to the system:
On Linux (and generally with FOSS software) whenever I hit a problem, if something didn't work, I could be sure that it was not there because someone didn't want me to be able to do it like that. It was always a lack of resources or insight, or both. And people and systems in FOSS are built to enable me to change things.
Working on windows, I tried setting up my PC in the way described in the article. Halfway through I realized that I was just fighting against the system, trying to make it do something it didn't want.
Needless to say, MacOS is not an alternative to Windows for me. They're both dead to me. Lesson learned, gonna vote with my money from now on. I started by ordering an MNT Reform for my personal use (not speedy enough for work) and I have been getting more into Rust and other tech that should allow me to get more and more of my daily activities out of the realm of "will only run on top notch hardware because we couldn't be arsed to think about performance."
It was basically the fault of Dell/Intel to provide proper drivers with my hardware, combined with the worst of timings: the first French started on the day after my hardware arrived, and I had to hastily relocate after picking it up, to avoid being stuck in a tiny temporary housing. This was then the only work-capable hardware in the house. So I couldn't just send it back when I noticed the problems, because it would have meant literally not being able to work for a while. Although with the time I spent trying to make it work on linux, then the nerves/mental health I've spent on using Windows on it, that would have been the better call in hindsight.
Anyhow, given that on-premise work is still not exactly around the corner, I'll build a ryzen workstation as soon as parts become available here, and be done with this. And I'll avoid Dell/Intel from now on.
I feel for all people forced to work like this. I cannot understand employers accepting the massive suck on productivity this causes. For my own sanity, I will charge a premium or avoid such environments altogether.
Btw., if possible a workaround for a lot of the usual driver/VPN/that-one-special-application headaches that force employees to use windows is to get approval for vmware, virtualbox or something, install yourself a linux VM and use that in fullscreen for most things. But of course that is not always possible.
It might be ok for the occasional Linux tool, but I want the other thing: the occasional windows tool, but the rest to be Linux.
Ever since I realized I was fighting a system I have no intention of mastering anymore (my brain cycles are too dear to me for that) I stopped engaging and just accepted it as the nuisance it is.
But "just use vmware" seems like an easy enough fix that I might actually go down that route from now on, thanks!
You must be dealing with different FOSS software than I usually am. Software quite frequently refuses to let me do things "for security reasons" or because "why would you want to do that". It is very tiring.
I am a long time Apple user and I understand that this platform is not for me anymore. Apple undoubtedly will have expansion of user base, M2 will be monster of processor and will eliminate the idea of Mac Pro tower. But trade off will be: no user control over software and hardware. For general user base this is not a problem. They feel at home because this is nothing new for them. This is iPhone and iPad experience all over.
So what is the solution? The solution for me is to relearn computing. Actually things that I cannot live behind (yet) are Affinity Designer and Logic.
Linux is the way for power user. Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora. Plenty of choices.
I discovered that learning Emacs is investment in future in which I will not depend on corporate idea of "user interface". As a long time designer I sketch and draw on paper with pencil and ink brush. In the past I successfully shipped designs with Inkscape (people were unaware of SVG) so in near future my work (if is any left) will be done without new Apple.
As for being "one update away from breaking" this is an issue on any OS, at least with Linux you have the choice not to update or even roll back.
In theory. In reality you just end up having to deal with all of them simultaneously to get your workflow going because you're using tools from different authors who all have their opinion of what "the right way" is.
> As for being "one update away from breaking" this is an issue on any OS, at least with Linux you have the choice not to update or even roll back.
Again, in theory but not in practice. Because of the repo/pacakge manager model that Linux systems insist on using, and because there's no such thing as a separation between 'system' and 'application', failure to update often means you are unable to use up-to-date software entirely. Well, unless you want to set up a build environment and compile your own version of that software, which is utterly ridiculous.
This is in fact an issue on any platform right now.
> there's no such thing as a separation between 'system' and 'application', failure to update often means you are unable to use up-to-date software entirely.
Isn't that why Flatpak was invented?
I don't want to be in a position where the developers of the currently most installed desktop environment GNOME are calling the shots.
GNOME is removing instead of adding features left and right and as a power user I get treated like a toddler that's being told what's good for me.
I haven't customised things like colours on my user interface since the days on windows 3.1 though. Mouse focus, click to hover, highlight to copy, various keyboard shortcuts for sticking windows in the right place (top left, bottom right, full screen, half screen, etc) sure, but colours?
Seems like any way you see it you still have no control over your machine. May I suggest you write your own desktop environment?
API v1 was hacky and rushed and it changed a lot in v2.
If anything, the steer to traditional native development was a classic example of Jobs being ready to deny everything he had sworn on until a minute before, just because he had found a new option that was more favorable to his profits.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
I recently installed the shiny new Mint 20. I have a lot of experiences that the fictitious cook with the kitchen inspector has. Am I just getting old? Do I just want the kids off my lawn? Why is it so damn hard to find anything now? Case in point, I was using a pretty old distro on my computer, one of those dang mini-itx jobs where the BT and WIFI are impossible to turn off from the bios, but you turn them off in software. Of course, on the old linux, they were just off, you had to configure them. Well, I am hardwired in my house (again, maybe I am too old and need to be killed?) and I do not use wifi for my servers/workstations. Install Mint 20, well, first off, it wants to do WIFI, nope. Hrm, open a terminal, why isn't the wired connection getting an IP? I know, beyond all reason, that my dhcp server is working. I try to do my normal config or look in /etc... nope. It is controlled by some kind of automagic thing now. Ill just get on the inter... oh, yeah, its off. So I look around the gui, that config does not show why it is not coming on?
Where is the normal "turn this on/off button in the gui? Why am I using the gui? Oh, right, my old method is long gone now"
I feel like although this example could be trivial, but a lot of things seemed to have gone away. I will not rehash the systemd vs init discussion here, but it sure seemed like a lot of configs used to be easier. Here are a few that come to mind:
My dns was just one text file away.
My network config was a very simple cli change away.
I want to change my prompt... wow, why is it referenced in 5 places in this bash file now?
My path is referenced all over the place... what happened here, I will just check with the set command. OMG, what is all this stuff now?
I think in our quest to make things "easier" for people, we made it a lot more difficult for those who want to change a few things and use the computer.
There are plenty of ancient distros that still need tons of manual janitoring. Slackware is still updated. OpenBSD exists. LFS is always an option. Go out and make your graybeard UNIX dreams of lovingly handcrafted network configs a reality!
I suppose this sounds like a counter argument to me wanting control... but I will admit I am in a special situation in that I want more control, but I use very specialized software that has issues with old or very bleeding edge distros.
If parent had instead said that they were having trouble getting some software working because of a system library conflict, you'd admonish them for using a distro meant for hackers instead of one of the "easy" distros.
The point being: why should anyone have to choose between these two extremes? Why can't things be both simple and functional?
Apparently you are unable to differentiate between nostalgia and an actual technical issue. Yeah, I remember sysv init too! Why should I have to choose between that and systemd??? That isn't exactly the same as having a library issue. hth
Only thing I had to do with my Mint install is workaround some sound issue. Mileage may vary though, and this has been true since day 2.
In order to have something work smoother, ie. supporting laptop/tablet usage, something had to change. It's always been annoying but at least you can even recompile the kernel.
IMO, if the article didn't "go far enough" because it didn't talk about something like this, then the article made the right choice. "Using Linux" doesn't mean "using linux mint".
For example: The three or four times I've bothered to reinstall my OS in the past eight years, I just install the minimal, CLI version of debian, and then proceed to install exclusively what I want on top of it. Seems like that's more or less what you would want to do.
Of course, your situation might be different and you might not have the opportunity to do that, but I hope this helps at least somewhat.
I installed Arch Linux and had to learn everything from scratch. I didn't know anything about UNIX, security, config files, environmental variables, compiling code, git, terminals, window managers, ssh, bash scripting, user groups, access control, boot options, or anything else. I wouldn't trade the time I've invested in learning how to operate and customize an open system, but the amount of upfront effort is very intimidating. I can say with confidence that if I hadn't simultaneously developed an obsession with programming that I would have very quickly given up.
> The system came with a reasonable set of defaults and when or if they grew more proficient and wanted to change something about their daily working environment, they had the option to do so.
This is the root of the issue in my mind, what are the 'sane defaults' for a UNIX system to someone completely uninitiated in how software works? There's so much 'don't know what you don't know' for people that only knew Windows and Mac growing up. I can't imagine anyone that doesn't work with computers professionally or as a hobbyist ever thinking that spending years learning open systems is worth the opportunity cost of the other things they could be doing with their lives.
The only way back would be to destroy the mass market and make it small again, but that has its own drawbacks.
The feeling was that it is 'your domain', which it isn't as soon as you take part in a larger ecosystem (i.e. networked and vendor-supported with many users and shared services).
A highly customized environment is a timesink of its own, a source of frustration whenever you have to work in a different environment, and 90% of the customizations are pretty meaningless anyway.
Give me reasonable defaults and I'm happy.
Oh and of course it causes your car to crash constantly now.
Not a knock against VSCode; I acquired this attitude before I started using it. Maybe if I invested in learning VSCode thoroughly, the investment would pay off. I've just been so thoroughly trained not to treat anything outside the terminal as stable that I can't bring myself to do it anymore.
I think it was putting work into a vimrc that finally changed my mind. It was great customizing vim, getting it to be just right for myself. But there were a few things that ended up bothering me over time:
* No end state meant I was just constantly toying with it and wasting time. Sometimes the changes would be minor things that barely mattered, but I couldn't decide which way I liked things more * Not always available, leading to needing to essentially remember two different versions of vim. Mine, and the default. * Keybind clashes. Bringing in new plugins was always a pain because there was a good chance that one of my custom keybinds clashed with the plugin, requiring me to make a mess of the plugin's default bindings or to reassign and relearn the colliding binding.
With sane defaults, these problems nearly disappear.
That said there are certain customisations which do really impact my productivity, and they tend to be ones which are 'off the beaten path', so I'm very much in favour of keeping software configurable. There are also tools which I spend a lot of effort hammering into a usable state using their options and extension support, and I wish they would take a more 'toolkit and framework' approach (as opposed to thousands of ad-hoc options), and/or present a more useful default.
- I take notes profusely, but I'm dissatisfied with every note taking app. I have rigged up Typora (a Markdown editor) to an Alfred workflow to build exactly the solution that I want. I guess Alfred is the "saving grace" here.
- I can't find a good podcasting app (I want to listen on my Mac, not on my phone). Eventually I just settled on The Old Reader subscribing to the podcast RSS and download the files manually to play in VLC. Works great, if you don't want a seamless UI.
- I, like I'm guessing everyone in this thread, have a very customized terminal shell. The customization environment here is thriving more than ever before and doesn't show signs of being trampled by any integrated solution.
What's the common thread? GUIs. GUIs are hard to make customizable, and the returns on doing so rapidly diminish with the number of non-power-users. If you discount GUIs, there's tons of customization to be had on your computer right now.
That is the repository for a Markdown full-text search engine that I use, although if you wanted you could modify it to use the normal Spotlight search.
Yes, computers have reached a new level of commoditization. So much so, that many users just use a smartphone and tablet. It's a lot more convenient than sitting at a terminal and with a cherry MX keyboard. But those choices are very much available; they just aren't available to everyone. If you really wanted, you can even design your own processor die based off RISC-V designs. And yes, you can totally build your own Linux system from scratch: I'd argue that's there's a lot more choice available in this regard. Remember the days of the simplistic GNU Stow? Today, there's Nix, and you can base your entire system on it. And use XMonad, rxvt-unicode and zsh, if you so desired; they're still maintained, last I checked. I'm sure there are packages for eccentric people to design their own cursors. FreeBSD and OpenBSD exist, and are quite viable. You could even base a system on SeL4, if you're into that sort of thing.
I wholeheartedly agree that this kind of commoditization is actively harmful and stifles creativity. Cashiers and librarians are walled into their little interface; in the best case, they might figure out how to play a game of Freecell. It's sad, but this is the price we pay to put multiple little computers in everyone's hands. Choices create fragmentation, and with fragmentation, there's little incentive to keep fixing the bugs on esoteric fragments. Every choice increases the testing burden exponentially, and to avoid special-casing each combination of choices, software ends up being written for the lowest common denominator. The result is something like Linux on laptops today: the defaults are so terrible that you're forced to mess with the touchpad driver to get basic usability.
Don’t be mislead by US government stats about rural v. urban population. Their definition overstates the number of Americans who live in (what Europeans would define sociologically as) urban areas. I discovered this when I perused a list of US Census urban clusters and discovered Zuñi Pueblo listed there.
I can’t see how hobbyist computing with open source operating systems and legacy hardware will ever go away, and with a thriving community of interest to boot. Analog ports forever and confusion to the usurper Apple slabs...
The convergence (a big fad term of the 1990s) into infocomputotainment will eventually cloy and kids will rediscover the real world, as they did in the 1970s back-to-the-land movement rebelling against conventional TV culture.
Boring because I want predictable, predictable because I want to spend the effort to learn something once and then not have to worry about learning it again.
For example I use i3, and I switch ctrl and caps lock. During my first pair programming experience my colleague was struggling with all that and I was feeling quite guilty ("maybe this need to fine-tune everything is just immature after all"). After this I made sure to be able to switch quickly to a "vanilla" Gnome setup.
Although coming back to Gnome after using i3 is quite easy since the Gnome paradigm is quite universal, there are some alternative "configs" that I am afraid to adopt, such as exotic keyboard layouts ("bepo" in french instead of "azerty"). Losing the ability to type on this de facto standard layout would be quite problematic.
Since accepting the default state when there's an update and the interface changes for the third time in a year I just get on and learn whatever I am confronted with and as a result I have lower blood pressure.
The only constant is change. Go with the flow. Yadadadaaa
Collectively, devs have decided that a high paying salary at FAANG justifies whatever trash they inflict upon the world. Even a highly sought after programmer is only a programmer, one cog in the machine.
Keep pissing in the common pool and stuffing your own pockets. Keep dissolving every semblance of community (as a force for collective action on the world, not just buddies having a drink). This is what a divided society looks like. Easily controlled by whichever crooks happen to be in charge.
Were computers more democratic when they were obscenely expensive time-sharing mainframes living at places like universities and Bell Labs? Were developers ever anything other than a 'cog in the machine' at any point during the 20th century? You can't just say 'late stage capitalism' and somehow have it morph into a meaningful (or even coherent) point jfyi
Yes, great developers were much more powerful than cogs in the machine until recently. Being a dev was not a mainstream, sexy, or high paid career until recently. So the kinds of people the profession attracted were quite different.
Maybe you feel anything with the words late-stage capitalism can be discarded immediately. Maybe it sounds hysterical or anti-progress. But we certainly can make technology better for non technical people without taking away configurability and freedom for experts to truly own their machine as well.
I remember a BBC description several years ago about what the internet was like in the middle east and India. It was awash with annoying ads and privacy violation but people didn't seem to care, presumably since it was all they knew and so much better than going without. With technology changing extremely-fast now, it is the wild west here too. Once AI is a commodity every can profit from, including on the defense side in finding you content without needed to give your data away, it will probably settle down again.
This bothers me too. Is there some history to using capital letters for home folder names? It seems really out of place in case-sensitive file systems.
https://youtu.be/TfCn4B8QzXg?list=PLbnsTpgUhcOfzC4qbV3n3R55Z...
> Now imagine if you couldn't organize your kitchen to your heart's content. Not because you're lacking the funds or skills, but because some federally appointed clerk is constantly coming to inspect it.
It turns out we live in this world more than we realize :-)
You can buy a handmade car from http://themetalsurgeon.com ...and they’re amazing! Yet, most people buy prebuilt cars from dealers, choosing from just a few options.
Well said. The kitchen analogy is too long. I skipped most of it.
There might be more indie developers making wonky stuff out there now, that there were programmers altogether in the early 90's.
Snap developers tell us they won't let you disable an update on our own systems, never mind if we don't want to update...
It feels almost like there is some arrogance going on nowadays in the industry.
Nowadays, if software is not customizable or if it forces updates, I will look elsewhere for alternatives. It has actually started to inspire me to start some new side projects.
Having our own computers customized to our every whim is less important because we can cope. By contrast, when something little goes wrong for less technical people, they might be blocked entirely.
The problem is they are still having trouble but I cannot help them as often as I used to.
part is a bit ambivalent. Doesnt this actually mean, that the programmers have the freedom to ignore the 'accent color' which the article is somehow arguing for. (the alternative would be that the OS mandates functionality of app in a very intrusive way)
And if I want to make a change, I can apt-get to my heart's desire. I don't really take advantage of the freedom, but it's enough knowing that I could.
On iOS devices, Apple Configurator is a good start and the XML policy files can be generated by OSS software. But there's currently no user-controlled way to prototype and request new policies, outside of jailbreaking.
As an alternative, I choose to use stable platforms that are designed with modularity, strong abstractions and internal programmability, so I can choose when to keep a particular workflow/UX, and when to adopt a newer style.
That platform is Emacs.
• The latest version of Windows that I use (and I'm ever likely to use) is Windows 7.
• I turn off Automatics Updates off by default and disable them from starting.
• Occasionally, I have to turn on Automatic Updates on to install some stuff, even if the internet is not required/or not connected (Virtual XP mode for example).
• When I do this, I occasionally forget that I have left Updates on and connect to the internet. If Updates go so much as even near a Microsoft server site then I erase everything and start again (if that happens I deem the system to be 'unclean' and thus I can no longer depend upon it).
• I start with a 'clean' Windows 7 installation disk, specifically one with a Windows 7-sp3 on it.
• I have a separate collection of 'known' KB security patches and a few other KB files, such as files associated Windows XP Mode/MS Virtual Machine, that I install. These I install first up.
• I then do preliminary/rough settings such as configuring the attributes of the command box, change the Environmental settings so as the TEMP files are in the Root Directory, C:\TEMP etc. (so I can always gain access to them in a split second).
• Here, I also do dozens of other tweaks and settings, the first of which is to get Explorer to display 'details' mode everywhere (in some instances this is damn nigh on impossible (why do the pathetically-little-mined authoritarian Microsoft programming Nazis shits insist that we cannot display files the way we want to)? Damn Them! Even after I tweak Explorer, I install probably the best file manager there is, Directory Opus (I can configure that mostly to the way I want).
• I then nuke the following useless crap (for me anyway—I never use them), partial list only: Recovery/Restore point, Action Center, Windows Security Center, UAC/User Account Control; then I Kill and disable multiple services (too detailed to mentioned here except to mention that Windows Update is turned off and defaulted 'disabled' (I always put a note on my screen to ensue that I never accidentally enable it.)
• I then install one of the greatest and most reliable freeware programs of all time — Ivo Beltchev's wonderful Classic Shell so I get my XP/Windows 2000 looks back — or I should rightly say I revert as close as is possible to IBM's CUA (Common User Access) User Interface. (Incidentally, I've put Ivo Beltchev's Classic Shell on dozens of machines and never, ever had a single moment's trouble with it. When installed, you'd think that how Win 7 came, as it integrates so well and it's so unobtrusive that it becomes 'invisible'. You can go years without realizing it's there. 'Tis a shame that many others don't use it as an example of how to do brilliant programming/programming design.)
• I then install another truly essential utility for Windows, ERU for NT (ERUNT). This program automatically backs up the registry for past 30 days and allows it to be resorted instantly (it's saved me many times).
• I then install other important O/S related utilities such as Nir Sofer's NirSoft utilities, Sysinternals utilities and Raspopov's excellent USB Oblivion which nukes all that Windows remembers about USB dives (it removes details about which USB drives have been inserted, etc.).
• After everything is tweaked and rechecked, I consider State 1 installation to be complete. I then do a mirror backup image of the drive.
• From State 1, I then proceed through various stages until I get to Stage 5, that's when I consider everything to be installed. With each stage, I install programs that progress from small, essential, reliable and stable (well know utilities etc. such as David Carpenter's Everything which I couldn't live without), through to large unstable programs such as Gimp, LibreOffice and MS Office (only up to 2003 ver however), etc.
• This exercise takes me about three weeks to fully complete and involves literally thousands of .reg registry patches (of which I have a documented library of thousands).
• Each stage is backed up separately, this means that if I discover a significant problem in Stage 4, I can reload Stage 3 and then reinstall Stages 4 and 5 from there (this saves a great deal of time as one doesn't have to start from scratch). Also, it's worth noting that the majority of installation time is taken up with fiddly, time consuming O/S adjustments, these mostly in occur in the early Stages 1 & 2. (In one machine, Stage 1 has not required tweaking since 2015, as all other tweaks could be made further up the line.)
•Windows is configured so no essential user data resides on the Operating system drive.
That's the brief version. Oh, BTW, every change on the O/S is documented, which amounts to several reams/over a 1000 pages of info.
Whenever, I blow up Windows or it gets too dirty, it only takes me about 6/7 minutes to stream a fresh working copy of say Windows 7-Stage 5 and I'm up and running again (it's really dead easy and very quick to be back in business). Right, this is one hell of an exercise, but over the years it's paid off big-time.
Now you ask yourself, would I ever upgrade to another crappy version of Windows again when these days that exercise would be nigh on impossible with Win 10. Not in you damn life I wouldn't!
Right, I'm stuck on Windows 7 forever. Next time I have to upgrade, I rekcon I'll only be left with Linux and its kludged brother, Android.
Bye, bye Microsoft.
Oh, I forgot to mention the obvious, which is that most of this messing about would not have be necessary if Microsoft had made it easy to configure the Windows Operating System from the outset.
I've only done the full exercise twice since 2012 (there's been no need to do more). The second was in 2015 when I fine tuned my installation and it has run like silk ever since. (I don't consider doing other machines as fully redoing the exercise as I've a record of most of the adjustments from the original machine which I apply to the second, and so on.)
It's not any more buggy than any other Windows system and the machine's drivers stabilized years ago. If you got the buggy idea from my comment about me blowing Windows up then it's not the machine's fault. I probably do more varied work on this machine than most, one moment it can be used as a prototyping test bed for some electronic project with the covers off and wires hanging out, another I'll be experimenting with Windows' internals, and the next I'll likely be writing a 20/30 page report where I cannot afford crashes to happen under any circumstances.
It's easy for me to crash Windows, and I do so often! If I get the notion that, say, I cannot uninstall some part of Windows because Microsoft won't let me do so from within the O/S, then I'll just load a Linux based utility like Parted Magic and simply remove the associated files anyway (and this includes all the file repositories and Windows 'self-awareness'/protection stuff which gets in the way when you're testing things out — Windows starts complaining when you do this, so the solution is to also kill off the complaining/monitoring bits). Sometimes this approach can be very successful, sometimes it isn't. What I'm saying is that I've no qualms about pulling Windows' internals apart bit by bit to get it to do my bidding. Clearly, this can cause trouble and sometimes it does.
However, it's never an issue because no useful user data ever resides on the O/S drive and I can stream a complete, fully-installed working backup and I can be up and running within 6/7 minutes. Alternatively, if I'm running multiple projects at once I just swap out the O/S drive for another disk that already has the identical Windows O/S installed and fully pre-configured.
BTW, I've found from testing it's amazing what one can actually do with W10 going down that path, but that's another story. Even though it can be 'tamed' considerably by using unorthodox methods, frankly, I've lost interest in Windows and Microsoft (so have the industries I work with). I've wasted too much of my life mucking about with Microsoft's proprietary code that's written primarily to benefit Microsoft at the users' expense.
Oh, I forgot your point about support. I've used MS products for an awfully long time and I've NEVER received any support from Microsoft (and I wouldn't take it even if it were offered). If you consider automatic updates as support then so be it. If I buy any other type of product I don't have to use it with an umbilical cord connected to the Manufacturer because it was so shoddy when it left the factory, so why do I have to do it with software? Patches and automatic updates are con jobs by a software industry who's convinced everyone that updates are necessary to cover up their crappy/sloppy workmanship—or these days to add in spyware that they forgot to install in the first place (witness Windows 10). QED!
> ..
> ...It's easy for me to crash Windows, and I do so often!
I get your point, but those two statements are in a bit of tension with each other.
Incorrect. Not all bugs are UI errors and you’re missing out on critical updates in order to use an out of date OS.
The point is that ongoing updates and upgrading Windows is a much worse option since Microsoft began stealing user information.
As I mentioned, my bugs are friendly ones in that they've not caused me any significant problem since 2012!
As for security, I couldn't give a damn about security updates, everything is backed up and there's no user data of any significane on the machine worthy of stealing. (One way to ensure private information can't be stolen is not to put machines containing it onto the net. I observe this rule and have always done so.)
The fact is that by not using JavaScript, I likely have better protection anyway.
Addendum, another way of looking at the problem is that I no longer have a relationship with Microsoft. I paid them good money for multiple copies of Windows in 2012 and as far as I'm concerned that's the end of it. Finito.
This ongoing umbilical tethering of software after it's purchased is something I'm strongly against, especially so with software from Big Tech, they're forever adding stuff in patches that benefits them well ahead of the user. I want no part of that type of operation.
I think we are better off focusing on content generation tools- ie geocities, garageband, gimp, and software that is customizeable by the end user, even if they aren't a programmer- for example being able to skin the UI, or lay things out a certain way.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...
The options are all there. I get the complaint about the lack of configuration on popular systems. But you can't have it both ways and then complain that Linux doesn't expose the options you really want. Every person will have something they'd like to do and you can't realistically expose millions of options without killing usability - but if you really want to adjust something, and are willing to put in some effort, you can.