Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately, the consumer industry trend will be to follow Apple. I see little hope for competitive open computing devices. Ever since the Nokia N900, openness has consistently lost in the market against faster, slicker, more integrated competitors.

Only in those markets where computing is a fungible commodity, i.e. servers, is the flexibility of openness any benefit, and even there it loses some autonomy to black-box "management engines". While these are still the most plausible vehicle for open computing, I only see them as appealing to a niche of amateurs buying cheaper refurbished machines.

Some may tout stuff like the RasPi as a viable alternative. Sure, but with the understanding that the RasPi is a CPU riding along a beefy VideoCodec/GPU, which has taken years of (ongoing) effort to implement open drivers for, and the RasPi4 still remains 2x slower than my 15 year old laptop.

In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.

I don't think much is changing when it comes to gaming PCs. They have been extremely modular and I see no trend for them to change. But when it comes to anything of mobile form factors, like laptops, I agree with you. Less and less ability to change and replace parts.

But then again the gaming PCs are full of malware -- most game launchers can be very easily called that. Not to mention that part of them have been caught to install rootkits, or the more modest ones just don't allow the game to be started if you have Process Explorer running (they claim it's for preventing game cheats -- which doesn't work anyway).

So while I have a gaming PC myself, I have long ago removed anything personally sensitive from it. I can't view it as a platform for open computing by any means.

I agree with you about the software part, but I mostly meant the hardware. What I meant by gaming PCs was that there is a market of modular computers, mainly but not exclusively serving gamers. You can still build your own computer from parts you ordered on the internet. You don't have to put Win 10 with a bunch of games on it. You can install GNU/Linux. I have done precisely that.

Agreed on that. The PC platform allows us to build any specialized computer that we like and that's awesome.

But I am worried. Non-free firmware is everywhere. The Intel Management Engine showed a very dark side of the hardware vendors. How long until a remotely activated censorship or spying is brought to light?

I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.

It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.

> I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.

> It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.

So, buy from vendors that are working toward similar goals, like System76.

Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.

At my work, we used to use gaming PCs as high power compute boxes. We used them fully, and they worked great. And they were as open as a PC can get - they had all open source software, no rootkits, no suspicious files.

Please don't mix the platform and what you do with it. Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.

> Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.

It doesn't make sense indeed because I am not saying that. I am saying that most software running on these platforms is proprietary and at least a part of it is malicious. I think we were discussing the merits of the various platforms plus what most usual folk uses them for. If not, then my mistake.

We're quite free to assemble any PC we like and install Linux on it. At least we have that still.

> Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.

Not necessarily. Freedom has its own equivalent to the Paradox of Tolerance (ie. tolerating the intolerant implicitly gives them the upper hand, leading to a decline in tolerance).

Because of that, there are various limits that are imposed on giving (or trading) your freedoms away, in the interest of maximizing freedom overall. For an extreme example, it is not legal to sell yourself into slavery (or indentured servitude, or most other variations on that theme).

Less dramatically, Fair Dealing / First Sale doctrines make imposing a restriction on reselling goods as a condition of purchase (most prominently applied to the secondhand book market) unenforceable. Various jurisdictions have similarly made non-compete clauses in employment agreements unenforceable. And so on.

Of course, there are plenty of circumstances where free societies have determined that the freedom to give up your freedom is allowed, or even encouraged, but it is hardly universal across the board.

When a graphics card manufacturer is allowed to artificially gimp the hardware you bought, is that really any better? they modify firmware and drivers in order to restrict you from performing certain workloads.

> ...is that really any better?

Yes. Much. They're (presumably this is in reference to Nvidia either with the cryptocurrency mining limit or geforce/quadro divide) doing this in order to sell you a more expensive product which has those premium features. Note that in this case premium is literally true; these are features which, if you want them, you need to pay a premium for them. Product prices are set by demand, not by cost. One happy side effect of this is, if you're not trying to destroy the planet by wasting huge amounts of power mining cryptocurrency, gaming graphics cards might get easier to buy.

In other words, if you want something you have to pay for it. Intentionally making products which are segmented is a fundamentally different thing than what is being discussed up-thread.

The consumer industry. And I think it is to be expected, and frankly, not a bad thing.

For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.

But Macbook Pros are not supposed to be consumer products! It is called "pro", that should be for a reason. People work on these machines, there are developers, sysadmins, etc... You can almost consider it a dev kit for the entire Apple ecosystem. That's why I am a bit concerned. The "consumer product" trend is starting to overstep its borders.

Pro has been and is just a marketing term for Apple.

I believe it has become just a marketing term - but the original macbook pros were very much geared towards lots of computing power to get serious business done. It has shifted over time.

> I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part.

Sure, but the right comparison is between an engine that you can access and might sometimes require work on your part (or you can hire someone else to do it) and an engine you can't access, and in fact is so locked down that no one not approved by the manufacturer can access it, so when you encounter any problem you have to take it back to the manufacturer, who (it turns out) almost always says the only solution is a total replacement of the engine.

You're forgetting one factor in this slide to locked-down engines: as a customer I prefer an integrated engine with a significant lower chance of failing so I will not have to work on it or pay someone to fix it.

It could be we're straining the whole discussion too far with all these analogies, but in any case, I think that would make sense if it were actually true that you'd never have to work on it. In the real world, my friends seem to be at the Apple store for repairs constantly, and Apple is bricking [1] older hardware when they release software upgrades.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/16/apples-...

> For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.

Ironically your car is a bigger spy device than your phone.

Getting more and more locked down each year

> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.

But, as you note, there is a huge benefit for open server and embedded computing, and there may be trickle-up and trickle-down effects to desktop computing.

Moreover, programmable hardware is becoming more price and performance competitive, and open source support software is becoming more functional and usable, so we may be in an interesting era where at least some hardware becomes more "open" and it's viable to run a full stack of open source software, starting with your own custom RISC-V CPU on an FPGA.

>> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.

This is a chicken and an egg problem.

Corporations don't have an incentive to create open consumer devices (lock-in,planned obsolescence). Consumers don't have an option of a consumer (not maker/hobbyist) level open computing device (TINA).

Hence the appearance of a non-viable consumer market.

> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.

The hardware hacker/maker and gamer communities would probably strongly disagree.

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