I don't want corporations like Apple or Microsoft controlling my hardware. We can see where that's got us and it's a disgusting dead end of the user not truly having control or ownership.
Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point. It's all about building random crap for the sake of building it and hand-editing config files.
On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility.
As for corporations - they already control your hardware. There is no such thing as open hardware, and won't be until chip-level designs can be fabbed at home. (And even then, because chip design is far beyond the skills of the average hacker and won't be practical without AI doing the heavy lifting.)
But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.
Access to source doesn't change that, because access to source code and tinkering aren't a substitute for being able to imagine original, beautiful, and useful new things for end users - not just an endless churn of half-finished clone projects and infinite dev tools.
No, it isn't.
"I'm not like the normies, because I am cool and underground." is a hipsterism.
"I'm not like the normies, because unlike them I happen to possess the skills to escape from a situation we all hate" is not an hipsterism.
> Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point.
This is also completely false. Improvements were made, things generally work out of the box. Polished and user friendly user interfaces exist.
_But_: interfacing with those commercial products/services that spoiled the fun of mainstream systems generally sucks. Because those only work if you give up control to them. Which was one of the main reasons you went to Linux anyway.
No. You can do it if you want, but you don't have to.
I used to have a huge .emacsrc, .Xresources and what not in the far past. Today I have just a couple of lines that help me avoiding stupid mistakes, but nothing at all to try to tune look and feel. I use Xfce on some machines and i3 on others. Both just work out of the box. The former for an average user, the latter of course needs a certain attitude and some learning initially. I am sure you can also work with Gnome or KDE without starting tinkering.
Maybe one exception: hdpi support on Xfce does not seem to be ready, at least not on Xubuntu LTS. So one step of tinkering was needed: Turn off the nonsense. And never look back.
Bollocks. I use linux for my work every day and like my privacy and the confidentiality of my data.
This is just flat out wrong. I spend more time waiting for OS X to "upgrade" than I ever do with package management and kernel upgrades in Linux. Ultimately upgrades in Linux are easier, there's no tinkering required. For odd configurations, sure - there may be some tinkering you can do to make things work more how you'd like. For example I have a SFF desktop machine that runs an eGPU. I only want the eGPU for some OpenCV use cases and I run the iGPU for my desktop window manager. Sure, in that case I did have to tweak things a bit, but I actually found an eGPU manager [0] in the process and everything now "just works".
But printing, window management, software installation, etc are all simple and just as easy (if not more so) than what you've described - "...hand-editing config files". I'd say you are not a Linux user or have not tried any notable Linux distributions in a long time if that's your perspective.
> As for corporations - they already control your hardware.
No, they don't. While, yes, Intel and AMD may have things in their hardware that I don't control - the Linux distributions I use don't have copious amounts of telemetry being fed back to corporations like Apple/Microsoft/Google.
> But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here but I'd have to say, in my opinion, the comment doesn't seem to make any sense given my long-term experience with Linux on the desktop.
I would rephrase this as "Linux is for people who like to customize their experience without compromise". Sure tinkering is fun but its the tool to get to your destination. When I first started using linux I spent maybe a year tinkering and playing with things. This would be along the lines of "XYZ isn't working how I want it to, let's find a way of making it work the way I want" where XYZ is anything from my screenshot tool to my window manager.
Over time this has meant switching DEs, writing glue scripts, swapping out bit and pieces here and there to build the desktop experience I want. Now I have things to my liking I just have an Ansible script which I can apply to a minimal install and have everything just the way I want it in a couple of minutes. I've not made any major changes in the last 10 years. I might add things as I find I need them but that's maybe a couple of dozen minutes a year.
I can however totally understand if people don't want that experience, most people just want to turn on their device and have it "just work" even if that "just working" means you have to conform to the way the developer thinks it should work. This is why people love Apple products, and the reason I don't.
Linux is not a puzzle, it is an extensible tool.
A lot of free/open-source software is created by a single developer in their spare time, because they want an open & functional version of their favourite commercial app.
The weird GUI is what you get when you can't devote unlimited man-hours and millions of $ to the project.
A lot of good has come from the Linux and open-source movement, let's not pretend otherwise.
I will take weird or unpolished GUI over polished, dark patterns, thank you very much.
Because that's the choice that we really make.
I wonder why people would conflate those two things? Sure, not all free desktop software is bad, but enough of it is that people prefer the commercial alternatives.
So more people use free desktop software? Hmmm
Also, that is the most confusing statement I have ever read.
I don't tinker on my Linux machine. I bought a supported Linux machine (System76) and haven't tinkered with it at all since I bought it. I just wanted a machine that worked and I didn't have to deal with all the ways MacOS terminal experience was different from Linux terminal experience. Simple things like not having docker running in a hidden VM and many more.
GUI and features aside: I thought "added user hostility" was a big-corporate feature?
Free software is exactly what kept Linux free, the moment it would get locked up it would go the same way that Windows and MacOS have gone: consumer oriented platforms rather than computer operating systems. Ideal for pushing ads and for-pay software down your throat rather than tools for you to use as you see fit.
But there is nothing more valuable to me than my time. It takes me less time to be productive on Windows and OS X and remove all the junk, than it does to waste countless hours trying to get a Linux DE configured "just right" based on whatever combo I'm using and feature parity I need.
I'll chose my time over my money, and I'm OK with that. Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.
Yeah, I agree.
But the major difference might be that once configured a linux desktop environment is "just right" for quite a lot longer than you think -- and once it is "just right" you get marginal productivity gains in small aspects, which in aggregate, is probably a lot of time saved.
I'm a bit biased because I already sank the cost into my desktop setup in 2011. But frankly: my desktop environment very much gets out of my way.
But this is just an upfront cost. With Windows, which I've tried to use regularly, there are many annoyances which introduce friction in the day to day. So the "opex" if you will is much higher.
Just this morning I started my Windows machine to play a quick game and wanted to check out something on the internet beforehand. It started bugging me about some "recommended browser settings" in some Edge window that showed up half off-screen that I couldn't move. Then there's the Windows Terminal app which sometimes takes forever to start up. And windows that pop up and look active but aren't.
Then there's a bunch of other little annoyances which I now forget but over a work day end up aggravating. Of course, YMMV as they say, and I know people who aren't as bothered by those. But in case you are annoyed, the upfront cost of setting up your Linux DE just right may be cheaper in the long run.
I've spent a while setting up i3 a few years ago, just out of curiosity. I had been a MacOS user at the time for a very long time. But then something happened, and it grew on me. Now I only use my mac from time to time when idly watching a movie in bed, because I find it slower to use. I hate having to hunt around for windows, move then around, click on some Dock icon which sometimes doesn't show, others shows up while it shouldn't (in the full-screen Mail window usually).
I guess the point is that different people have different needs and are willing to pay different prices for those. There's also a case to be made about high upfront cost + low maintenance vs low upfront cost + high maintenance.
> Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.
Well, of course. Only issue is how you define quality, as related to what you need. For me, the price of the Windows license was lumped in the same bin with the GPU. Have to buy it to be able to play a game I wanted to play. But I'd feel robbed if I had to pay for it and than have to use it for my job. In my case, I haven't looked under the hood of the Linux kernel or the DE or the terminal app or anything, for that matter. It just works better for me. And I'm also OK to invest some time if it means I'll be more confortable down the road.
Wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time alone on Linux just figuring out network file sharing than all other DE-related configurations combined.
On the other hand, I wouldn't deploy software against any other OS (unless it's an app). There's no world where I don't want or see Linux. I'm just not sold on it's DE experience so far.
There is no customization you can make to a DE that saves me so much time and energy long term that it makes up for all the other time and energy needed to invest in Linux DE as a daily driver. Most of my energy seems to be devoted to task-specific regiments, more influenced by that tasks software.
In twenty five years, I've probably spent less than $3,000 on Microsoft products personally. I've got my moneys worth.
I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp. And the only intra-OS file sharing I've ever had a good experience with is Mac AirDrop.
That's weird. I usually just fire up Samba and everything works pretty much as expected. Granted, I don't use GUI tools, but one of the examples in the default config file is pretty much what you need (share the homes, or something to that effect).
Mounting remote file systems can be done easily in the GUI, as can sharing. Like any such software, it's going to have a learning curve.
I can't remember the last time I was on Linux and didn't have to start off by installing cifs-utils, and then hunting down instructions on writing an .smbcredentials file.
Windows also makes it (relatively) easy to administer file sharing if you're on a AD domain. All said and done, I personally use Unraid for my home NAS.
Both macs and linux can handle this fine.
NFS is simpler and easier to manage.
There is a solution for that, dsclient, but it is still missing Kerberos support, so you have to account for that.
I went through exactly the same experience after trying i3. Also a Mac user. I couldn't move to Linux at the time because apps, so I did my best to recreate that experience on a Mac. Rectangle+Karabiner+Hammerspoon did the trick, and at this point I'm so used to it that when I set up my Linux desktop, I actually recreated the same shortcuts in i3 vs. the default i3 config.
So I would say if you _have to_ stay on a Mac, there are ways to customise and tinker too, with the end result much better than you expect.
I was more or less in the same boat app-wise, as for work I use Office 365 and at the time the web apps were barely usable. I also loved Apple Mail, and to me, it still is the best email client I've ever used (disclaimer: I don't tend to do anything "fancy" with my email). Nowadays, Outlook online works well enough for my needs (I'd say it's actually better than when I was using the 'heavy client' on the Windows machine I was given). Teams works well (as in no worse than elsewhere) on Linux, too, so all my work-related needs are met.
Hammerspoon is just an automation tool for Mac, you can do a lot of things with it, including moving windows around and a lot of other stuff (just look at the docs to get a feel). I use it as an app switcher: I found that it's more efficient to do "show me Slack" or "show me VSCode" than "move to workspace 3 where VSCode should be". I don't use workspaces at all nowadays. So, with the help of Karabiner, I mapped my most-used apps to combinations like "caps+g" for Google Chrome, "caps+s" for Slack, "caps+c" for VSCode etc. And for cycling through windows of the same app, there's a built-in cmd-` on MacOS.
One thing that people fall into is the ability to tweak things endlessly. If you simply don't do that and use a good default install then you are going to do just fine without all that tuning.
For me my main tools are shell, browser, various audio related programs (audacity, midi editors, score editors and so on) and installing a new linux machine takes about as long as copying the data off the medium takes. Then I copy over (or mount, depending on the circumstances) my homedir and get to work.
The other systems did not react the same way; they still consider that doing it is fine.
Plus, notwithstanding the CSAM detection thing, Apple has been steadily introducing a stream of really sweet consumer privacy features for the ordinary user, such as Sign in with Apple, Apple relay (basically TOR lite for grandma), email aliases, etc.
[1]: created with https://www.windowsafg.com/win10x86_x64_uefi.html
Say someone implements an appstore for Linux, and start selling apps. This could theoretically be enough to get commercial developers onto the platform, opening up for wider popularization of Linux. That doesn't mean you have to install that appstore.. Heck of Linux ever becomes popular, it's probably gonna be Ubuntu. If you don't like that, well, use fedora then. Or nixOS!
Look at nvidia. They release proprietary drivers that do things in the opposite way things are supposed to be done. It's supposed to be integrated, they do their own thing. It's supposed to be open, they close it. They only do things if it's on their terms. They don't contribute to Linux as a whole, they merely co-opt it for their own purposes. They don't believe in making Linux a better system for all, they do just enough to satisfy their customers and call it a day.
If that's what commercial software means for Linux, the other platforms can keep it.
It would be a benefit to Linux adoption.
Once your default distribution starts shipping with built in ads, and every other distribution follows suit because it makes them boatloads of money, your linux desktop will be well and truly dead.
Is there some idiom or trope to this that I'm missing that makes it obvious sarcasm? Because that's literally not possible without some inconceivable laws being passed, so I'm confused as to what you're trying to communicate.
Both got forked a bunch, but the mother project remains the popular one due to user stickiness and, frankly, sheer amount of (paid) effort invested compared to small-scale volunteer efforts. Users can still choose to go with Iceweasel, disabled Pocket integration or Ungoogled Chromium or whatever fork de jour, but generally they don't because "the ecosystem keeps moving". They generally get more desirable things added than annoyances. Unless a company gets it wrong and you get a WhatsApp-level backlash to make another competitor viable.
With constantly moving goalposts, commercial interests can keep the upper hand as the community (and much other competition) can't keep up fast enough. That's why Google keeps pushing the web into ever new directions, and why standardized APIs got replaced by ever-changing Electron apps with mandatory auto-update.
If the popular distributions ship with ads, I'm not afraid as long as there is competition out there that does without. I can always do Arch or Debian instead of Ubuntu and I know they'll do the right thing.
Where it gets dangerous is when the base technology is controlled by commercial interests. Microsoft owning secure boot certificates, Android not getting drivers upstreamed, Apple deciding who gets to compete by owning the App Store. Linux may end up in this spot at some point if a particular vendor (or consortium of commercial interests) becomes too powerful compared to the community and smaller competition. Once it gets there, the only escape is having viable alternatives.
If you rely on commercial software, your alternatives come with huge switching costs. Chromium to Firefox is a little tedious, Mac to Linux is a major disruption. The more you rely on a particular piece of commercial software, the more they can control you.
But competition generally does the trick. I don't mind games being closed source, there are so many quality alternatives that the game studios simply can't lock most users in. Now, app stores for games? That's where you want to be cautious, because they control what competition looks like. Operating systems and drivers? If they turn on you, better start swearing and leaving investments behind. Chip-level DRM? Zero leverage, ask your government for help and if they're not willing, you're screwed.
So really, commercial software isn't that much of an issue high up in the stack. The lower you get, the more careful you want to be about end user communities retaining control. Let the companies make apps, let them sell apps, don't let them grow platforms. The platforms should belong to users.
If a company comes along and makes a commercial platform out of Linux, run.
The trouble comes from a slippage in expectations and the increased incentives to do bad things.
Once some (e.g.) spyware in some software is expected and acceptable, suddenly more spyware in even more apps could potentially be acceptable. Now it becomes a constant effort to keeping track of a known good application set which expends a lot of energy. And any one of those apps in the good set could spoil at any time.
And of course, the increased commercial incentives of a lot of non-technical people using the platform immensely increase the likelihood of this occuring.
So it's not hipsterism, it's just something that's been observed to happen many, many times.
> tech was certainly more enjoyable to me before everyone had to consider the “average user,”
Yeah. To people like us, computing has intrinsic value. We like the system. We want to control it. We want to understand it. We want to make it better. We want to make it ours.
Normal people simply don't care about this. Corporations make every effort to hide the computer from them. That's where the money is so we end up getting lumped together with this average person.
Why can't we have systems designed for programmers? It doesn't matter if some normal person can't use it.