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Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely not a "hipsterism". I agree with OP as I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both desktop and all personal laptops since 2003. I've gone through a number of distros over that time and I do pay for a few applications that run natively on Linux. However all mainstream OSes, today, are a garbage experience comparatively. Locked down, too many choices made for you already out of the box, excessive local advertising and that's just getting started. I'm forced to use Windows or OS X at work, I choose the latter, but still do the majority of my productive tasks outside of Apple. I'd pick my aging T470 all day long over my corp issued 16" MBP.

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.

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"I'm not like the normies" definitely is a hipsterism.

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.

> "I'm not like the normies" definitely is a hipsterism.

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.

> Tinkering is the point

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.

> 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.

Bollocks. I use linux for my work every day and like my privacy and the confidentiality of my data.

> Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering.

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.

[0] https://github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher

So untrue in my experience.....the amount of times I had to fight with external screen resolutions, bad looking fonts, scrolling issues in chrome, etc.

> 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.

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 about providing a good OS/kernel, good OS/kernels respect user preferences, respecting user preferences means to allow personalization and tinkering.

Linux is not a puzzle, it is an extensible tool.

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

> On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility.

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.

> The weird GUI is what you get when you can't devote unlimited man-hours and millions of $ to the project.

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 didn’t know the opposite of terrible UI is dark pattern.

It isn't, just like opposite of free software is not great UI. Despite that, free software and terrible UI gets conflated; so what's just one more conflation, right?

"Despite that, free software and terrible UI gets conflated"

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.

Replace free with proprietary, commercial with free, bad with dark patterns and that will be just as true as your version.

“Replace free with proprietary, commercial with free, bad with dark patterns and that will be just as true as your version.”

So more people use free desktop software? Hmmm

Also, that is the most confusing statement I have ever read.

> Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point.

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.

My daily driver is stock Fedora+Gnome. The only "tinkering" I've done on the desktop is switching dark/light themes and changing the wallpaper. Otherwise my tinkering is focused on my terminal tools needed for serious work - nvim, git, zsh etc. If I owned a Mac or Windows, I'd probably be the same.

> On the [Linux] desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility.

GUI and features aside: I thought "added user hostility" was a big-corporate feature?

Reading this comment really pissed me off, and I felt compelled to strike back, but upon seeing from the replies that it pissed off a lot of other people too, I feel much better.

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