OK Lenovo, we need to talk
haiku-os.org
haiku-os.org
Lenovo has listened and acted on our requests in a very good way, the Linux support has become better and better over the years, IMHO and experience.
So no, this rant does notbresonate with me and my 16 years experience at all.
No offence. Just a different experience.
If so, maybe you could "pressure" your contacts over at Lenovo to get them published once and for all so systems/distros can provide decent support?
Are you saying there is 0 binary blobs involved in running a modern Thinkpad? I find that hard to believe (although i would love it). I'm guessing there's a few blobs in the kernel tree itself, and even more firmware blobs the kernel doesn't even know about.
On the topic of how Linux deals very little with actual hardware on modern machines, i really enjoyed this talk called "It's time for operating systems to rediscover hardware" [0]
I'd be curious to know if it actually works well with linux-libre (Linux without the binary blobs). It's apparently not maintained as a distro package but is available on the AUR.
Moreover, I'm still curious if all hardware functions without its own binary blobs. For example, is the networking firmware really free and replaceable, or is the proprietary firmware interoperable with a FLOSS driver? Likewise, is the entire system libreboot-able?
Sorry for nitpicking, i'm just looking for precise answer to a topic that's not widely questioned/debated to my knowledge.
I'm not sure it's exactly the same. First, because having embedded firmware formed an incentive for hardware manufacturers to test stuff and fix bugs before hitting the market. Second, because who gets to push updates to our machine has serious political/security implications. We have reached a situation where the OS we choose to run has less and less control over our computing, and i find that worrying.
> it’s not a deal breaker for me, as long as the blobs are freely redistributable
Thanks for your explanation. I can completely respect this position, although i personally disagree. If you ever get the chance to bring up the issue (libre firmware/drivers and librebooting), please spare a minute to raise our disenchantment and mention the possibility to work with other distros (such as Debian, who also has ties to Lenovo) hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers to improve the situation for everyone.
I don't exactly have any hope for it, but having Lenovo publish its entire hardware specs and playing nice with maintainers to provide libre firmware would definitely inspire confidence in their hardware. For the moment, it seems only Librem and Pine64 (and a few others) are manufacturers that can be approached on that topic. But like the original author (mmu_man) suggested, software freedom should be for everyone, not just people investing in specific hardware... and i'm pretty sure he would be thrilled to work on Haiku support for his Lenovo hardware given proper documentation ;)
When it comes to hardware, source code availability is not sufficient.
Other OS platforms can have different driver architectures, different kernel ABIs and other platform quirks in comparison to Linux, and having to reverse engineer a driver for another platform from a Linux kernel driver is not very open. And then there are licensing considerations to be taken into account as well.
Linux is not the only opensource operating system in existence :-/ And for a project like Haiku, we don't have the people-power to reverse engineer Linux drivers, and again, the question of the GPL also applies when our kernel & drivers are MIT licensed.
I don't think the parent commenter suggested you are responsible for publishing the material. However, it would be great to have vocal support from distro maintainers to encourage hardware manufacturers to publish them in order to provide better support across all systems. If only, to have more transparency about what parts of "supported hardware" are actually supported by the distro drivers, and what specific datasheet references could be requested through other venues (such as directly asking the manufacturer).
Nvidia graphics causing problems on laptops is a known issue that only Nvidia can fix by opening up more.
However, there are a few things that IMHO are holding them back:
* In EU, sales and support are outsourced (to Digital River Ireland Ltd). Support is a disgrace. Sales are also bad, as pricing is ridiculous compared to the US (often 1.5-2x more expensive than Apple) and most models are released late. Besides, they often sell open-box machines as brand new. If the want to compare to Apple, Lenovo should try to have unified global sales and guarantee.
* They sell way too many Thinkpad variants, so they often release some that are unpolished. Lenovo should consolidate their lineup into fewer models.
* They are lagging back with processor updates, compared to other PC manufacturers or non-Thinkpad Lenovos. Thinkpads are often sold with previous generation Intel CPUs. Models with AMD variants are seldomly available.
AMD happens to use this company for orders on their own site as well. If anyone wants to see how bad an e-commerce experience can be, I suggest they try to order something from AMD.com
It used to be even worse, but it seems they at least figured out that billing and shipping addresses can differ, and instead of ignoring most of the EU countries, they now ignore only about half of them.
The AMD subreddit also had a few threads about this.
I never had any issues, only on the X220, the SD flash reader was borking my cards and I had to get an external flash reader.
I cannot imagine using something different. So my experience is a bit like yours, this for 20+ years.
The Thinkpad design team is still operating from the same ex-IBM facilities in Japan, iirc, even keeping some place-related naming in the internal codenames (X220/X230 and related T420/T430 were "Nozomi", iirc based on my spelunking in firmware)
Lenovo laptops gave me the best Linux experience out of the box, my only problems have been with the NVidia graphic card, but as others have said that's a known issue and is not Lenovo's fault, even though it got better with time and right now I'm running Plasma+Wayland on Debian testing and apart some hit and miss with copy/paste, it worked great so far.
IBM got out of an industry they didn't want to be in, but they still have a lot of positive brand feelings, and a large stake in Lenovo (not sure if they still hold that). Where's the bad for IBM?
They sold off their PC server line to Lenovo about a decade later, so clearly the first deal wasn't too bad.
IBM seems to want to focus on Enterprise, so getting rid of things that individuals use, while still having relationships to sell them (because individuals exist in the enterprise), seems to work for them. After IBM bought SoftLayer, Lenovo servers started showing up instead of SuperMicro.
I do not find Lenovo ThinkPads to be any worse than the business offers from Dell, or HP. In some ways they are better, in some ways there are worse
I would avoid the non-Think* lines, as just like with the Consumer lines of Dell they suck...
They did introduce a Think branded L line recently, these I are approaching that consumer level branded as business line, but the T and P series are still very good IMO
And let's not forget the excellent Linux support on the thinkpad line (partially thanks to Ubuntu?).
From what I heard, mostly thanks to thankless employees at Red Hat who get these machines for work and batter them into submission (by reverse-engineering the hardware and writing device drivers). Lenovo only deserves the middle finger here.
Edit: or maybe it does not. Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978330
That relationship has become a lot better over the years. We get early access to new hardware, Lenovo did a lot to get fwupd integrated, etc.
No OEM preload necessary on the business line machines. RHEL/Fedora installs just fine OOTB. Some problems remain, especially with Thunderbolt (docking stations) but that’s not just Lenovos fault, IMHO.
Disclaimer: Red Hatter since 2005
...Unless it has an Nvidia GPU
Never had a P, but had my hands on recent Ts and Xs and they're definitely an order of magnitude worse than their respective ancestors. They're much harder to crack open and replace parts (some even have RAM soldered to the motherboard!), the shell is much more fragile, and there's so many tiny hardware failures that they're hard to list... my two favorites:
- something with the internal speakers/cables preventing it from making sound in a pseudo-random way (some positioning of the computer reliably triggers it, but there's no reliable position to have sound)
- lid detection sensor going crazy and putting systems to sleep because the screen has just moved a little... i can't explain to you how confused was the person who came to me with this problem that the laptop was going to sleep automatically and thought it was haunted or virused :) (and of course no BIOS option to disable the faulty sensor, we had to disable sleep mode on the OS)
Even the modern Ts (professional series) don't have a CDROM drive anymore. Being able to replace it with a second SSD/HDD was definitely a cool feature.
Missing a DVD drive I * might* be able to understand, but CD-ROM? That ship has sailed, latest with universal support for USB boot or booting via network, IMHO.
Every major laptop vendor is going to the soldered ram, non-repairable, units. I dont like it, but to say "Lenovo is trash" because of that but then not acknowledge that Dell, HP,Apple, Microsoft, etc are all the same way is deceptive
Also, you can still use a second drive; I have the NVME drive and added a 3.5" SSD I had lying around. Not all models have that obviously, but not all models had the UltraBay either.
I don’t know any other brand (excluding framework) that has a web page where I can enter the model number of my laptop and buy any part and order it and repair the laptop myself.
Currently the only internal parts actually for sale are RAM, a subset of the SSDs, and the heatsink. I can't wait until I can buy some replacement parts for my framework laptop from their marketplace, but that day is definitely not here yet.
"Framework laptop lets you buy parts"
"They don't sell parts yet though"
"Yes they do, see the marketplace"
My wife needs a Traditional Chinese, so I went on Lenovo website, entered the product number in found this page:
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/sg/en/products/laptops-and-netb...
Got the part numbers:
UpperCaseASM_TCL82JQSGw/RGBWRF Part Number: 5CB1C14972
Then went to the Lenovo store and ordered the part, then replaced it.
It's not about googling, its about the manufacturer having this itself. I don't know if Dell or HP do anything similar.
Every internal component has a QR code sticker on it pointing to a web page with the specs, replacements, etc.
You could potentially find some vinyl wraps for it. Dbrand sells them.
Don't even get me started on how ** the hardware is now to open and replace parts, compared to my previous T60. (soldered RAM? really?)
EDIT: I'm not at all claiming other mainstream vendors are any better. I've never found any decent hardware besides old Thinkpads and Macs.
I’m not sure why this is a Lenovo issue…
Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/partsforyourdell/index HP: https://partsurfer.hp.com/search.aspx
Lenovo has lost a lot of the quality in comparison. Typos in documentation and invoices, all kinds of support service nightmares even for people with most expensive support policies, X1 Extreme G4 shitty heatsink, thermal throttling to 800MHz, just take a look at forums.lenovo.com
It's for this reason the next, and probably last, laptop I buy will be the Framework.
They bought all the know how, engineers, a full rnd lab iirc. The first couple generations of Lenovo ThinkPads were very similar if not indistinguishable from the IBM ones, and I agree with most people here that even current models are still among the best laptops you can get.
> The LCD. Ok, 3k was a bad idea, I hate not seeing individual pixels
This is sort of representative of TFA for me. He's whining too much.
Author appears to be complaining (among many other things) that attempting to retrofit machines that came pre-installed with Windows to run GNU/Linux doesn't work well, and... It never has. Not once. I can name zero experiences in my lifetime doing that where it was relatively painless. I perceive this to be not a "machines aren't flexible" problem, but a "machines come out of the factory with ten thousand complex configurations tuned to work correctly with each other, and when you rip out a piece as large as 'the operating system,' half those configurations are now tuned wrong (and the OS was holding another half of them)" problem.
On this ThinkPad, the only time I've run into issues is when I switched out the window manager. Turns out, the WM's configuration is implicitly tied to a half-dozen features (audio selection power management, etc.) that don't "just keep working" if you replace it. Should I be blaming Ubuntu for that, or should I accept that some pieces of the OS are big enough to be disruptive if you swap them out?
Nobody is optimizing for the "get some hardware and retrofit an entirely new OS into it" use case; that way will forever be a gravel-strewn road. If you want a smooth road, get the OS you want from the factory.
Maybe the fingerprint scanners didn't work, I never tried those. But otherwise seamless near as I can tell.
Granted it's mostly older Thinkpads but still. 0 problems.
A recent win10 update for some reason removed fingerprint drivers for me and I didn't even notice it.
Of the distros I've used, Ubuntu is the one that works most reliably if I throw it on random PCs.
That was the author's point. Hardware manufacturers should sell hardware and provide detailed specs. If they're not providing specs, they're failing their mission and just releasing crappy binary drivers for Windows which may or may not work in the future, and require reverse engineering for other systems to support.
Just respect standards and/or publish your datasheets. That should be a requirement to sell any kind of hardware. I can't believe it's legal for a company to sell a washing machine without schematics, even less so an entire computer!
If the hardware manufacturers don't publish docs/schematics, then systems can't support the hardware and we end up in this special hell-hole that IT hardware industry has been stuck in for about two decades now.
I'm surprised how good this is, and I've been using ThinkPads for a long time. This model works way better even compared to the mighty X230 I still love and adore as a great product from the past.
Config: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos
Those from the past didn't fall under a Linux certification program though. That seems to be a main point of the rant:
> And you take risks too. When you sell “certified” ThinkPads with Linux, do you understand you are actually certifying that this machine will run correctly with drivers written by people who had to guess how the hardware should be used because vendors like you didn’t properly document it in the first place? Isn’t this mind-boggling?
As usual, YMMV, but I've been running Linux with almost no issues on an HP ProBook. The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader. Bluetooth, custom secure boot keys, Wi-Fi, great battery life [0], sleep, hibernation, etc. worked without any fiddling on Arch Linux.
As far as I know HP doesn't offer these computers with Linux. I'm not even sure you can get them without Windows.
---
[0] Great as in "comparable to what Windows gets on the same hardware".
I haven't seen any evidence of Windows since, but that creeped me out. Can anyone explain what was going on, there?
Also, of course, I had to completely wipe the hard drive and install my own version of Fedora to be totally comfortable after that.
It's an unfortunately consequence of a secure device.
Apple seems to know what they are doing considering how happy their customers are.
You misunderstand the implications of the video. It means you can't replace most of the parts. Swapping the mainboard is the same thing as swapping all the parts at the same time. What this means is that this phone is not repairable. Everyone wants to be able repair their phones.
The design is foolish from a security and ownership standpoint if it iss as you say it is and, yeah, the trade off to that is that you can't repair it, which as the video accuses may be the primary purpose of using the foolish design.
Sure, as long as they don't give up any security, as long as the price doesn't change, as long as the phone doesn't get thicker, etc...
> may be the primary purpose of using the foolish design
If Apple is so terrible at making phones, I expect their competitors to make them irrelevant any day now.
It's not necessary to sacrifice security, as I explained earlier.
I don't mind paying a little bit more if it means people living under certain regimes have a better chance at survival.
But sure if they really want to remove all competition for security reasons, they could certainly show good faith by doing all repairs entirely at cost thereby removing any profit motive.
No, that's bullshit, and it saddens me that on the day where everyone is finally coming up to learn that not only Google is evil but that even the stuff Google does "in the name of privacy" is still evil, people still give Apple a free pass for the very same shady behavior.
I can think of a million ways to make this "cryptographic integrity" that do not have the side effect of making repair impossible. For example, and even the video author mentions it, why not allow "pairing" the motherboard with the new components after a secure wipe of the data?
And that's just the first obvious thing. But even if it was completely impossible to do this "cryptographic integrity" without impacting repairability (which it isn't), which of these scenarios do you think worries the average iPhone customer more: an evil-maid replaces the $300 screen on their iPhone with a compromised one in order to get to their passcode; or: Apple trying to charge $800 in order to repair the same $300 screen which their toddler broke ?
Let's not give these companies a pass on their obviously anti-competitive behavior just because they claim to do in the name of "privacy" or "security".
I realized that modern Lenovos aren’t even that repairable or upgradeable (even the Thinkpad line) so hell… might as we’ll get a Mac right? I picked up a used M1 Macbook Air for $700 and have been absolutely blown away. Battery life, performance, display, speakers, the thing blows away any Thinkpad I’ve owned. Sure, impossible to repair or upgrade, but it’s not like you can change out the CPU/RAM/graphics on modern Thinkpads either.
C940 is Yoga from the top of my head a consumer laptop. X1 carbon and other thin models have soldered RAM.
T, E, L and P models have serviceable RAM.
Has he even tried installing Linux on it before publishing this rant?
It works OOB on pretty much all machines, even with secure boot turned on. Worst case scenario, you can just turn secure boot off.
I seriously don’t get why people are still making a big deal out of this, 10 years or more since this was first arriving as a concern.
As it turned out, there’s still nobody preventing us from installing Linux on our PCs. Instead we only have one extra option if we want to improve the security of our boot process.
If they say they provide Linux support, they have to. Else they're misleading potential buyers.
The W541 is not one of those models...
Lenovo has one of the best websites for looking up their models, and configuration. I am not aware of any other vendor that has anything like it. Pick a model, then filter by OS. The T15 as an example has plenty of models with Linux Support
Beyond the GNU/Linux debate [0], there's some interesting points in there.
[0] Today i learnt: Haiku should not be called GNU/Haiku because Haiku is the entire system and not just the kernel, and rms (to my surprise) approves this interpretation
This GNU/Linux stuff comes from POSIX's definition of operating system. That piece of paper says operating systems have all these little commands like cp, mv, etc. Therefore, GNU gets to be part of the operating system because it provides those commands. It doesn't have to be this way though, especially on Linux where one can just trash all the GNU stuff and obtain or write custom software directly on top of the kernel.
Technically true. But do you run a lot of software that works without glibc and other userland utilities?
> on Linux where one can just trash all the GNU stuff and obtain or write custom software directly on top of the kernel
True, yet most of us still use a GNU/Linux distribution.
Would not surprise me if 80% of recent GNU contributions come from the Linux crowd.
Yes. I made a few of these utilities for my own use. I actually started developing a Linux system call library to facillitate this but then I discovered the kernel developers themselves already made one for their own tools.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/tools/include/...
People can include this awesome header file in a freestanding C project and enjoy making 100% dependency-free Linux binaries. No C standard library cruft anywhere. It's amazing. You could boot Linux directly into one of these things just by writing init=/my/program in the kernel command line. You'd need to do some init stuff like mounting procfs and sysfs but it's totally fine. I've even seen graphical software running this way with OpenGL ES on top of kernel interfaces for mode setting and buffer management, people could even make video games that run this way. I really want to get into this.
Cool, thanks for sharing!
> I really want to get into this.
Hope to see more links on that topic popping up on HN. Are you aware, beyond "raw" OpenGL, of any GUI/TUI frameworks for Go/Rust that would work this way?
I'd like to know as well. My most recent discovery was RetroArch, a really good frontend for many emulators. It's not freestanding but it does support OpenGL graphics with Linux kernel mode setting and generic buffer management.
More and more as time goes on. Most applications written in Go do not require libc. Some of my servers have nothing on them but a few Go applications, like influxdb + prometheus + grafana. Theoretically you can strip out everything but the kernel (and replace systemd with something extremely lightweight, maybe also written in Go), but mainstream distributions don't make this easy, and what's the point anyway.
FROM alpine:latestDebian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Hurd, and even Windows with a GNU userspace (such as Cygwin) all exist.
Sure, it's totally possible to install GNU software on other operating systems. You can install it on Linux, the BSDs, even Windows. They're just regular programs.
"GNU/Linux" is a relevant label to me so i know we're talking about a system which has common POSIX-inspired utilities... "Linux" can be Android for all i know, which is a very different system.
Mentioning that I use Arch Linux annoys people for some reason so I stopped doing that. I just say I use Linux.
> The principal developer is the GNU Project, and the system is basically GNU.
I think the system is basically Linux.
The percentage of Linux's contribution doesn't really matter. Operating systems manage hardware and support the execution of programs. That's what Linux does. To me, most of GNU is just wrappers around Linux system calls plus some additional logic. The most significant GNU program being GCC of course.
I think this way because I'm a programmer who likes working with small Linux systems. GNU takes the perspective of a user of POSIX-like systems.
I think all useful code should matter, not just that which you like more. GNU "wrappers" are used by people a lot, and to most people Linux would be totally useless without them.
I was pointing out that most definitions of operating system I've seen say it's a kernel plus a userspace, and that Linux, the kernel, is a replaceable component.
Why wouldn't he? See FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html
Anyway, the thing that annoys me the most is the terrible keyboards we've been getting, especially since X240. Keys need travel distance, and should not be ruined in order to make the laptop thinner. We use those things to work on, not to show off. ... and here I go myself, ranting as though Lenovo cares.
I sent it to the Lenovo support center in HK once, but the problem has never been fixed.
Long story short, as a guy who moves a lot internationally, Apple and Lenovo are the only companies offering global warranty and after my horrible experience with Lenovo, I'll be back to Apple!
Thinkpad quality has been terrible after the sale to the China-based Lenovo.
Maybe my experience would have been better with the T or X series though.
Heed this and weep.
I set it up with dualboot since I hadn't run windows a while and needed a windows for a few things anyway.
Must say that windows 10 is not totally bad, but why must it be so blinky, and have an appstore with a front page of colourful games, and even autodownload candy crush?
anyways, the lenovo machine is greay with ubuntu, and the trackpoint work with both middle click as well as scroll, something I could only pick one of in wimdows.
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-best-raspberry-pi...
https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-laptop-kits-projects/
The only attractive looking device from Waveshare has a fake touchpad and can't be used for anything serious either.
There is a real niche for RaspPi CM4 compatible Laptops which is not yet filled. (And all other options are useless children's toys for "tinkering".)
Quite eye opening for me as i always thought support for Raspberry Pi was of a high standard. The reality couldnt be further than the truth. Ironically I have a Lenovo which works well out of the box with no blobs or weird hacks on Arch or Debian (despite no official support for my particular model that I know of). The latter is what I would describe as "well supported by the Linux kernel". Certaintly not Raspberry Pi.
Still it's quite underpowered for me to treat it like a daily use laptop/pc.
There are a few tablet designs with PI3 CM but the performance is way below PI4.
Yup, makes sense. Because Open Source was originally created as Free Software minus the ethics bit.
I am only 41 and don't care about these articles anymore.
I was able to explain the problems this article raises, to a 20-year girl who knows almost nothing about technology, in a 15-minute conversation. And she agreed the current situation spells doom for future buyers and that she still wants to be able to buy a pink laptop and put whatever CPU, GPU and RAM she wants in it.
Quote from her: "Why must I buy a VAIO or Acer when I need some more colors? Why can't I buy a lime green ThinkPad and then replace the CPU?".
So look, we all get it just fine. Can you start doing something? This endless virtue signalling will not achieve anything, is this not glaringly obvious at this point?
You all really underestimate the unbridled relentless greed of the shareholders and their servants. They will NEVER stop.
If you want a change, pioneer it.
And to the general HN audience: please understand most devs and hardware guys here are almost literal slaves. A good chunk of you (especially Americans) are privileged beyond what like 80% of us here will ever have, in terms of income and job security.
Please start using your free bandwidth to do good! Patting yourself on the back like "hey, I can articulate the problems, I am helping!" is just you being a quiet accomplice in a future state of affairs where there will be no recourse.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot: get off my lawn. :P
Seriously though, those articles don't help nothing. Awareness has been raised a long time ago. It's time for action.
Corporations only understand one thing: coercion. Especially if you hit them in the wallets. Everything else they ignore.
So I didn't tell her because I didn't want the poor girl to invest a month of income on a laptop, put a skin on it, and have it burn out promptly in 3-6 months.
But I don't know for sure. never had a problem.
I don't think most of them underestimate the relentless greed of corporations. If anything, HN is one of the forums I'm on that's the most anti-corporate while not being explicitly communist/anarchist.
You can dismiss the OP as simply complaining, but they're also literally writing an alternate OS for tips. Is that not "using their free bandwidth to do good"? Does it not count because it's not hardware? What about companies like System76 and Framework that are seemingly trying to do exactly what you're claiming people in the US aren't doing?
I generally agree with where you're trying to go, and the futility of just complaining, but you're painting with a really broad brush, assuming a lot of bad/ignorant intentions on the part of anyone you disagree with, and only proposing vague "go do something you ignorant privileged Americans" to solve it.
As for your questions, they are fair. My main point was that lengthy rants against corporations will achieve nothing and are a distraction from more noble pursuits.
I am not saying "quit your job". I am saying however that many of those devs have the free time and energy bandwidth that many others don't, and maybe that should be used to put their wallet/actions where their mouth is.
My comment was however mostly a harsh criticism of the endless echo chamber that HN can be. Almost nobody cares what we here think though.
I agree that I painted this with a broad brush. It's something that's ticking me off and it gets really sad and frustrating seeing people just yammering their mouth endlessly. :| But sure, that's only my problem, I can easily concede that.
Which isn't to say that I think you're not well-intentioned, or not doing anything yourself, but that there's a streak on HN and in general of "why won't the government pass a law to fix X" or "why isn't everyone at (insert unethical company here) doing something about their employer".
Ultimately, the problem is a combination of things - some portion of devs just don't agree with you that this is a problem, another portion is radical to the point of only investing in a solution so pure as to be unworkable, and the remaining portion that may agree with you (myself included) isn't enough of the population to matter outside of doing something drastic like quitting their jobs en masse.
I recently purchased a Framework laptop. I'd imagine the overlap of people who own S76 or Framework computers and people who are on HN is pretty high. You're already grousing at a group of people who's most likely to be doing everything you think they should be doing, and it hasn't made things better, so out of frustration, we're all ranting to anyone who will listen about how we've done what we can and it's still not better.
That's completely fair and I get where you are coming from.
> Ultimately, the problem is a combination of things...
Sadly you are correct and that's one of the things I just can't make peace with -- a lot of liberties are not only at stake here, but they are being relentlessly attacked every day, yet people still choose to divide in camps and scream at each other, while the common enemy grows stronger every month... :(
> You're already grousing at a group of people who's most likely to be doing everything you think they should be doing...
Yes and no. I realize what you say about the hardware that some HN users are using might be true and I'll concede it immediately. There's another group though, same ones I kept talking about -- those that have the free time and energy, maybe even the resources, to try and improve things for everybody else, yet they chose not to do so.
As a guy with a streak of super sh_tty luck in the last ~18 months or so (changed several employers; of course not only their fault, mine too) who is just dreaming of having that free time and energy, it's honestly infuriating for me to sit helplessly on the side and fight furiously for stabilizing my life almost every day, while a lot of these (likely) hedonists just parrot ideal theories on a forum...
Sorry. As you can see, I am very jaded. Still, I prefer to express myself openly. I know it's offensive to some but I choose to believe that people can and will see through my being jaded and find my true motives and goals. Like you did.
Sure, I have time and money that I'm not spending, but it's because no one, you and I seemingly included, has any good ideas for how to solve the situation. For most people the options are "complain on a forum" or "start an entire new company in a new industry". There's not that much in the middle of that which will solve the problems you're worried about. Part of the revulsion to your statements is that the people who may be able to follow your advice and solve the issues you want solved are like... Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos, and maybe 200 other wealthy people with a vision who might align, not any of the people who might read what you write.
I'm not choosing not to help. I'm helping wherever I feel like I can make any progress at all, but that's not many places, and it seems neither you nor I can point to other things we should be doing...
Gods, I hope not. I see your point... and I hope you are wrong.
It's a niche market calling saying "I will give you money if you just make design decisions that made your computers great to work with in the past." How big is this market? What can really be expected from trying to sell to that market when computers are complex things to build?
If anything, there are companies out on the market trying to serve this niche market. System76 has been around for awhile now, for example (I bought a System76 laptop in 2013 and I hated it, but that's a different story.) I think a few of us would at least hope that these companies look at old ThinkPads and take a few notes. I think maybe that time is coming soon (I would hope :) )
Stay mad pajeet
Why not simply... create as much value?
Equal skills, equal pay.
> Equal skills, equal pay.
Muahahahaha, good one!