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Comment by thsksbd | Hacker News Reader

"There's dozens of us!"

I kid. I've been using Debian as my main OS since about 2012. Once Steve Jobs signed Flash's death warrant, Linux as a desktop became feasible.

Its bitter sweet though. Linux is feasible because everything is on the web, which is worse than what we had before.

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> Its bitter sweet though. Linux is feasible because everything is on the web, which is worse than what we had before.

What do you mean?

Late 90s argument against linux sounded like “we need to run Office”. Today i don’t need spreadsheets that are not shared in real time with my colleagues. So you use web version of excel/googlesheets and it doesn’t matter what OS is running your webkit-based browser.

Also all the “free software” is in someone else’s server.

In the past there was a binary running on your machine working with data stored locally. You had defacto control of your data. You also had defacto control of the program running since you could look at the assembly, maybe even patch it.

Now the software, all runs on the cloud on other people’s computers and your data is stored in their systems and you may or may not be able to get it out easily.

The whole point of GNU is having control over the binaries run on your local machine.

Today our situation is far worse than that, our data is held and processed by third parties.

The advantage of the latter is so great that Big Tech no longer cares of you run some weirdo OS. They own you anyway.

I self-host almost my entire stack and infra.

Its so much work and Im not a techie. Its definitely beyond most people's reach.

(I self host everything except email and calendar -> Apple and Microsoft own me)

Sad to say but Electron helped a lot too.

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