Ask HN: How much are you willing to use a "worse" product to promote competition | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much are you willing to use a "worse" product to promote competition

3 points_lvbh9 comments

It came up the other day in a discussion about ladybird where some people suggested that they would be willing to completely change their habits & simply not use some sites so that they could daily drive the browser. I’m curious how many people share a similar (perhaps less extreme) sentiment towards monopolies/competition.

Another example that gets brought up is Linux. It’s obviously superior to Windows/MacOS but there are still games that simply won’t run. Would you be willing to abandon these games completely to adopt Linux?

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I do, with Linux, Firefox... since a year I stopped using even Android, and I run my own Yocto-spin on my Pinephones (with my own desktop environment and other self-written apps), with daily-driving Servo also (alongside Firefox). But for me it's not about promoting competition. It's about showing a middle finger to the crap that big-tech calls state-of-the-art.

That's funny: I use them because they're genuinely better-aligned with my priorities. Linux is far better for programming and not being spied on (important to me); it's just worse at AAA games with anticheat and Photoshop (not important to me). Firefox's pros are similar, swapping programming with customization. It has no cons I notice.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a diehard Linux fanboy. But there are some things that I can't deny.

- As long as desktop problems are only solved if it happens on Linus' current machine and he complains about it, Linux will remain an inferior desktop system compared to Mac and iOS, and the year of Desktop Linux will remain a dream.

- I couldn't agree more with you about the importance of privacy. However after installing any single distro I have tried, the first thing they do is to phone home, and then immediately try to update the system. Some distros need this phone-home to be disabled at 3 or 4 places (in the DE, then in some syanptics or similar manager, then there are also some odd automatic cron jobs, and I haven't even started about flatpak...). This is the single most irritating thing for me - they don't even ask if they can phone home. Sure, maybe not as bad as Windows/MacOS, but that's not a high bar.

- I haven't used Windows for more than a decade (last experience is from early Windows 7 era), but I remember that even back then there were 2 important MS things: Visual Studio and the MSDN documentation. I definitely missed both of them for a while after I switched to Linux. To this day there is nothing in the Linux ecosystem that would match the quality of either from 10+ years ago. While I write code on Linux for a living (though mostly OS-independent things), and Windows just became an abusive pile of crap, I wouldn't call Windows a bad platform for development (but gotta stress once again my possibly outdated experiences).

- Of course OSS has a huge advantage: if you find a bug, and you are missing a feature, you can just make the necessary changes on your own. This is its disadvantage too: sometimes you want to use the system as a tool, instead of tinkering on it.

Firefox became a follower years ago, it is trailing Chrome. And every day it gets more common that some websites simply say that they don't support Firefox... and I don't even want to start ranting about the hostile default settings. I do actively maintain a Firefox layer for Yocto since about a year, and the biggest painpoint at each updates are patching the browser to use some sane defaults, instead of for example deleting the user profile because it doesn't like the current date... of course users rarely notice this fortunately, unless something goes bad during packaging.

Clayton Christensen said [1] that when a new product offers something you can't get elsewhere, consumers are willing to use it even though it might be worse in many respects than the competition. I.e. smartphones were underpowered computers, but because you could take them anywhere, many more people used them than desktop or laptop computers (maybe there's a better example, but you get the idea).

I think these ideas are best used to look at history. I don't think it's useful for a company or organization to aim to "disrupt" a market. Make a compelling product and the rest will follow.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

I'm willing to use Qubes OS (security-oriented OS relying on virtualization, no games at all) and Librem 5 (GNU/Linux phone) as my daily drivers - this much.

Not having all the features, functions, and flashing lights of a competitor/similar product doesn't make something worse. As someone pointed out (can't find the darned link, sorry) an alternative doesn't need to match a competitor one-to-one re: features. It just needs to do what its audience needs it to do.

Yes, I have bought many RISC-V dev boards even though you get more bang for buck using ARM ones. Similarly for AMD GPUs.

I use some "underdog" products like Firefox, Android, and AMD CPU/GPU to do my part in keeping them alive.

I’m already doing it with Firefox.

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