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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.

An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.

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Progress in software is supposed to just needing more computing resources by your definition? As in, basically slowing everything down? Well, we got local AI for that I guess.

I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.

Thank the web for that. We have lost more control of our devices and our privacy; the more we depend on the web and SaaS. We need to get back to writing native software, be it for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or Windows. We need to make the local device the priority.

Well said. Vote with your wallet. Use software that doesn't require an internet connection, write software that doesn't use s3 or online dependencies, stop patronizing online gaming communities, no adobe, no QuickBooks cloud, , pirate apps(not because it's free, because they work offline)

I'd argue that pirating apps is actually the wrong direction for this, not for any kind of ethical objection, but since it's kind of a concession that these applications can't be replicated in a non-awful pricing model.

I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.

Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.

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