> They just need to
Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
This doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.
Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you. If I was going to rebuild any one of them for Linux, it would easily become a major project that would suck up all my free time.
That's fine.
> Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you.
And it never will should nobody actually step up and put in the work to make it a reality. Linux needs users willing to do such things.
The original free software business model is that people would pay programmers to work on the features they needed and the results would go back into the commons in the form of upstream patches. I've actually made some money this way. It was nice.
Do most people want to get through that research? Absolutely no, I don't expect many people to follow me into that rabbit hole. They can get the default or Windows or a Mac, no problem with that.
Claude did tell me where to fiddle with CSS, but its suggestions where not always on spot. It cut the time I spent on it and maybe it made it possible, because I wouldn't have dissected the source code or inspected the UI in the right way (GTK inspector). All the process still cost me a few weeks of five minute attempts now and then.
I think that there is no way an agent (and I was using the chat UI) can take control of my desktop, patch CSS, restart it, take advice and give me what I want. Not yet.
By the way, I have an autohiding Windows 95 like app bar at the bottom. The text inside the app items is still a bit too small and some icons in the terminal top bar are still too narrow. I think I have more CSS to fix but I'm in no hurry.
Claude Cowork can do such things if you set it all up.
Nothing inherently prevents Linux from replicating those features. It's just that somebody's gotta put the work in to make it happen. That somebody could very well be you if nobody else cared to do it.
My laptop has fancy RGB keyboard LEDs. Manufacturer shipped a shitty Windows app to control them, as well as the internal fans. My choices were: either give up on those features or implement them myself. So I reverse engineered what I could and made a Linux program to control the LEDs. Threw it out there on GitHub just because and woke up one day to discover that not only did I have users but somebody else had independently built a GUI on top of it.
The idea is not to change Linux distributions into Apple tier experiences. The idea is to convert you into a contributing user who is capable of solving his own problems and making his own features. The idea is to elevate users from consumers to contributors who take ownership of their systems.
That's the only way you can ever be free of "they" and whatever "they" decide to impose on you. Being at their mercy is a dangerous position to be in. Forcing low contrast glass UI on users is a nonissue compared to that one time where they threatened to start automatically scanning everyone's devices for CSAM. There's really no limit to what they can do to you should you relinquish ownership of your machine to "they". That's what I want people to understand.
Until you want to contribute but is stonewalled and gatekept by overzealous devs to the point that you lose all interest in contributing and just give up. Which means you are back to using a “they” computer—not a big corp “they”, but a “devs somewhere” “they”. Pretty much exchanging six for half a dozen.
Still preferable to being completely at someone else's mercy though. It is always better to have the option to maintain a fork if needed. I actually maintained my own custom fork of bash for quite some time. About a year later upstream added the feature I wanted so the fork was no longer necessary. It was a pretty good exercise though. Maintaining the fork turned out to not be that hard. All I had to do was pull upstream, rebase my branch on top of upstream, recompile and repackage. It is always better to have the power to do this than to not have it.
The absolute VAST majority of Linux users are not out there forking their own distros or creating their own WMs. They, more often than not, are just fine with using whatever is being cooked up by the big names in the Linux space, people aren’t giving up the “they” just because the “they” is now KDE or GNOME.
Hell, even Torvalds himself has gone on record to say that he just wants his computer to work and is happy using Fedora and GNOME (the very definition of a “they” Linux).
I built a freestanding lisp interpreter that runs directly on top of the Linux kernel just to prove this. Zero dependencies, native system call support. I know that everyone is going to want stuff like glibc instead. But it was possible, so I did it.
For those that such options do matter, it is absolutely essential (I’m in this category). But for the common user, it’s just another thing that their system does that they don’t understand and have no desire to spend time learning. Most think like Torvalds himself: they just want a computer that works and gets out of their way.
I'm arguing against the "common user" migrating to Linux though. "Linux is for people who..." I just didn't want to say it out loud. If this stuff doesn't matter to you, then obviously you shouldn't use it. I'm just trying to convince others that it does matter.
I want Linux to be the programmer's system, and I want a world with more programmers in it. I have no interest in "common users" other than the fact they might one day become programmers themselves.