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Comment by zx8080 | Hacker News Reader

Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.

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It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.

linux

Your one-word answer probably violates somebody's rules here. It's also perfect and therefore worthy of upvoting.

I think he forgot the GNU part, since the non-GNU linux is android and it's the opposite of user's freedom.

Yes, and becoming harder to use with UEFI removed S3 sleep (which MS pushed). I also expect banks and govts to force the requirement to have trusted platform (secureboot with some OS level stuff like in Android) to be able to log in from desktop, probably this or the next year. All "for your safety", sure. And for children's also.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance

Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years

The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.

Today it’s all about side hustles.

It isn’t about the hacker ethos; in the 1970s Pong was the arcade game. In the 1980s there was room for Pong in the home, on Atari and Amiga and Commodore64 and Spectrum. In the 1990s there was room for Pong on PC, in CGA, in VGA, in multimedia, on CD-ROM. In the 2000s there was room for Pong online and mobile Pong and Pong in emulators of older systems.

Pong is a placeholder for all software, there.

Anything one person could do, has been done over and over. Except things that only Fabrice Bellard could do, progress now needs a team of people and a longer time horizon and a large budget. nobody is satisfied with Pong anymore and if they are they already have as much Pong as they need.

We’re already in Vernor Vinge’s age of programmer-archaeologists.

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