3 ms·

For me it's because the big tech companies (one of which I work at) are making everything way too complicated, gimmicky, and over-integrated for me. I want a k

For me it's because the big tech companies (one of which I work at) are making everything way too complicated, gimmicky, and over-integrated for me. I want a keyboard, not half a keyboard and a weird touch display that does nothing useful for me I want a directory that's synced to durable cloud-based storage, not a monolithic service product that tries to work its hooks into every corner of my computer(s) and digital life in general. I want software that writes data in common formats to a filesystem I can understand and interact with as such, rather than squirreling away my data somewhere application-specific that isn't replicated on my personally owned storage, in some unknown format that's probably locked down according to business concerns I shouldn't have to care about, and subject to some arbitrary TOS picked out of the massive constellation of TOSs we all have little practical choice but to be subject to. And so on. The more time passes, the more consumer products seem to drift away from what I want. It's a shame because a lot of the hardware is really quite nice and technically capable of hosting my workloads, but the software makes me feel dirty when I use it and often just can't do what I need. I think there is a crazy emphasis on consuming rather than creating, and it hobbles so many products that could be great. For instance, I bought my girlfriend an iPad Pro for Christmas and it's amazing, and I'm so fucking jealous. But it can't run a *nix terminal without a boatload of caveats, doesn't have a real accessible filesystem, and there are a million other little problems (like, I can't remap caps lock to control). So, as much potential as I think that form factor has for me, the product itself is useless because it's pretending it's not a general-purpose computing device. Rant over, I guess. Ultimately I don't expect big companies to go out of their way to cater to users like me, but it's a constant disappointment.

Derbasti 8y ago
I agree with every word you said. Thank you for writing this!
wasted_intel 8y ago
Well said. I switched to an XPS-based Arch build for many of these reasons. I think computers are generally too complicated for lay users. People tolerated the quirks because there was no alternative. Even on a Mac, which wouldn't suffer from the same hardware compatibility issues as a PC/Windows machine, users would still need to understand how to organize files, properly close applications, and avoid running/opening arbitrary programs/files from the internet. And that's if they could connect to the internet at all. iOS and its ilk solved all of that. And in that moment, the number of people who needed to be exposed to all of that underlying complexity shrank considerably. There is most certainly something lost for those people, but at the end of the day, there is a cognitive cost to understanding how those pieces work, and I think the mass market has shifted away from implementations that require (or allow for) that visibility. I think that's fine, provided there are still hardware options available to the rest of us. :)

Derbasti 8y ago

I agree with every word you said. Thank you for writing this!

wasted_intel 8y ago

Well said. I switched to an XPS-based Arch build for many of these reasons. I think computers are generally too complicated for lay users. People tolerated the quirks because there was no alternative. Even on a Mac, which wouldn't suffer from the same hardware compatibility issues as a PC/Windows machine, users would still need to understand how to organize files, properly close applications, and avoid running/opening arbitrary programs/files from the internet. And that's if they could connect to the internet at all. iOS and its ilk solved all of that. And in that moment, the number of people who needed to be exposed to all of that underlying complexity shrank considerably. There is most certainly something lost for those people, but at the end of the day, there is a cognitive cost to understanding how those pieces work, and I think the mass market has shifted away from implementations that require (or allow for) that visibility. I think that's fine, provided there are still hardware options available to the rest of us. :)