3 ms·

Damn, the future of personal computing gets more depressing every day.

• echelon 5y ago
  The market economy has discovered this path and is allowing it. - iPhone you can't freely distribute software to (and Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, so we may as well count them in too) - infrastructure giants that turn open source services into paid platforms and then accrete all developer mindshare - thin clients replacing thick clients. Workloads will move from desktop computers to the cloud. No need for a beefy computer to run software locally. More moat for the platforms since tools won't develop for a small market of hobbyists.
  • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, That's BS. My mom installed f-droid by herself and can install apps from APKs without any help. It's not like you gotta root your phone, use ADB, or break out the CLI for that. All you have to do is tap Install when prompted, that's it. OMG, so complex, only 0.01% of users can tap Install in F-droid. /s
    • echelon 5y ago
      Purely anecdotal. It sounds like your mom is pretty tech savvy, though. F-droid is less popular than Unix on the desktop. They don't publish any stats, but as a proxy, their Twitter account only has 10k followers and their forums receive fewer than ten posts a day. Google trends shows "Ubuntu vs f-droid" dwarfing the latter term to the point there's no signal at all. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I was expecting it to be closer.
      • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Yes, but you were talking about difficulty, not popularity. Those are not even remotely the same things. Just because something is not popular does not automatically make it difficult.