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And this is my real beef with stallman's brand of free. His freedom is a narrow-minded ideology, abstracted from what freedom means in the real world. In the re

And this is my real beef with stallman's brand of free. His freedom is a narrow-minded ideology, abstracted from what freedom means in the real world. In the real world the only freedom I care about is the freedom to spend my time the way I want. From that perspective, jobs did a lot to make me free, because the switch from linux to apple "freed" more of my time than it cost me. You're overloading the word free, a common rhetorical confusion that invariably appears in discussions of this nature. You're not really saying that Apple gave you more freedom; you're saying it gave you more time. That's a legitimate point, but you shouldn't pretend that that's the same thing as "freedom" in any sense remotely resembling what Stallman or foob care about. As such, you clearly don't "strongly agree" with what Stallman is trying to do; he wants software to be something anyone can tinker with, modify and redistribute. Apple wants to give you the "best possible computing experience", which it can only do for you as long as you're in total agreement with Apple over what that means. By the way, Apple machines are a huge timesink for me whenever I try to use them, precisely because I can't customize the things in the UI that drive me batty (namely, the global menu and the dock, two elements of the OSX UI that Apple holds sacrosanct). I'm orders of magnitude more productive on a machine I've set up to work the way I want than one that I haven't. So of what use to me is Apple's brand of "freedom"? Contrast it to Stallman's, which allows me to tear open a piece of software to see what it's doing or modify its behavior. I know which one I'd rather have.

danssig 15y ago
>Apple machines are a huge timesink for me whenever I try to use them, precisely because I can't customize the things in the UI that drive me batty Actually, it sounds like either machine is a huge time sink for you. Apple machines because you have to deal with how they're set up and your dream OS because you have to spend a bunch of time tweaking everything to be how you want it. For those of us who find the Apple OSX way just fine, we don't have that time sink.
- vedang 15y ago
  >it sounds like either machine is a huge time sink for you No, it doesn't sound like that. There are many things I like to tweak that make me more productive. Tweaking those things is time-consuming, but once it's done, I never have to waste time on it again. This default window manager sucks? Let me spend a day to throw it out and install awesome. I find myself doing the same things over and over again in Emacs? Let me write and store a macro for it. And you know what the really cool part is? _I can do these things!_. And I usually end up learning something useful about the system. Now you may find Apple OS X perfect and that's great for you. But what if Apple makes some change tomorrow that bugs the crap out of you? Everytime you encounter that "shitty" detail, a little part of you will get irritated and want to take a hammer to your laptop. Or maybe these things don't bother you. I, however, won't live with something like that.

danssig 15y ago

>Apple machines are a huge timesink for me whenever I try to use them, precisely because I can't customize the things in the UI that drive me batty Actually, it sounds like either machine is a huge time sink for you. Apple machines because you have to deal with how they're set up and your dream OS because you have to spend a bunch of time tweaking everything to be how you want it. For those of us who find the Apple OSX way just fine, we don't have that time sink.

vedang 15y ago
>it sounds like either machine is a huge time sink for you No, it doesn't sound like that. There are many things I like to tweak that make me more productive. Tweaking those things is time-consuming, but once it's done, I never have to waste time on it again. This default window manager sucks? Let me spend a day to throw it out and install awesome. I find myself doing the same things over and over again in Emacs? Let me write and store a macro for it. And you know what the really cool part is? _I can do these things!_. And I usually end up learning something useful about the system. Now you may find Apple OS X perfect and that's great for you. But what if Apple makes some change tomorrow that bugs the crap out of you? Everytime you encounter that "shitty" detail, a little part of you will get irritated and want to take a hammer to your laptop. Or maybe these things don't bother you. I, however, won't live with something like that.