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I actually think you have a point. Linux is far less of a walled garden in principle. And it seems a lot of people are assuming "walled garden" is a statement

I actually think you have a point. Linux is far less of a walled garden in principle. And it seems a lot of people are assuming "walled garden" is a statement from developers perspective (no cost license or difficulty in developing for platform). I think what you're saying though is that your choices and options are far easier and wider with windows as a regular user, than with Linux, and if so I see your point. I've been working with Unix at work happily for 25 years now, day in and out in the cli, yet I've always bounced trying Linux on desktop. It feels like a limited, difficult, thorny garden for most regular windows users :)

Dalewyn 4y ago
Yup! A walled garden isn't just about developer lock-in driven by financial incentives. As far as the end-user goes, if the choices provided outside of the garden are wholly impractical it might as well be walled in practice even if it's not in theory/principle.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  This feels like a rabbit hole argument. So, down the rabbit hole we go! Let's imagine for a minute that using Open Source or FOSS also implies feeding back into the ecosystem. "Normal users" should be feeding back into the ecosystem somehow which then implies some form of understanding of that ecosystem. It can be bug reports (which requires understanding enough to post a coherent bug report), bug fixes (which requires knowing a little more), project leadership (which requires a different skillset and perhaps technical knowledge), monetary contributions (which makes the software less "free") My argument is, "Open Source doesn't get you past tanstaafl." The work to use it still needs to be done by someone. If you want to be a user of it and the thing you want to do isn't on the already-paved/easy-path then you need to get someone to pave that path for you or you need to understand how to do it yourself. That's the nature of the beast and has nothing to do with being a "walled garden."
bee_rider 4y ago
That’s not really a walled garden though. A wall is something out there to impede progress. Linux and Windows are not walled gardens, they are forests. A forest doesn’t necessarily have easy paths to every destination, some are far, some are just hard to get to. But there’s nothing artificial to prevent you from figuring out how to navigate through the forest. Calling the inherent difficulty of things a “walled garden” removes any meaning from the term. I’m bad at picking up human languages, I don’t know lots of programming languages, I don’t know anything about overland navigation, I’m bad on MacOS and I’ve never used an Amiga, so is most of the world a walled garden?

Dalewyn 4y ago

Yup! A walled garden isn't just about developer lock-in driven by financial incentives. As far as the end-user goes, if the choices provided outside of the garden are wholly impractical it might as well be walled in practice even if it's not in theory/principle.

imoverclocked 4y ago
This feels like a rabbit hole argument. So, down the rabbit hole we go! Let's imagine for a minute that using Open Source or FOSS also implies feeding back into the ecosystem. "Normal users" should be feeding back into the ecosystem somehow which then implies some form of understanding of that ecosystem. It can be bug reports (which requires understanding enough to post a coherent bug report), bug fixes (which requires knowing a little more), project leadership (which requires a different skillset and perhaps technical knowledge), monetary contributions (which makes the software less "free") My argument is, "Open Source doesn't get you past tanstaafl." The work to use it still needs to be done by someone. If you want to be a user of it and the thing you want to do isn't on the already-paved/easy-path then you need to get someone to pave that path for you or you need to understand how to do it yourself. That's the nature of the beast and has nothing to do with being a "walled garden."

bee_rider 4y ago

That’s not really a walled garden though. A wall is something out there to impede progress. Linux and Windows are not walled gardens, they are forests. A forest doesn’t necessarily have easy paths to every destination, some are far, some are just hard to get to. But there’s nothing artificial to prevent you from figuring out how to navigate through the forest. Calling the inherent difficulty of things a “walled garden” removes any meaning from the term. I’m bad at picking up human languages, I don’t know lots of programming languages, I don’t know anything about overland navigation, I’m bad on MacOS and I’ve never used an Amiga, so is most of the world a walled garden?