4 ms·

Operating system decline and cultural death

23 points by ingve 1y ago

fithisux 1y ago
My exact thoughts the last week.
Telaneo 1y ago
I'm curious how many people started their hobby or career by just dabbling in Paint or whatever other bundled Windows program. The equivalent of that does still exist to some extent (is Garageband included by default on iOS? Or MacOS for that matter?), but the world has clearly changed. And sure, there's a whole world of apps out there that you could go and download, but 90% of it is garbage, and the remaining 10% is locked behind a login and choice paralysis, so it'll never be discovered by kids today unless they get lucky (recommendations by other people, seeing someone else doing something cool and asking what that app is).
JSR_FDED 1y ago
Sorry, I agree with the sentiment of wanting a computing environment that’s easy for kids to approach and not too much walled garden, but “last bastion of hope is Windows”???
- Borg3 1y ago
  Haha, yeah I wanted to post very same question. Like WHAT? Maybe he have some retro computing in mind like WinXP (or Win7 at best). Win10 and up is uter crap.
- wheybags 1y ago
  Maybe I should have made it more clear in the post itself but, what I was getting at is that windows is the last mainstream OS that is reasonably permissive. MacOS has gone too far down the walled garden road already, and besides, they never had decent backwards compatibility. And phones have just been dead from the start. Linux is too obscure, normal people never encounter in their daily lives unless they're already into tech. So, by process of elimination, there is only windows.
  - rocketvole 1y ago
    I agree. I've been trying to use linux as my daily driver for months but aside from using it for incredibly basic things (like web browsing and watching videos) its been a genuine chore. I've settled on fedora gnome as most likely to be the one I'll stick with but it still feels less polished than windows. Funnily enough I'm having compatibility issues- there are a bunch of extensions that promise to use to fix my experience with gnome but they're only compatible with previous versions.
    - RamtinJ95 1y ago
      This is not my experience at all I have been daily driving arch for months for work and hobby development without a single issue. In fact it’s easier to fix issues or keep things like my config working on arch than it was on macOS.
      - yetihehe 1y ago
        I've been daily driving mint for a year. I use it to program, watch videos and play games on steam (fairly powerful rig). > In fact it’s easier to fix issues or keep things like my config working on arch than it was on macOS. I didn't have to fix issues or keep my config working. It just works.
  - kjellsbells 1y ago
    Your point about backwards compatibility is the key one, I think. Windows allows space for experimentation by accidental virtue of the side effect of being so good at back compatibility. If Windows didn't have to support a gigantic universe of old-yet-critical software, Microsoft would have radically reduced the API and feature surface and Windows would be as locked down as MacOS is. If you can play around on Windows today you probably should be thanking some person who wrote a VB5 program to control a nuclear reactor in 1996 and insisted that it talk to COM1: (gulp).
    - simne 1y ago
      > If Windows didn't have to support a gigantic universe of old-yet-critical software Interest point, but not exact. MS have close to monopoly state and is very close to formal margins, where regulators must issue regulative measures. As I know, nearly all companies achieved so huge share of US market, got warning from regulators, and most immediately hit brakes to limit their share and avoid measures. Examples from past are IBM, Commodore/Atari, etc. But what interest, using some obvious things, like just strip API to limit share, considered by regulators as offense, so subject must not do direct things to limit his product, and only could slow innovations.
cobbaut 1y ago
I agree with the post, but it is not just operating systems, and it has been going in the 'closed wall' direction since before WinXP. We had programs like 'pidgin' that allowed chatting with different protocols, whereas now even I (a Linux nerd with 30 years IT experience) have no clue how to take a backup of my Whatsapp/Facetime/... conversations. Completely closed protocols are winning over open ones. There is a similar process going on with websites; they used to be open and readable for everyone. Today I cannot access most pages that are sent to me via mail or that are linked in forums, unless I create an account and agree to share everything with 799 partners. Never mind that all links are now safelinks.protection.outlook.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Hardware, too. You used to be able to figure out what was going on with hardware with an oscilloscope. You could get the oscilloscope onto a pin of a chip. You could replace chips. Now all of that is far beyond most people's reach.
rini17 1y ago
I'd widen the scope to demand kids having unmediated, self-managed contact with reality, preferably physical one. Should be encouraged to tinker with everything, computers being only part of it. Not having any such kind of play is the original cultural death.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
> To use a computer, especially for programming, is the purest form of creation that man has ever dreamed up. Literature? Poetry? Sonnets? Film? Romance? Brewing? This is an incredibly uncultured take. Reminder that only programmers, by and large, care about anyone’s digital creations. Anyone can appreciate romantic verse more than your C# program that spins a cube.
- wheybags 1y ago
  I think you're misinterpreting what I meant. I was not trying to diminish the cultural importance of any other medium of expression. What I was getting at is that I feel the unique thing about programming is that the gap between thought and effect on the world is as small as can be. That it maps my thoughts onto external effects as directly and immediately as humanly possible. You can disagree if you like, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't baselessly accuse me of being uncultured.
koverstreet 1y ago
Ivory tower is right when you're talking about Linux. I've heard "Linux is for the big tech companies now" enough times to make me gag.
bitwize 1y ago
This reminds me of Louis Rossman's Clippy rant. No, Clippy wasn't "just there to help". He represented not the end of some bygone era, but the beginning of the current one: in which operating systems attempt to get ahead of the user and shape their behavior to the vendor's needs, rather than simply doing what the user commands. Similarly, Windows XP represented the beginning of the current, telemetry-encrusted, handholdy, locky-downy era in computing, not the idyllic past. It was the first Windows to feature product activation, and to send vital data about your system back to Microsoft for license enforcement purposes. When I read that news, I noped out of Windows pretty much for good. It was also released in the era when Microsoft started seriously talking about Trustworthy Computing, whose fruition is the very problem the author laments. The only reasons why Windows back then wasn't even more locked down is because of backwards compatibility concerns, and with the DOJ breathing hotly down their necks they could ill afford the backlash if they tried. But the XP-era Palladium initiative is just now coming into reality, and may be in full force in Windows 12, which will doubtless require a signed code path from boot loader through application code. There's also the issue that in the past, most Linux users had exposure to Unix, even if it was just their collegiate shell account, and so had some passing knowledge of Unix culture and values. People who weren't up to speed on this culture were richly rewarded for being at least willing to learn. These days, most Linux users come from a background of exclusively using Windows or (the non-Unixy bits of) macOS, are disappointed when Linux doesn't look and behave exactly like those, and if they be developers, feel the need to Change Fucking Everything so that it does. This perfectly explains GNOME. It's deeply embedded in GNOME's DNA. The founding document of GNOME is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", where the definition of "not suck" is literally "look and behave exactly like Windows". So we're already well into a culture of least-common-denominator-ism, even in the open source world, for ~20y and counting. I dunno, maybe that last bit is a bit too "old man yells at cloud". But the 90s hit way different in computing, even compared to the immediately following decade. (Linux was legitimately cyberpunk. Instead of the anodyne, if not exactly welcoming, blue splash screen of Windows, we were greeted by the text-mode chatter of dozens of kernel and user-mode systems, each line having been written by some human whose name you could find by examining the source code or its history. The voices of the street finding its own uses for newly-cheap PCs.)
- bitwize 1y ago
lucas_membrane 1y ago
I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all technology that is permitted becoming mandatory, and all technology that is not mandatory is becoming forbidden. So much of the free as in whatever software sector (and much of the telecomm infrastructure that it relies on) is now subject to change without notice, mostly because it is tolerated, funded or owned by very business-oriented mega-corporations who (note: corporations being people in the USA, please do not think I am casting aspersions on any of my flesh-and-blood brethren) have tempered their avarice to the extent that they want to move only somewhat faster than everyone else, and only break things that slow their progress. So the list of things that are going to get worse before they get better is bound to get longer before it gets shorter. Progress is our only product, love it or leave it. I could give you 37 or 38 pages of examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to die of legal fees. That brings me to Viktor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way".

23 points by ingve 1y ago

My exact thoughts the last week.

I'm curious how many people started their hobby or career by just dabbling in Paint or whatever other bundled Windows program. The equivalent of that does still exist to some extent (is Garageband included by default on iOS? Or MacOS for that matter?), but the world has clearly changed. And sure, there's a whole world of apps out there that you could go and download, but 90% of it is garbage, and the remaining 10% is locked behind a login and choice paralysis, so it'll never be discovered by kids today unless they get lucky (recommendations by other people, seeing someone else doing something cool and asking what that app is).

JSR_FDED 1y ago

Sorry, I agree with the sentiment of wanting a computing environment that’s easy for kids to approach and not too much walled garden, but “last bastion of hope is Windows”???

Borg3 1y ago
Haha, yeah I wanted to post very same question. Like WHAT? Maybe he have some retro computing in mind like WinXP (or Win7 at best). Win10 and up is uter crap.
wheybags 1y ago
Maybe I should have made it more clear in the post itself but, what I was getting at is that windows is the last mainstream OS that is reasonably permissive. MacOS has gone too far down the walled garden road already, and besides, they never had decent backwards compatibility. And phones have just been dead from the start. Linux is too obscure, normal people never encounter in their daily lives unless they're already into tech. So, by process of elimination, there is only windows.
- rocketvole 1y ago
  I agree. I've been trying to use linux as my daily driver for months but aside from using it for incredibly basic things (like web browsing and watching videos) its been a genuine chore. I've settled on fedora gnome as most likely to be the one I'll stick with but it still feels less polished than windows. Funnily enough I'm having compatibility issues- there are a bunch of extensions that promise to use to fix my experience with gnome but they're only compatible with previous versions.
  - RamtinJ95 1y ago
    This is not my experience at all I have been daily driving arch for months for work and hobby development without a single issue. In fact it’s easier to fix issues or keep things like my config working on arch than it was on macOS.
    - yetihehe 1y ago
      I've been daily driving mint for a year. I use it to program, watch videos and play games on steam (fairly powerful rig). > In fact it’s easier to fix issues or keep things like my config working on arch than it was on macOS. I didn't have to fix issues or keep my config working. It just works.
- kjellsbells 1y ago
  Your point about backwards compatibility is the key one, I think. Windows allows space for experimentation by accidental virtue of the side effect of being so good at back compatibility. If Windows didn't have to support a gigantic universe of old-yet-critical software, Microsoft would have radically reduced the API and feature surface and Windows would be as locked down as MacOS is. If you can play around on Windows today you probably should be thanking some person who wrote a VB5 program to control a nuclear reactor in 1996 and insisted that it talk to COM1: (gulp).
  - simne 1y ago
    > If Windows didn't have to support a gigantic universe of old-yet-critical software Interest point, but not exact. MS have close to monopoly state and is very close to formal margins, where regulators must issue regulative measures. As I know, nearly all companies achieved so huge share of US market, got warning from regulators, and most immediately hit brakes to limit their share and avoid measures. Examples from past are IBM, Commodore/Atari, etc. But what interest, using some obvious things, like just strip API to limit share, considered by regulators as offense, so subject must not do direct things to limit his product, and only could slow innovations.

cobbaut 1y ago

I agree with the post, but it is not just operating systems, and it has been going in the 'closed wall' direction since before WinXP. We had programs like 'pidgin' that allowed chatting with different protocols, whereas now even I (a Linux nerd with 30 years IT experience) have no clue how to take a backup of my Whatsapp/Facetime/... conversations. Completely closed protocols are winning over open ones. There is a similar process going on with websites; they used to be open and readable for everyone. Today I cannot access most pages that are sent to me via mail or that are linked in forums, unless I create an account and agree to share everything with 799 partners. Never mind that all links are now safelinks.protection.outlook.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Hardware, too. You used to be able to figure out what was going on with hardware with an oscilloscope. You could get the oscilloscope onto a pin of a chip. You could replace chips. Now all of that is far beyond most people's reach.

rini17 1y ago

I'd widen the scope to demand kids having unmediated, self-managed contact with reality, preferably physical one. Should be encouraged to tinker with everything, computers being only part of it. Not having any such kind of play is the original cultural death.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> To use a computer, especially for programming, is the purest form of creation that man has ever dreamed up. Literature? Poetry? Sonnets? Film? Romance? Brewing? This is an incredibly uncultured take. Reminder that only programmers, by and large, care about anyone’s digital creations. Anyone can appreciate romantic verse more than your C# program that spins a cube.

wheybags 1y ago
I think you're misinterpreting what I meant. I was not trying to diminish the cultural importance of any other medium of expression. What I was getting at is that I feel the unique thing about programming is that the gap between thought and effect on the world is as small as can be. That it maps my thoughts onto external effects as directly and immediately as humanly possible. You can disagree if you like, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't baselessly accuse me of being uncultured.

koverstreet 1y ago

Ivory tower is right when you're talking about Linux. I've heard "Linux is for the big tech companies now" enough times to make me gag.

bitwize 1y ago

This reminds me of Louis Rossman's Clippy rant. No, Clippy wasn't "just there to help". He represented not the end of some bygone era, but the beginning of the current one: in which operating systems attempt to get ahead of the user and shape their behavior to the vendor's needs, rather than simply doing what the user commands. Similarly, Windows XP represented the beginning of the current, telemetry-encrusted, handholdy, locky-downy era in computing, not the idyllic past. It was the first Windows to feature product activation, and to send vital data about your system back to Microsoft for license enforcement purposes. When I read that news, I noped out of Windows pretty much for good. It was also released in the era when Microsoft started seriously talking about Trustworthy Computing, whose fruition is the very problem the author laments. The only reasons why Windows back then wasn't even more locked down is because of backwards compatibility concerns, and with the DOJ breathing hotly down their necks they could ill afford the backlash if they tried. But the XP-era Palladium initiative is just now coming into reality, and may be in full force in Windows 12, which will doubtless require a signed code path from boot loader through application code. There's also the issue that in the past, most Linux users had exposure to Unix, even if it was just their collegiate shell account, and so had some passing knowledge of Unix culture and values. People who weren't up to speed on this culture were richly rewarded for being at least willing to learn. These days, most Linux users come from a background of exclusively using Windows or (the non-Unixy bits of) macOS, are disappointed when Linux doesn't look and behave exactly like those, and if they be developers, feel the need to Change Fucking Everything so that it does. This perfectly explains GNOME. It's deeply embedded in GNOME's DNA. The founding document of GNOME is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", where the definition of "not suck" is literally "look and behave exactly like Windows". So we're already well into a culture of least-common-denominator-ism, even in the open source world, for ~20y and counting. I dunno, maybe that last bit is a bit too "old man yells at cloud". But the 90s hit way different in computing, even compared to the immediately following decade. (Linux was legitimately cyberpunk. Instead of the anodyne, if not exactly welcoming, blue splash screen of Windows, we were greeted by the text-mode chatter of dozens of kernel and user-mode systems, each line having been written by some human whose name you could find by examining the source code or its history. The voices of the street finding its own uses for newly-cheap PCs.)

bitwize 1y ago

lucas_membrane 1y ago

I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all technology that is permitted becoming mandatory, and all technology that is not mandatory is becoming forbidden. So much of the free as in whatever software sector (and much of the telecomm infrastructure that it relies on) is now subject to change without notice, mostly because it is tolerated, funded or owned by very business-oriented mega-corporations who (note: corporations being people in the USA, please do not think I am casting aspersions on any of my flesh-and-blood brethren) have tempered their avarice to the extent that they want to move only somewhat faster than everyone else, and only break things that slow their progress. So the list of things that are going to get worse before they get better is bound to get longer before it gets shorter. Progress is our only product, love it or leave it. I could give you 37 or 38 pages of examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to die of legal fees. That brings me to Viktor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way".