4 ms·

This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile

by amlib 1y ago

This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything. Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
Agreed. It's all about leverage. Without huge numbers of users, we have no leverage. Corporations can afford to just drop us because of our software preferences. That would not be the case if there were more of us.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
baq 1y ago
Desktop is still useful, but it doesn’t matter. Everything important to non-techies outside of work life is happening on the smartphone, which has had hardware attestation since forever.
- gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
  Those are vital points! Mobile is the battleground. No company now or ever working on classical hardware attestation will understand cryptographic engineering at a basic level.. Thus FOSS has plenty of time (decades to centuries) to learn from for-profit tech's mistakes
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Mobile is the battleground but you are forgetting how damn easy it is on android (atleast right now before google's attestation) it is to install f-droid and then install open source. People don't even do that. They don't even search for software on f-droid first and try the UI. Nope they go to play store and search software which is going to advocate for closed software because ads/review buying... You really have to expect something from the general populus as well imo. Maybe they don't know about f-droid but people say to me its not about knowledge but rather caring, they don't care and I don't know wtf to say to that. It's a very weird chicken and egg problem.
    - gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
      Within the mobile space there are other possible Schwerpunkte and appstoretech is the most obvious one to work on. It's also one where superior technology could win out over feelings--> why NLNet wants to fund: https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/ https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/ >‘decentralized app stores’, a technology that uses the F-Droid app store architecture, for organizations or other entities that wish to distribute their apps to a select user population (e.g. employees), plus an app distribution system that makes it simple and cost-effective for developers to distribute their applications to multiple app stores. For mixed approaches, I like to think about why Google et al haven't beaten Apple at the appstore game (outside China) You mention chicken and egg which suggests that there's a 2-sided-market type of problem to try to solve here even if one isn't well-versed in marketing
      - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        When I mean the chicken and egg problem I mean this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286#45565446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286#45565446 and originally this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45565346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45565346 Basically that people expect a lot from open source yet they want it right now but nobody mentions anything about donating to them or they will donate to it once the software gets a lot of features but the software will only get it if you donate to them in the first place imo otherwise the whole situation would feel entitled. There is no reason to expect good UI/UX from open source when at scale, the society doesn't fund open source with donations at all. They are severely underfunded but I don't know what people want from them. Nobody cares about it. Oof. This is a chicken and egg problem that open source can get really good if people donate to the creators but they will only donate (I doubt that actually as well now) once it gets good but ... it will only get good once they donate. Open source is stuck in this chicken and egg problem. I was thinking about how the creators of deltarune/ undertale if they were open source, I just checked and undertale has made 114 million $ in sales and its price is 10$ which might be worth it... 10$ isn't that bad and people still pirate it, I think this model can be decent for games which is why people don't open source games. Imagine the amount of money that could've lost if lets say undertale was open source. I am pretty damn sure that nobody would've donated 114 million $ to them if it was open source. Just some thoughts. I have mixed opinion now. Its a chicken and egg problem and actively hurts the devs financially in the process as well and people don't want anything to do with open source aside from us people who already know about it. Like wtf. We are taking a cut for a ideology and uh I am just a bit speechless. Its messed up & my question is: can we change it? I genuinely didn't want to be pessimistic but I don't think that there is much of a way, is there? I want to find some hope to cling upon but I genuinely can't find any hope. Everyone I talk to is so down right pessimist or nihilist or doesn't care about open source for a fix that I feel like I am in the wrong for looking for ways to change and now I genuinely doubt if change is even possible.
setopt 1y ago
I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on. I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.
- jezek2 1y ago
  That's normal in Linux. It's always about to get really good then everything is made crappy again, then slowly improving to get good but then the cycle repeats. I've lived through several of such cycles, it has slowed down Linux adoption a lot.
- robinsonb5 1y ago
  For me, Ubuntu / Gnome 2 came so close to being something tech-savvy people could recommend to non-technical friends and relatives at a time when people who were happy enough with WinXP and Win7 were being corralled into dealing with the Win8 carcrash. And instead of closing that final gap it went scampering off into the far distance again, never to recover.

by amlib 1y ago

matheusmoreira 1y ago

Agreed. It's all about leverage. Without huge numbers of users, we have no leverage. Corporations can afford to just drop us because of our software preferences. That would not be the case if there were more of us.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

baq 1y ago

Desktop is still useful, but it doesn’t matter. Everything important to non-techies outside of work life is happening on the smartphone, which has had hardware attestation since forever.

gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
Those are vital points! Mobile is the battleground. No company now or ever working on classical hardware attestation will understand cryptographic engineering at a basic level.. Thus FOSS has plenty of time (decades to centuries) to learn from for-profit tech's mistakes
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Mobile is the battleground but you are forgetting how damn easy it is on android (atleast right now before google's attestation) it is to install f-droid and then install open source. People don't even do that. They don't even search for software on f-droid first and try the UI. Nope they go to play store and search software which is going to advocate for closed software because ads/review buying... You really have to expect something from the general populus as well imo. Maybe they don't know about f-droid but people say to me its not about knowledge but rather caring, they don't care and I don't know wtf to say to that. It's a very weird chicken and egg problem.
  - gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
    Within the mobile space there are other possible Schwerpunkte and appstoretech is the most obvious one to work on. It's also one where superior technology could win out over feelings--> why NLNet wants to fund: https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/ https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/ >‘decentralized app stores’, a technology that uses the F-Droid app store architecture, for organizations or other entities that wish to distribute their apps to a select user population (e.g. employees), plus an app distribution system that makes it simple and cost-effective for developers to distribute their applications to multiple app stores. For mixed approaches, I like to think about why Google et al haven't beaten Apple at the appstore game (outside China) You mention chicken and egg which suggests that there's a 2-sided-market type of problem to try to solve here even if one isn't well-versed in marketing
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      When I mean the chicken and egg problem I mean this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286#45565446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286#45565446 and originally this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45565346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45565346 Basically that people expect a lot from open source yet they want it right now but nobody mentions anything about donating to them or they will donate to it once the software gets a lot of features but the software will only get it if you donate to them in the first place imo otherwise the whole situation would feel entitled. There is no reason to expect good UI/UX from open source when at scale, the society doesn't fund open source with donations at all. They are severely underfunded but I don't know what people want from them. Nobody cares about it. Oof. This is a chicken and egg problem that open source can get really good if people donate to the creators but they will only donate (I doubt that actually as well now) once it gets good but ... it will only get good once they donate. Open source is stuck in this chicken and egg problem. I was thinking about how the creators of deltarune/ undertale if they were open source, I just checked and undertale has made 114 million $ in sales and its price is 10$ which might be worth it... 10$ isn't that bad and people still pirate it, I think this model can be decent for games which is why people don't open source games. Imagine the amount of money that could've lost if lets say undertale was open source. I am pretty damn sure that nobody would've donated 114 million $ to them if it was open source. Just some thoughts. I have mixed opinion now. Its a chicken and egg problem and actively hurts the devs financially in the process as well and people don't want anything to do with open source aside from us people who already know about it. Like wtf. We are taking a cut for a ideology and uh I am just a bit speechless. Its messed up & my question is: can we change it? I genuinely didn't want to be pessimistic but I don't think that there is much of a way, is there? I want to find some hope to cling upon but I genuinely can't find any hope. Everyone I talk to is so down right pessimist or nihilist or doesn't care about open source for a fix that I feel like I am in the wrong for looking for ways to change and now I genuinely doubt if change is even possible.

setopt 1y ago

I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on. I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.

jezek2 1y ago
That's normal in Linux. It's always about to get really good then everything is made crappy again, then slowly improving to get good but then the cycle repeats. I've lived through several of such cycles, it has slowed down Linux adoption a lot.
robinsonb5 1y ago
For me, Ubuntu / Gnome 2 came so close to being something tech-savvy people could recommend to non-technical friends and relatives at a time when people who were happy enough with WinXP and Win7 were being corralled into dealing with the Win8 carcrash. And instead of closing that final gap it went scampering off into the far distance again, never to recover.