3 ms·

I never understood why some people really, really want others to switch to Linux. I don't really care if many people switch to Linux. If anything, a lot of begi

by palata 9mo ago

I never understood why some people really, really want others to switch to Linux. I don't really care if many people switch to Linux. If anything, a lot of beginner switching to Linux may well make Linux worse for me. I see a lot of "if you want to convert Windows users, you have to...". I really don't want to convert Windows users. I did not move to Linux to please those who like Windows. Said differently, if a distro managed to please all Windows users, it most definitely wouldn't please me. I don't see why I should hope for that.

NoPicklez 9mo ago
I agree with a lot of this. Most people want Windows to be better, not to have to move to Linux. You can't make people convert, especially people that quite frankly might not want to. People just want the Windows they have been using to be better, they don't want to move away from it and that's perfectly reasonable.
matheusmoreira 9mo ago
Agreed. Some degree of elitism is a force for good. I want Linux to be the programmer's system. Just enough popularity to be relevant and have people actively developing it. Never enough popularity that we have hordes of computer illiterate randoms. Linux should be a system built by programmers and for programmers.
- palata 9mo ago
  Totally. And even for developers: many developers will happily ship their program as a docker image, just because they can't be arsed to learn how to properly package it. And that's just one example.
tryauuum 9mo ago
Linux is cool and I want more people to enjoy it. I see all these people suffering -- pointlessly -- and I want to tell them "come! suffer for a while! In exchange you get low latency, native docker, no ai or bing or other shovelware, being the master of your computer feels great!"
- palata 9mo ago
  I see a difference between "you should try to learn Linux, you'll see it's cool" and "we should change Linux such that Windows people don't need to learn it".
nilslindemann 9mo ago
Disagree. It is good for users of all operating systems, if Linux becomes so usable that it threatens Windows. Then Windows has to improve and we have a race to the top.
- palata 9mo ago
  I disagree with "usability" being one dimension. I disagree with assuming that Windows is the definition of "most usable" and "Linux should move towards Windows to get more usable". Linux is different. It's great to learn something different. I don't use Linux because I don't want to pay for Windows. I use Linux because I like how Linux is. The more Windows people join Linux and try to make it look like Windows, the more Linux starts looking like the platform I left 15 years ago.
  - nilslindemann 9mo ago
    You are making a philosophy out of it, but I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value. The more usable a tool is, without losing anything else, the higher it's value.
    - palata 9mo ago
      > I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective. I hate it when people tell me "Linux should look more like Windows, because Windows is more usable. And if you don't find that Windows is more usable, then you're objectively wrong".
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - nilslindemann 9mo ago
        > Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective. Hard to argue with you about that, unless you get more concrete. Can you give an example for something you find more usable which others find less usable (than what?)?
soganess 9mo ago
1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom? 2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices). And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.
- palata 9mo ago
  > Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux I don't think it is necessarily true. More users may mean that some platform (say Ubuntu) gets so much traction that the rest becomes irrelevant. I already see "free as in freedom" projects that only support the last two versions of Ubuntu, and couldn't care less about other distros. To the point where they will have hard dependencies on things that only work on Ubuntu and are very difficult to adapt to other distros. > I love old hardware and don't want to see it die I have a counter-example with Android. Android/AOSP is pretty good with backward compatibility. It is pretty easy for a developer to compile an app for older devices, the OS totally supports it. But developers/companies will just happily target newer devices and drop older ones ("98% of our users are on Android "X", let's drop the support for older ones") and tend to test their apps on recent hardware (meaning that a perfectly fine device will still be able to run the app, but it will lag to the point where it is unusable). Happened to me: I had to change my phone because random apps (like banking or weather forecast, I'm not talking high-performance like games here) became unusable. A banking app just shows a few numbers, still they manage to make it lag on a phone from 2020.

by palata 9mo ago

NoPicklez 9mo ago

I agree with a lot of this. Most people want Windows to be better, not to have to move to Linux. You can't make people convert, especially people that quite frankly might not want to. People just want the Windows they have been using to be better, they don't want to move away from it and that's perfectly reasonable.

matheusmoreira 9mo ago

Agreed. Some degree of elitism is a force for good. I want Linux to be the programmer's system. Just enough popularity to be relevant and have people actively developing it. Never enough popularity that we have hordes of computer illiterate randoms. Linux should be a system built by programmers and for programmers.

palata 9mo ago
Totally. And even for developers: many developers will happily ship their program as a docker image, just because they can't be arsed to learn how to properly package it. And that's just one example.

tryauuum 9mo ago

Linux is cool and I want more people to enjoy it. I see all these people suffering -- pointlessly -- and I want to tell them "come! suffer for a while! In exchange you get low latency, native docker, no ai or bing or other shovelware, being the master of your computer feels great!"

palata 9mo ago
I see a difference between "you should try to learn Linux, you'll see it's cool" and "we should change Linux such that Windows people don't need to learn it".

nilslindemann 9mo ago

Disagree. It is good for users of all operating systems, if Linux becomes so usable that it threatens Windows. Then Windows has to improve and we have a race to the top.

palata 9mo ago
I disagree with "usability" being one dimension. I disagree with assuming that Windows is the definition of "most usable" and "Linux should move towards Windows to get more usable". Linux is different. It's great to learn something different. I don't use Linux because I don't want to pay for Windows. I use Linux because I like how Linux is. The more Windows people join Linux and try to make it look like Windows, the more Linux starts looking like the platform I left 15 years ago.
- nilslindemann 9mo ago
  You are making a philosophy out of it, but I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value. The more usable a tool is, without losing anything else, the higher it's value.
  - palata 9mo ago
    > I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective. I hate it when people tell me "Linux should look more like Windows, because Windows is more usable. And if you don't find that Windows is more usable, then you're objectively wrong".
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - nilslindemann 9mo ago
      > Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective. Hard to argue with you about that, unless you get more concrete. Can you give an example for something you find more usable which others find less usable (than what?)?

soganess 9mo ago

1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom? 2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices). And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.

palata 9mo ago
> Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux I don't think it is necessarily true. More users may mean that some platform (say Ubuntu) gets so much traction that the rest becomes irrelevant. I already see "free as in freedom" projects that only support the last two versions of Ubuntu, and couldn't care less about other distros. To the point where they will have hard dependencies on things that only work on Ubuntu and are very difficult to adapt to other distros. > I love old hardware and don't want to see it die I have a counter-example with Android. Android/AOSP is pretty good with backward compatibility. It is pretty easy for a developer to compile an app for older devices, the OS totally supports it. But developers/companies will just happily target newer devices and drop older ones ("98% of our users are on Android "X", let's drop the support for older ones") and tend to test their apps on recent hardware (meaning that a perfectly fine device will still be able to run the app, but it will lag to the point where it is unusable). Happened to me: I had to change my phone because random apps (like banking or weather forecast, I'm not talking high-performance like games here) became unusable. A banking app just shows a few numbers, still they manage to make it lag on a phone from 2020.