💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~kaction › log › 2021-01-19.1.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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All my life in Free Software was devoted to software adhering to Unix philosophy, software for which sound design being more important than whims of users, especially incompetent users. I do my best to eliminate complexity here and there: in Debian I fought hard against systemd, after its downfall I fix static linkage in Nixpkgs¹.
But all my victories and defeats are nothing compared with elephant in the room called "web browser". Complexity of web browsers is mind-blowing, and they are getting more and more complex².
Modern browsers are quite decent at keeping content of your $HOME safe, but are much better at making sure everything valuable is stored anywhere but in $HOME. And what disheartens me is that no matter what I do, these monsters are getting into my life more and more.
I am writing these lines with vim and you don't need anything more complex than curl to read them, but that is about as much as I can have. Even to contribute to Free Software, I have to let these monsters it. Is it what I really want?
During my best years in Debian I had my closure within it -- set of programs that I liked and contributed to. I used mail client and editor to contribute to mail client and editor. Yeah, paradise...
I was ejected from the paradise. No matter how much I love Nix, contributing to Nixpkgs via GitHub is pain that is too much to bear. It is like touching filth. I have enough of it in cases where I have no choice, like banking or making my living.
I am writing it mainly to prove to myself that I have right to do nothing. Right to quit the fight. Right to admit defeat and surrender. Right to be nobody. Right to enjoy being nobody. I do, don't I?
¹ Advantages of dynamic linking linking are myth. Actually dynamic linking is useless complexity that gained traction because of historical accident. Explicit dlopen(3) can be useful occasionally, though.
https://drewdevault.com/dynlib.html
² This article some part of unreasonable complexity of modern browsers.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html