💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › Bazmatazable › 5904 captured on 2023-11-04 at 17:13:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Let me start by apologizing for the sensational headline but it really is something that I encountered that stopped me in my tracks.
I am currently a year into my journey to switch away from big tech and have been setting up my own digital sovereignty. I have my own website, I host my own email (sort of) and I have a handful of indispensable services all running quietly on a little tiny box in my closet. So for me this is all very satisfying and yet is almost an exact replacement to the services I was using a year ago. Along the way I have built up an understanding of the basic principals of Linux and have spent quite a bit of time in the terminal and of course been tinkering with config files ....... so many config files........ however......
From my wife's point of view, anyone using Linux looks like a regular person except worse. A normal person will open their laptop and download an important attachment form their email. Then they will continue with whatever related important life task, all in less than 5 minutes.
On the other hand a Linux user will open their laptop and then get lost doing whatever Linux stuff for maybe a few hours and then be no closer to getting the email attachment and will need to be reminded about some other deadline so then they download the attachment on their phone instead and then I need to convert it because it is not in the same ecosystem only to find out that the file format is not standard and so then I have to research an alternative and in the end my wife just does it herself and now I am on thin ice for the rest of the day... (hypothetically of course)
Her opinion extends to any kind of free community software that isn't perfectly polished. Even though in principal the FLOSS equivalent is the same as a proprietary solution, in practice the chances of some amount of time wasting or trouble shooting is not zero. She doesn't see the fight for freedom, the sense of community or satisfaction of self determination. She has no mental bandwidth to consider the enshitification of the web or slow decline in the quality of our entertainment. She is not dubious about subscriptions. For her, outsourcing something, at any cost, is always the better deal. For her, Linux users are metaphorically "always dressed inappropriately and acting counterintuitively" as if they were real life cosplayers that never got out of costume. She has no time for any of this, let alone any kind of discussion about it.
I have also been reading a lot about the power of collective cooperation. It is demotivating to think of all the investment in closed software that could have been diverted to open software. If open projects were adequately funded then not only would there be no competition between open and closed software but my wife and others like her would be completely ambivalent about it!
I like Linux and the way she feels about it makes me sad.
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2023-10-05 · 4 weeks ago · 👍 clseibold, kleb, Minko_Ikana · 1 🤔 1 ❤
Personally, the way I see it is you both are partially correct. The investment in open source software and decrapifying the web and various other software is great and needs to be done; however... some of the open source community isn't really meeting that goal, at least not very well. BSD vs. Linux is a common example: BSD is pretty well polished for what it's good at, whereas the Linux ecosystem is just throwing whatever they can at the wall to see if it sticks. Linux has thus been able to get lots of support for drivers and open source software that can open documents from proprietary systems...
but BSD has better design for servers, and Windows is easier to use for desktop, lol. So, the way I see it is both sides have somewhat of a point.
I personally think we can have both sides, we just need to work to get there. We can have open source and customizability AND ease of use, sane default, and good design. Both things are possible, we just need to keep working towards this goal and not loose sight of one half of the goal trying to focus on the other half.
I've been a primarily Linux user for the last 10 years, and my wife is ride-or-die apple, so I get where you're coming from.
People care about different things, and that's ok. For me I see technology as a means to improve people's lives, to connect with others in new ways, and as mechanism to enrich our lives in previously impossible ways. So when technology companies are getting in the way of those goals for profit motives I get annoyed and am willing to spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering and trying OSS solutions and all the rest.
But I get that other people don't share that vision, and for them technology is just a tool which may or may not be useful to get a job done. If subscriptions or vendor lock-in or DRM riddled nonsense is the way to do it then so be it. We've all got things to do, and I'm glad there's someone out there who cares about things that I don't care about, because I'm certainly not gonna care about them :)
My advice to you, if you're asking for it, is that if you want someone to accept your technology as legitimate, you need to show that it can provide an experience that meets their expectations. Linux doesn't _have_ to be a time sink, it can just work, but it takes some restraint to not be constantly fiddling with it and to leave well enough alone.
I've definitely had those days where I set off to do a simple thing, and it turns into a whole project. But it's always my fault, in the end. I chose some new exciting tech I didn't _really_ need, or I bought some hardware without proper research, or I'm going way out of my way to dodge a shitty file format just out of principle. These things didn't happen to me, they are me.
Once someone actually needs something from me, though, the tinkering stops. I can't expect others to have the same outlook as me, and therefore the same patience. I either get it done or tell them how they could do it with whatever they're working with, remembering for a later date what the issue was and perhaps working on a solution in my own time.
Computers and how people use them are too complicated. I love tinkering with Linux and customizing everything, but I completely understand most people's impulse towards "it should just work."
Differences aside, if you consider the perspective between different use cases and the respect for individual preference in utility, your personal connection should maintain without issue regardless of isolated preference for tech if there's no reason for the two fields to interfere. It seems that whether or not either of you prefer one or the other, should be irrelevant to how you both express endearment for eachother. For example, in much the same way it's demonstrated that perhaps she finds some disinterest to the linux system as a whole, would you say that in some manner you yourself might find some criticism in something say like Apple macOS/iOS software or Microsoft software? <pt1>
<cont'd> Either way, those personal preferences are only relevant to how you personally see fit wanting to interact with technology you wanna use and the purpose you want to use that tech for. How one of you thinks about a group of software contrary to the other ultimately shouldn't color how it affects you what they think about it, as what they think about it shouldn't reflect how they think about you, as those personal preferences don't embody who we are as a person. Our character, quality of ethic, individuality, and integrity is what embodies us as a person, regardless of what anyone thinks about the things we involve in or take preference for.
ALL THAT SAID: It coulda easily been minics e
(Afternote: speaking from perspective with my own wife, who spends her time more with windows 11, web + apple-based tech, while I spend my time on linux and smallnet. I don't mind what she does, and take involvement, and she doesn't mind and finds fascination in it. Cheers, and god speed to you both!)
New to Gemini, but I hade this issue a few years back. The common ground that repaired it was Linux Mint Cinnamon. Basically a full GUI that operates like Windows 7.
While I can see how your wife comes to this conclusion, I've been using Open Source for so long that I find the opposite to be true. If I try to use Windows for anything beyond web browsing I immediately run into road blocks and have to do a bunch of research into how everything works on this exotic platform.
Any kind of software development shows this problem immediately. In particular from a fresh installation. Last time I tried to set up Windows for developing C/C++ (for my son on his way to college) it took me hours to find the download which gave him the command line version of the MSVC toolchain. On FreeBSD I've got the compiler, headers, build tools and vi all in the base install. About the only extra package I really need is git, which is a single command away.
Now, most people aren't software devs and have different needs. But for me, proprietary systems are and always have been frustrating and woefully incomplete.
While I can see a decent amount of config for most systems when first getting set up... once you get a system pretty dialed in, it shouldn't take much tinkering. Tinkering is a hobby, not a necessary part of using a unix-like system (for the most part). Sure, things come up from time to time, but I very very rarely have to change config stuff on any of my systems (FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and BunsenLabs). The BunsenLabs setup in particular is just lightweight, solid, does what it needs to do with no fuss.
I can relate. My SO likes Apple products in spite of my frequent rants (and even shared hatred of Jobs). She is a visual artist, so I get it - everyone else uses Macs... At least we seem to be done with winders.
2023-10-06 · 4 weeks ago
sounds like your ideal computer is a hobby but your partner's ideal computer is a tool. and that's okay!
If someone wants free software be used, we must never forget it must remain useful to its users.
I also started self-hosting my own data a few years ago, starting with a Nextcloud instance to store our pictures and some documentation. Guess what? My wife never liked it - she knew well how to use it, but it was painfully slow and just didn't work.
I was so frustrated that I wrote my own replacement in C99 using as few dependencies as possible: https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/slcl
And now? slcl isn't nearly as fancy, JS-rich or fully-fledged as Nextcloud by any means, but *it works* fast and smooth. Since then, she is always happy about the change, and wants to use it everyday.
Her priorities are different. That's okay.
@xavi Precisely.
Much as I despise Jobs as a person, he definitely latched onto what must be a bug in the human brain. As Stallman pointed out, Jobs built a very shiny prison that people were very happy to be stuck in, without giving a thought about freedoms some of us care about. This push for a very shallow aesthetic over everything else shaped much of our world - people care more about perception than reality.
Usability of software is important, but it does not have to be big and shiny, and constantly replaced, like the iPhone. That is now an expectation. Simple solutions that may appear rough around the edges are avoided (often for a good reason). Few people think of the need to actually tinker with their tools - largely because the same trends of largesse and shinyness are solidly permeating development tools and languages. Developing software is no longer something a hacker does, because it requires a production team reminiscent of a movie (movies are now billion-dollar productions even though a 4K camera is cheaper than a sushi dinner).
Until we recognize this as an awful capitalist trend designed to imprison individuals and seize all means of production, this will continue to work against us. And that is why I will never use an Apple product. My wife no doubt thinks I am a fool to refuse a perfectly good sandwich made by Hitler. She thinks we already lost, but I am still hopeful.
2023-10-07 · 4 weeks ago
There is a balancing act between replacement, usability, and simplicity. Good design sometimes requires replacement. Make and Gnu are prisons themselves, but few people on Linux like to realize this, because they are a different type of prison. When you cannot build the linux kernel without a billion dependencies of weird or outdated programs like awk and perl and make and whatever else, then there's a problem. When you cannot build a linux program without doing a bunch of crazy configuration every time, then there's a problem. When C *used to be* portable by design (except not really) but now you cannot build a C program on different platforms, then there's a problem.
Linux is not simple and never has been. Unix *used to be* simple, until Linux largely replaced it and put a bunch of layers of dead skin on top. DOS *used to be* simple, until a bunch of dead layers of skin piled on top.
When a person's job consists of only making sure that updates to packages within some package management system doesn't break other programs, then that's a very grave stability problem. Linux is not stable, it only looks like it because people put in hours of effort into making sure things don't break.
@clseibold: absolutely. Linux has succumbed to the same race to the same shiny trap, and is ballooning at an amazing rate. Many subsystems are layers upon layers of crap that no one ever looks at, and instead of fixing and shrinking the system, everyone wants to add a large (and popular) project.
A huge amount of effort is spent on making Linux look like a Mac or a Windows machine - something truly unthinkable to me (I use dwm, the simplest tiling window manager possible and avoid attention-foulding trinkets as much as I can).
I also switched to FreeBSD a few days ago, as even XUbuntu was getting way to big for me to not be constantly annoyed. Things are more sane in FreeBSD.
@stack your comments are reminding me of my last gemlog post, where I explored the concepts of "finished" and "feature complete" in terms of software, and how screwed up our expectations have become in regards to those concepts.
DWM is actually a good example of a piece of software that is "finished".