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(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!)
2023-10-05 · 4 weeks ago
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".
My Wife Hates Linux — 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...