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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 When you cannot build the linux kernel without a billion dependencies of weird or outdated programs like awk and perl and make and whatever else, then there's a problem.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...