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Poll: What is your primary operating system

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#451

Post by nileshtrivedi »

danudey wrote: post #366
randallsquared wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that…

> It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. But what's the point then? If it's just an academic process then that's fine, but for the purposes of determining a useful day-to-day primary system, it seems like 'It's free software' is a terrible metric on its own. All else being e…

Isn't that equal to always optimizing locally, as in a greedy algorithm, and therefore ending up at an suboptimal destination? Why isn't a short-term productivity loss acceptable if it improves things in the long-term?

I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.

I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#452

Post by nileshtrivedi »

goodcanadian wrote: post #412
slowpoke wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.

"Free - as in Beer" has always been the more important point to me. This is followed closely by the ability to screw around with anything I want which, I suppose, is close to the "Free - as in Speech" argument, but for me it has always been about pragmatism rather than ideology.

Ideologies are pragmatic in the long term.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#453

Post by randallsquared »

Natsu wrote: post #449
rbarooah wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing. It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously. On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of…

I think his problem is with those people who would take away the user's freedom to choose who to trust.

I don't really expect them to take it away completely. So, a simpler version is that I expect the capability to silently disable applications on user machines will be misused (through third-party insistence if nothing else; see the _1984_ debacle at Amazon). A similar system which could only throw up scary warnings when starting an unsigned application wouldn't bother me much, since it wouldn't be such attractive lawsuit bait. But I agree that I'm only speculating that Apple will carry this through to its natural end of being iOS-like. I can't imagine any reason for them not to do it, and I think that for the majority of their users, it will actually improve the experience.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#454

Post by randallsquared »

rbarooah wrote: post #445
randallsquared wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did mention those benefits in passing: "for excellent reasons involving security and malware". I don't disagree that this can provide those benefits; I just don't feel that they're worth the cost to me, personally. Also, I don't have any notion of how they could provide what I and other technically savvy people want and what the main base of computer users need at the same time.

The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing. It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously. On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of…

The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing.

Yeah, I dislike negative consequences. :)

To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.

I wholeheartedly agree!

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#455

Post by sbuk »

apgwoz wrote: post #406
apgwoz wrote: post #172

I choose other because I use GNU/Linux

Since when did it become not OK to side with the FSF? This, (i.e. the "Hacker" News crowd) has really set a new low bar.

"Since when did it become not OK to side with the FSF?" I'm sorry, but when did it become obligatory to agree with your world view. You were down-voted presumably because your comment was fatuous. Being a 'hacker' is not synonymous to exclusively using F/LOSS. Ideological fallacies are just the same as all the other fallacies...

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#456

Post by eli_gottlieb »

rbarooah wrote: post #442
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada. And Linux is the top system for ease of acquiring development tools. Compilers, debuggers, IDEs, version-control systems, scripting languages... you get it…

Aren't these just a subset of what you can get on OSX? On OSX, as well as the FOSS tools you can also choose from a set of nicely tailored Cocoa apps, some free and some worth paying for.

Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first, whereas Linux has a package manager for that.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#457

Post by rbarooah »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #456
rbarooah wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't these just a subset of what you can get on OSX? On OSX, as well as the FOSS tools you can also choose from a set of nicely tailored Cocoa apps, some free and some worth paying for.

Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first , whereas Linux has a package manager for that.

What about macports?

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#458

Post by slowpoke »

janardanyri wrote: post #376
slowpoke wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Freedom also carries a cost. What cost? You're stating this as a fact, when it certainly isn't. As I've pointed out in another comment, the claim that usability is an orthogonal concept to Freedom is a false dichotomy. Yes, there are quite some issues at the moment, I'm not going to deny that. The thing is, a lot of those, like missing hardware support, are not the fault of the Free Software community, it's the faul…

This IS clear to everyone; it's simply irrelevant. Life's not fair. We all have to deal with unfair problems. Emphasizing the unfairness of your problems only makes the FSF look less "idealistic as in principled" and more "idealistic as in naive." Relatedly, your most critical problem is not external, it's that the FSF is now associated more closely with non-issues like "GNU/Linux" nomenclature than solving serious p…

It's us hopeless dreamers that have built the world you say has no place for us. And we will continue to dream, and make our dreams reality, no matter how much you tell us we should accept defeat and just face the "reality of life", whatever that is.

So no, we're not going to "suck it up", but we're going to press on, to make a better world for future generations.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#459

Post by eli_gottlieb »

rbarooah wrote: post #457
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first , whereas Linux has a package manager for that.

What about macports?

Not nearly as extensive as any Linux package manager. I've tried.

Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system

#460

Post by foxit »

esolyt wrote: post #285
foxit wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting older, and after about 15 years playing around with config files, I just want something that's stable and consistent[.] .. Windows is leaps and bounds better than when I heavily used it last. This is why we use Windows. When we buy a new computer, it's a former corporate business class laptop sold on eBay, it comes with some version of Windows preinstalled, and we don't mess with it. As with the recent Gm…

I use Windows too. But I found it interesting that someone on Hacker News considers installing an OS as "messing with the computer".

I'm using "messing" in the same sense the gp used "mucking":

Ubuntu was soooo close to surpassing Windows from a "I just want to get stuff done without mucking with the machine" standpoint.

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