> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy.
True but with a caveat: Those people rarely need the same 20% of your features.
Free software scares normal people
221–230 of 641 posts
Re: Free software scares normal people
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either you're implying that people should code for free, or your analogy is so vague as to be useless. Yeah it's a different job but they're both jobs . Why should one be free and one not be free?
Because programmers consent to programming for free. That fact does not, in any way, obligate anyone else to.
The question/skepticism is why the programmers are consenting to this but not the artists.
Re: Free software scares normal people
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you see as wrong or missing "fine details" in, say, Cinnamon?
Assuming that the point of comparison is Windows (since it’s a rough XP/7 analogue), any difference in behaviors, patterns, or conventions that might differ from what a long time Windows user would expect, including things that some might write off as insignificant. In particular, anything relating to the user’s muscle memory (such as key shortcuts, menu item positions, etc) needs to match. The DE needs to be as clos…
For example, practically every text box in practically every Linux system handles ctrl+backspace by deleting a word. This clashes with a Windows user's expectation that ctrl+backspace deletes a word in some system applications while inserting a small square character in others.
Re: Free software scares normal people
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently. If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.
Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette. It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal. Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The on…
> Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.
Are you quoting someone? Yeah it's a real job, and so is programming. I don't think anyone in this conversation is being dismissive about either job.
Re: Free software scares normal people
#225> People benefit from stuff like this
While I agree that people generally feel better by getting something with little effort, I think that there is a longer-term disservice here.
Once upon a time, it used to be understood that repeated use of a tool would gradually make you better at it - while starting with the basics, you would gradually explore, try more features and gradually become a power user. Many applications would have a "tip of the day" mechanism that encouraged users to learn more each time. But then this "Don't Make me Think" book and mentality[0] started catching on, and we stopped expecting people to learn about the stuff that they're using daily.
We have a high percentage of "digital natives" kids, now reaching adulthood without knowing what a file is [1] or how to type on a keyboard [2]. Attention spans are falling rapidly, and even the median time in front of a particular screen before switching tasks is apparently down from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 40 seconds in 2023 [3] (I shudder to think what it is now). We as a civilization have been gradually offloading all of our technical competency and agency onto software.
This is of course leading directly to agentic AI, where we (myself included) convince ourselves that the AI is allowing us to work at a higher level, deciding the 'what', while the computer takes care of the 'how' for us, but of course there's no clear delineation between the 'what' and 'how', there's just a ladder of abstraction, and as we offload more and more into software, the only 'what' we'll have left is "keep me fed and entertained".
We are rapidly rolling towards the world of Wall-E, and at this pace, we might live to see the day of AIs asking themselves "can humans think?".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think
[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253526
[2] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/gen-z-typing-computers-keyboar... , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41402434
[3] https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/att...
Re: Free software scares normal people
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.
Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.
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Re: Free software scares normal people
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
And increasingly it doesn't matter because they just live in a browser anyway.
Which also makes it easier than ever for more users to run Linux as a desktop OS :)
Absolutely. I still prefer MacOS/Mac hardware in some ways but running a browser on Linux on a Thinkpad or whatever works pretty well for a lot of purposes.
Re: Free software scares normal people
#228This is a good write-up.
In addition to this issue, I've also had good conversations with a business owner about why he chose a Windows architecture for his company. Paying money to the company created a situation where the company had a "skin-in-the-game" reason to offer support (especially back when he founded the company, because Microsoft was smaller at the time). He likes being able to trust that the people who build the architecture he relies on for his livelihood won't just get bored and wander off and will be responsive to specific concerns about the product, and he never had the perception that he could rely on that with free software.
Re: Free software scares normal people
#229Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…
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Re: Free software scares normal people
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always tell clients (or users): "If you bring your car to the mechanic because it's making a noise and tell them to replace the belt, they will replace the belt and you car will still make the noise. Ask them to fix the noise." In other words, if you need expert help, trust the expert. Ask for what you need, not how to do it.
If you tell the mechanic "my car is making a noise, fix the belt please" and then they just fix the belt, that's on the mechanic as well.
I would hope the mechanic would engage with the customer in more back and forth.
But sometimes power structures don't allow for it. I worked tech support in a number of companies. At some companies we were empowered to investigate and solve problems... sometimes that took work, and work from the customer. It had much better outcomes for the customer, but fixes were not quick. Customers / companies with good technical staff in management understood that dynamic.
Other companies were "just fix it" and tech support were just annoying drones and the company and customer's and management treated tech support as annoying drones. They got a lot more "you got exactly what you asked for" treatment ... because management and even customers will take the self defeating quick and easy path sometimes.