We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#241

Post by magduf » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #123

magduf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you. If you're working with embedded Linux, Visual Studio isn't going to be much help for debugging on a target. >Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. LaTeX does some things much better than Word, and Illustrator is very expensive. >GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what…

Many proprietary programs also get used because they are good enough. Not everyone wants to do a simple thing using some UI that has grown into a Boeing 747 cockpit. Some Windows users use neither GIMP nor Photoshop to crop an image, but rather MS Paint, which is comes with the OS, so it is "no additional cost", and requires next to no training to use. MS Paint has vastly diminished functionality compared to either G…

Maybe cropping wasn't the best example for me to use, but there are many people who want to do more advanced photo editing than that (which is beyond the capabilities of MS Paint), but do not want to pay $$$ for Photoshop. Those people frequently use GIMP, simply because it's free and it works well enough.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#242

Post by Crinus » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #239

Crinus wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it wasn't really a conspiracy but that most distro developers do not give a rats ass about good desktop experience, thus they simply package whatever those who do work on desktop stuff and get done with it. "Those who work on desktop stuff" are basically Canonical and Red Hat and both of them decided, for various reasons to stick with GNOME, partly because GNOME at some point (2.x days) was a good en…

>After all, those who do the work are those who decide how that work will look like. Anyone else, regardless of them being right, wrong, having better or worse opinion on that work, is irrelevant. Yes, but it's not just GNOME who does such work. KDE has been around even longer than Gnome, and has a very different philosophy for their DE (one which, IMO, is much more aligned with the hacker philosophy of being able to…

KDE is nice and all and certainly better than GNOME from a UX perspective (at least according to my preferences) but it always suffered from Qt:

1. Initially Qt1's license made a lot of developers to shun it (if that was warranted or not is a matter of opinion, but that is what happened).

2. Being written in C++ makes it very hard to not break ABI and Qt broke it several times - either because of itself or because of C++ libraries.

3. C++ also makes it harder to interface with other languages, meaning that for most languages interfaces either do not exist or they do but are of inferior quality. In comparison Gtk+'s gobject was designed to be easy to interface with.

4. Even if you buy into C++, for a long time you had to wrap your build system around Qt with moc and all.

5. Qt was always controlled by a 3rd party company whose interests did not align with KDE's: Trolltech/TQTC wants to provide middleware to developers for developing desktop applications, KDE uses it to provide a platform API. These two overlap a bit, but they also are incompatible in other areas (such as API/ABI stability).

Some of these (e.g. license, moc) are not valid any more, but others (TQTC goals) are and even without them, GNOME has already a lot of inertia.

> Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce.

These desktop environments rely on technology developed primarily for GNOME by GNOME and/or RedHat (and to a lesser extent Canonical) developers, like Gtk+, Clutter, etc.

The original post was about why everyone uses GNOME if other environments are available: if there is anything that my answer implies is that if you rely on GNOME tech and/or tech made primarily with GNOME in mind (even under the disguise of a neutral tech) then GNOME will be where things will work better and first show up.

The only neutral tech that there is on desktop is X11/Xorg and of course the GNOME people want to tear that down and replace it with their own tech.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#243

Post by wrs » Thu, May 09, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #157

wrs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived through the entire history of free software (well, Free Software with capital letters, anyway) it always comes back to this: Software freedom is fundamentally valuable only for developers, because only developers can use the freedom it gives. (That's pretty much the definition of "developer"—someone who can modify software.) Users get value only as a side effect of this developer freedom, because a devel…

> Software freedom is fundamentally valuable only for developers, because only developers can use the freedom it gives. That is akin to saying that democracy is fundamentally valuable only for politicians, because only politicians can use the freedom it gives. That is simply completely wrong. You don't have to be a developer yourself in order to benefit from not being dependent on a monopoly. The fact that you can bu…

I said fundamentally for a reason. All of those things are of course user benefits, but they are indirect side effects. Users get none of those benefits without enlisting a developer to take advantage of them. So the most powerful evolutionary pressure is to make free software that is valuable for developers. The closer it gets to a “pure” user problem, the less incentive there is for developers to work on it, and the worse it gets. (As a general rule.)

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#244

Post by price » Thu, May 09, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #196

api wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3 The difference is usually more like "software A requires an hour of setup and constant maintenance on a dedicated VM or container due to dozens of dependencies, and software B requires 3 clicks"

And also the difference between "the code is inelegant and sucks and I'll remove it, damn the users" and "the code may be ugly but the feature users want is ugly so let's do it". Case in point, I recently upgraded the computer of a non-technical person from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04. And now desktop icons are completely broken. It's been reimplemented in JS, with horrible performance, and doesn't even support features li…

Stuff gets removed from proprietary software all the damn time. To pick a notorious example: have you tried to use Google Reader lately? :-P Others I've personally noticed in the last couple of years include features of Dropbox; of Gmail; of Facebook; of Google Search; and various startups acquired and shut down -- including a mobile app with no backend of its own.

When stuff gets removed or shut down, the basic reason is that it takes work to keep it going, and someone decides to stop allocating any work to that. Even with client-side software with no service to run (like that mobile app), the platforms they run on change, and it takes work to keep up.

And that's exactly what I see in that GNOME issue you link to. There's a bunch of technical detail about why it's so much work -- but the point they're making is it's been a lot of work to keep that feature going the way it was, and it'd be even more work to continue doing so as the rest of the software on the desktop changes around it in the ways that are planned. And so they decide to drop the existing thing and build a new one in a much easier way.

The only difference from proprietary software is that everyone has the option to step in and say, no, I'm going to go pick up that work, and everyone's welcome to use my version instead. In fact, GNOME makes a great example, because there have been a bunch of popular projects precisely about doing that with previous decisions they've made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(software) is one of the bigger ones.

If people had that option with Google Reader, it'd be alive today. (I'm told it was a very small amount of work to keep running, and when the ax fell on it many Googlers pleaded to be allowed to just keep it running on their own time.) Ditto for many of the other proprietary things I've missed after they went away.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#245

Post by Drdrdrq » Thu, May 09, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

Crinus wrote: post #231

zanny wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many popular programs are now seeing continuous paid development by patronage including Godot, Krita, Blender, GIMP, and OBS. It is unsettling that they all get this success on a proprietary middle man that siphons a portion of the money in the form of Patreon, but the principle is absolutely applicable to development in general. Right now its regular people paying to have software they want to use developed - game e…

> Many popular programs are now seeing continuous paid development by patronage including Godot, Krita, Blender, GIMP, and OBS. Godot=$10k/month (patreon) Krita=$2k/month (their donation page) Blender=€31k/month (their fund page) GIMP=individual donations only for two developers, $1k/month and $595/month each OBS=$3.5k/month from opencollective, $1.5k/month for the lead developer for patreon Now, i do not know what s…

True. It's funny when those who rave against the licenses that might actually help change these problems, also publish their donations' summaries. Funny in a sad way, that is.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#246

Post by groby_b » Thu, May 09, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #213

groby_b wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument is not holding any water. First, free software doesn't improve "because developers use it". It improves because developers work on it. Blaming the users for that problem is not helping at all, except with a vague sense of moral superiority. Second, people use tools (e.g. software) to achieve things. "Making the engine of free software run" is not on that list of things for the vast majority of people, s…

If you take care of your own interests in a more thoughtful way than "I want what works best and I want it now", Free Software looks much better. Short-term pragmatism can shoot you in the foot long-term. Lock-in and control are very real things.

And long-term zealotry can shoot you in the foot long-term, too.

There are trade-offs. OSS can shift trade-offs on some of the axes, but that's about a cultural change.

It means giving up on the ludicrous idea that GitHub is bad because it "runs proprietary JavaScript executed in our browsers". It means realizing that "writing code" is a tiny part of creating a useful product. It means giving up on the disdain for all things non-engineering. It means welcoming people into the community who "just" want to write documentation, or work on UX, or any number of other things. It means letting go of overblown rhetoric like "we're the resistance now".

Above all, it's about realizing that it's not about "choosing a fight", but creating a better community.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#247

Post by ahartmetz » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #246

ahartmetz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take care of your own interests in a more thoughtful way than "I want what works best and I want it now", Free Software looks much better. Short-term pragmatism can shoot you in the foot long-term. Lock-in and control are very real things.

And long-term zealotry can shoot you in the foot long-term, too. There are trade-offs. OSS can shift trade-offs on some of the axes, but that's about a cultural change. It means giving up on the ludicrous idea that GitHub is bad because it "runs proprietary JavaScript executed in our browsers". It means realizing that "writing code" is a tiny part of creating a useful product. It means giving up on the disdain for al…

You are really making a lot of negative assumptions here. I happen to work (a little, I used to do more) on a F/OSS project that is all about user interface, and when I have no good idea for a UI, I ask an expert. Disdain for UX?? Please. Maybe you're thinking of that guy, I forget his name, that came up with git. He's very pragmatic about licensing, you'd like him.

(I actually think Linus is a positive figure overall, I just really can't stand git's UI)

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#248

Post by cpach » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #232

cpach wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRCCloud is really neat. Great UI IMHO. However, I must admit I’m too cheap to pay $50 USD/year for something that I use even less than once a month. So I go with irssi+screen instead.

In that case you may want to try quassel + quassel-webserver + quasseldroid, which gets you something very close to IRCCloud, entirely selfhosted

Cool. Looks really useful!

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#249

Post by ghostly_s » Thu, May 09, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #35

coldpie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by a wide margin the biggest problem is that IRC doesn't have any offline features. In a world where people swap devices all the time, it really sucks to have to drop your connection on every device change, and lose any chat that occurred while you were offline and be unreachable while you're offline.

Maybe IRC should have a standard way to send an email to a user wherein the irc client knows the users email but don't reveal the users email. It could also use its intermediary status to filter obvious spam, individual channels/users could also set policy as to who is allowed to mail users for example registered accounts only.

Well that sounds like a feature I would absolutely hate and never enable. Offline messages need to live in the same place as online messages.

Re: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible

#250

Post by ghostly_s » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

nevrthepfhor wrote: post #137

People choose proprietary software because proprietary software doesn't make you memorize and type things like "systemctl suspend" for the most basic of tasks such as putting your computer to sleep. They don't want to find, audit, install, and evaluate dozens of obscure third-party extensions to make their OS usable. They want options for setting their background image besides Fit to screen. And they want to be able…

This is just....such a bizarre example. What Linux desktop environment are you using that provides no more user-friendly method to sleep the system than the `systemctl` command? Or are you suggesting command-line-only installs should have a better interface for this? What would the precedent be for that use-case?