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Free software scares normal people

danieldelaney.net

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#601

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

scott_w wrote: post #470
nradov wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours. The developers sit in isolated siloes rather than going out and directly engaging with business units. This is mostly a management problem but there are plenty of individual developers who wait to be told what to do rather than actively seeking out better solutions for business problems.

> In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours. I disagree: it's a business prioritisation issue (not necessarily a problem). Ultimately, a lot of the processes are there because the wider business (rightly) wants IT to work on the highest impact issues. A random process that 3 people suffer from probably isn't the highest impact for the business as a whole. Also, because i…

Yes, but often the "business priorities" get so screwed up that people's needs go unmet, and the business ends up wasting money as a result.

My best example was a conversation I had with one of the scientists at my job when she mentioned that she had people spending hours every day generating reports from data our instruments produced. I pointed out that with the code we had it would be simple to generate the reports automatically.

Her response that she had asked repeatedly for a developer to be assigned to the task, but she kept being pushed away because it was low priority.

I couldn't just change the codebase on my own (it was for a medical device), but it was easy enough to spend a lazy afternoon writing a tool to consume the output logs from the device and generate the reports that she needed. That's it: about 4 hours of work and produced something this person had asked for a year prior, and that people were already spending hours each day doing!

The people in charge of vetting requests never even bothered to ask a developer to estimate the task. They just heard that there was a work around, so it immediately became "low priority."

Re: Free software scares normal people

#602

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #401
marcus_holmes wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met the occasional person like this, sure. But only ever in really large organisations where they can hide, and only a minority. The huge majority of devs want to understand the business and develop high quality software for it. In one business I worked for, the devs knew more about the actual working of the business than most of the non-IT staff. One of the devs I worked with was routinely pulled into high-le…

The mistake is in trying to understand the business case. There is nothing to understand! The business case is the aggregate of what people actually do. There is no proper procedure that's actually followed at the ground level. Workflows are emergent and in constant flux. In this environment, the role of a dev should not be to build internal products, but to deliver internal hacks and ad-hoc solutios, maintain them,…

An hour is a stretch, but otherwise, yeah.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#603

Post by GTP »

listenallyall wrote: post #576
GTP wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shutting it down due to a technicality about not following a procedure != shutting it down because it is an unmaintainable mess, while also tasking IT with implementing the same core idea, but in a proper way.

Lol, define "proper". If they were so knowledgeable, why hadn't they implemented something before the intern arrived?

There can be many reasons, e.g. management giving them other tasks.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#604

Post by GTP »

amelius wrote: post #568
GTP wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm not familiar with their office suite, but I bet that, if I open their word processor, I will still find a ton of features that I will never use.

The question is more if they left out features because they were deemed too difficult for the average user.

In the context of this blog post, yes. But in the broader context of the quote, a word processor having a ton of features shows that you don't really get away with only implementing 20% of the functionalities.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#605

Post by tombert »

fn-mote wrote: post #597
tombert wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run a modern distro with a modern filesystem, you can at the very least have automatic snapshots that actually work, and you can restore to a previous state if an update breaks things. The same cannot be said for Windows.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I would not give anybody good odds of booting from a snapshot on Ubuntu/ZFS. I would expect that booting from an older kernel would work, possibly in recovery mode.

I have booted from snapshots on Ubuntu with ZFS plenty of times and it has worked fine. I've also used Snapper with btrfs and restored from backup and it's worked fine. I've also booted from snapshots in NixOS and it has worked fine. I actually cannot think of a time where any of those examples didn't work fine.

Windows system restore has never worked for me.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#606

Post by bccdee »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #401
marcus_holmes wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met the occasional person like this, sure. But only ever in really large organisations where they can hide, and only a minority. The huge majority of devs want to understand the business and develop high quality software for it. In one business I worked for, the devs knew more about the actual working of the business than most of the non-IT staff. One of the devs I worked with was routinely pulled into high-le…

The mistake is in trying to understand the business case. There is nothing to understand! The business case is the aggregate of what people actually do. There is no proper procedure that's actually followed at the ground level. Workflows are emergent and in constant flux. In this environment, the role of a dev should not be to build internal products, but to deliver internal hacks and ad-hoc solutios, maintain them,…

The thing about that is that you can only ever YOLO the superficial layers of your architecture, and only ever in certain ways. Having a YOLOable system requires deliberate and considered architectural choices deeper down.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#607

Post by jcelerier »

fn-mote wrote: post #598
jcelerier wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG But then you have to remember the names of 200 distinct software that all do this one thing, so you make a meta-software to manage and organize them, and you're back to square one only with more indirection

LLM's exist now. Google could do this years ago. It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it, but you'll find the solution quickly because many other people also experience the problem.

> It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it,

as you say, it is a problem, and for many people an unacceptable tradeoff

Re: Free software scares normal people

#608

Post by devilbunny »

cestith wrote: post #572
devilbunny wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a coder, so I'm not going to pretend that this solution is easy to implement (it might be, but I wouldn't assume so), but how about allowing you to expose the "expert" options just temporarily (to find the tool you need) and then allow adding that to your new "novice plus" custom menus? I.e., if you use a menu option from the expert menu X number of times, it just shows up even though your default is the novi…

That’s harder than static menus, but it’s not really anything harder once you have customizable hot list menus.

It seemed that way to me but I have done enough work with computers (I am on HN, after all) to know that things people in general think should be easy often are not, and things they think are hard may be simple. Thanks.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#609

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #540
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design f…

There isn't any.

That's my point.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#610

Post by cosmic_cheese »

pessimizer wrote: post #560
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability. It's…

No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system), nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I a…

It's not necessary to chase, just copy what Windows users have largely agreed to be good and stick to that.

So for example, a hypothetical Windows DE could offer XP, 7, and 10 modes which the user can freely switch between which would never change. This delivers on two fronts: first, it presents a familiar, comfortable UI for the user, and second, it offers a promise that most of the popular Linux desktops do not which is that significant changes will not occur, even over long time scales.

I disagree on LLMs/terminal use. Too many things can go wrong in too many different ways for LLMs to be of much use to users for troubleshooting in many cases, and there's also the issue of the user even knowing what to ask for in the first place (even many moderately technical users aren't going to have the foggiest clue what a Debian package, MATE, HEAD, or upstream are).

The system really just needs to be engineered to 1) be extremely robust and not break in the first place 2) when it does break, have the ability to silently self-heal 99% of the time. A non-essential but excellent bonus would be 3) to be able to express what's wrong and what needs to be done to the user in that last 1%. This won't be easy to accomplish, but the first distro that does will be richly rewarded with user loyalty.

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