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This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond. All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft. I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways.…
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...
Dennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002. https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and jus…
