MudMan

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

No, hey, let me be clear, I don’t think you’re actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.

What I do say is that the notion that “it’s not free, it all comes from taxes” is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn’t the same as paying for a service, and public services aren’t “services you pay with your taxes”, they’re… well, public services.

And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it’s a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you’re definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that’s not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that’s not the same thing.

So hey, I get it, you don’t ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you’re still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You’re right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you’re willing to explore.

Yeah, for sure. I’m just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.

If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn’t root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling “obligated” to pay, they either won’t pay anyway or won’t use the software. That’s not a viable option.

So you’re left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is “broken” or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is… well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that’s where the effort should go.

It’s not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn’t to you) was triggered by the notion that we “need to normalize paying for foss”. I don’t think that’s true, and I do think it’d lead to generating a “tipping system”. Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.

I’m also not fond of “we live in a system” as an argument for playing by the system’s rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that’s what the “system” is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn’t mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.

We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can’t rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn’t be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.

No, it’s not, and it’s not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.

This is not a case of “no one”, anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it’s not just “a coffee”, plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It’s the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can’t do it any other way (or hey, maybe it’s already funded by corporate money, that’s also a thing). But no, you’re not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it’s publicly available. That’s some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it’s coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don’t contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don’t know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it’s owed not so much.

So much. Yes. How do we all agree on this and yet it hasn’t sunk in after twenty five years?

I mean, Blender got it. Be like Blender.

Gimp never even needed to be as robust as Photoshop. All anybody needs is a OSS alternative to casually touch up a photo every now and then if you aren’t forced by life to be one of Adobe’s hostages. Just give me a vaguely Photoshop-like thing with a semi-competent context aware filter that isn’t physically painful to use. Kryta and others will pick up the slack for all the painting stuff.

I’d agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I’m a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it’s very directly in their way.

Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn’t use to work to work better.

A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.

To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn’t try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal…

I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I’m saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I’m trying to provide a perspective on those.

I am always amused by how “Linux newbie” guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at “well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help”.

Look, I’m not particularly new to Linux, but also don’t daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I’ve ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they’re trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.

Who in the world celebrated that?

Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but… nobody did that.

The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.

Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it’s Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don’t begrudge people finding communities wherever. It’s just… you know, come on.

I mean, at the risk of being obvious, take your contract to a lawyer or two and ask them.

But it is, is the point.

Like, here it is.

Whatsapp (and Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Line… whatever is your local poison) have absorbed texting entirely. Whatsapp drives all texting, a significant chunk of voice calls, a lot of non-work videoconferencing and it serves as a Discord-like group chat platform for a lot of people. That’s how your grandma got radicalized over here, not Facebook proper.

Again, social media is more regional than people think, and it often doesn’t look like Twitter, Instagram or even Facebook.

But you and I don’t seem to be in the same society.

This is a heavily regional issue, which is my entire point. There is no iMessage alternative, we aren’t in a WeChat area, or a Telegram area. Here it’s overwhelmingly Whatsapp.

This is not the same everywhere. Social media is global, but the mix of it is far from universal.

I’m still a weirdo, but I can’t afford to be a weirdo performatively these days.

So yeah, I can default to Firefox or keep the MS tools I have to use for work on its own contained browser instance, or refuse to use Samsung or Apple phones or whatever other act of technological petty rebellion that I want. But the point I’m making is that cutting the cord on Whatsapp is not practical for daily use in this region. It’s very different in the US and in some other territories, but here it’s definitely not.

It’s far easier to step away from Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook than it is to do the same with Whatsapp here. That’s the big takeaway that I want to convey here.

Oh, it’s my choice to approach every potential client with a long-winded pitch about why I’m off the grid and don’t believe in telephones.

It’s just terrible for business, and since I do like to consume food to keep this sack of meat running, I don’t do that.

Look, there are two things happening here:

One, you don’t seem to get to what extent Meta has entirely replaced key parts of the communications infrastructure in several parts of the world. You may as well be advocating communication via carrier pigeon.

Two, you get a kick out of being the difficult contrarian weirdo that refuses to submit to the mainstream of modern tech because you work for some boss that thinks it’s worth getting your skills despite that song and dance, so there is no immediate downside. I know. Been there, done that. When you freelance you get way less precious about that, by necessity.

And yes, by the way, I do keep separate hardware and software environments to isolate some predatory applications to work hardware. That is viable. Just… not for Whatsapp. Because EVERYBODY uses it and I like my friends and family to keep talking to me, too.

My employer is me.

I’m doing what my clients tell me, because it’s generally considered to be a good business practice to not argue with one’s clients unless you have a good reason to do so.

Me neither :)

Of course there are more than two countries in the world, so it’s entirely possible to have different pricing structures anyway.