Huh. That’s interesting. Are the MacOS coreutils incapable or not user-friendly in some way? Or is it more that they’re too different for people who know GNU and BSD coreutils?
I also wonder if their coreutils are open source. I quickly tried searching here but couldn’t find an answer https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
Thanks for the response. I’m ignorant in this topic. How is MacOS horrific?
It sounds like you really value skill, precision, and usefulness.
Fair enough. Now that I think about it, maybe the developer experience in Apple products are not universally lauded.
For example, I remembered Pirate Software saying that he didn’t develop for Mac because it was a pain, including having to pay Apple $100 yearly to distribute code without issues. Additionally, I remember my brother meeting a Spotify developer, and the Spotify developer said that Apple makes great hardware but lackluster software.
At the same time, it seems like Swift is not a hated language. The 2023 and 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey reports that, even though few people use Swift (~5% of developers), there’s ~60% of admiration for the language.
Amazing. I should look into that! How did you enable it? I did a quick search and found I just need to do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"; is that it?
I’m sorry for having said something untrue. For example, I saw someone saying that they do have fractional scaling with GNOME on their laptop. I see how it’s untrue to say “fractional scaling is non-existent”.
However, is my experience untrue? Was I lying when I said that my track-pad two-finger scrolling is frustrating? Furthermore, it’s not unusual for people at work to try my track-pad and it being way too sensitive or too un-sensitive, but no in between.
Was I lying when I said that, for me, it’s hard to get software? Was I lying when I said that maybe this is a skill issue on my part, but even that is indicative of a lack of easy ways of getting reassurance in the way that Apple makes it easy to find software in their App Store?
Was I lying when I said that, to me, GNOME is gorgeous?
Was the creator of the Mojo language lying when he recounted his experience developing Swift?
Was I lying when I said that developers are leaving Linux?
I agree that GNOME and KDE are gorgeous and very polished in many ways. However, there are some basic problems at least in GNOME:
Despite these problems, I do have to recognize that GNOME is absolutely gorgeous. It’s precisely the kind of user-centricity that I want to see in Linux.
However, the end-users aren’t the only users. There are also developers! For example, Apple has cared about their developers as customers. I remember listening to the developer of the Mojo language talking with Richard Feldman, and he said that the development of the Swift language made it clear to him that Apple is aggressively user-centric. I don’t doubt that there are many problems with Swift as with Apple products in general, but I don’t see that kind of discourse in Linux, let alone the kinds of positive developer experiences. Heck, key developers are leaving Linux!
Today, it is practically impossible to survive being a significant Linux maintainer or cross-subsystem contributor if you’re not employed to do it by a corporation. An interviewer to the Linux dev that’s mentioned in the article: “So what did you do next to try to convince the Linux kernel devs of the need for more focus on end-users?”
I appears as if Linux is a nest that is not built with a consistent set of user-centric principles. Instead, it seems that each part of the nest is built with a specific corporation or project in mind.
Assuming I’m right that Linux is built with project-based thinking and not product-based thinking, I do wonder what a user-centric Linux or another user-centric FLOSS OS would be like, an OS that is so smoothly built that users come to think of it not as an OS for tech-savvy people, but an obvious alternative that you install immediately after getting a computer.
If Linux is indeed built with project-based thinking, then I wonder why that is. The uncharitable explanation is that someone doesn’t want Linux to have a MacOS-like smooth and gorgeous experience. If you don’t think MacOS is smooth and gorgeous, I’ll address that.
I know some people have suffered immensely with Apple products not only because Apple builds devices that can’t be repaired, but because of things simply not working. However, there are many people who love Apple. That’s the kind of passionate advocacy that I would love to see in Linux, and not just around freedom and value-based judgements. I want Linux to be thought of as the least-friction tool for professional or recreational use. I want people to think of Linux as gorgeous and usable.
Of course, we can apply Hanlon’s razor to this situation (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [ignorance or lack of skill or practice].”). Managing a product is difficult. Managing a community is difficult. When the nest’s design is not built by a team constantly seeking to care about users, but instead by a bunch of users pecking into the nest until their corner is shaped the way they want, it’s not surprising to see a lack of user-centricity.
Does it feel as if they clarify the kind of life you want to live or that they’re forcing you to avoid them?
This is a great point! Humans can put names on things that aren’t there, such as holes!
This ‘naming of hole-like concepts’ may sound trivial, but there have been entire cultures that didn’t have ‘hole-like’ concepts and this stunted their ability to make certain discoveries. For example, the ancient Greeks could not have developed calculus; they did not have a concept of zero that they could use for mathematical manipulation. This shows an unfortunate reality: you can’t mentally manipulate ideas that you don’t have.
However, once you do have those ideas, they may seem obvious. This is a well documented human bias: the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something, it is very difficult to imagine not knowing that. For us, knowers of pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms, it may seem absurd to not have names for pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms. We take them for granted, when in reality it was not an easy road to arrive at them.
Your comment sent me on a quick exploration. I was not sure how strong the connection between depression and poverty was.
Here’s what I thought before checking the evidence: on the one hand, poverty is associated with constant stress of all kinds, from material considerations to social stigma. On the other hand, wealthier people and societies lose their vertical social capital, which on its own could lead to loneliness. Additionally, wealthier people and societies can undergo radical changes of any kind (changes that are arguably more drastic than changes that poor people and societies undergo, simply because of the expansion of capabilities associated with wealth), and that could lead to the anomie that Émile Durkheim described in the 19th century.
Turns out, inequality is shit for mental health https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5775138/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9140340/#%3A~%3Atext=Depression+prevalence%2Cthese+associations.&text=In+comparison%2Ctimes%2C+respectively.&text=About+35%25%2Clow-PIR+have
I see many down-votes. I assume these are the positions people are having (please correct me if I’m wrong or mischaracterizing):
While looking for the middle ground or a compromise can be seen as absurd, the evidence seems to support parts of both of these stances. For example, moderate punishment has been shown to reduce crime much more than harsh crime.
A simple example is how many countries around the world no longer execute people in public as a form of punishment. For the vast majority of those countries, violent crime has been reduced drastically. In the light of these two facts (less executions and less violent crime), is it really tenable to argue that “harsher punishments result in less crime”? So, what is actually causing crime to be deterred?
Some people have thought long and hard about this problem, and we now have the evidence to understand what drives crime down. Here’s one such person and their summary of their findings: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence” (https://igarape.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Homicide-Dispatch_1_EN.pdf)
I know lethal violence is different to non-violent crime, such as wage theft. However, imagine a CEO making the decision to steal wages. Where is he located? Who, if anyone, surrounds him? What is his demeanor? Now imagine a society with “an effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons”. What kinds of institutions would this society have? How would you feel walking in the streets or laboring in this society? Now, think about the CEO and the society at the same time. Are those two compatible? Would that criminal CEO really go home free in a society with those characteristics?
I assume there is an impulse to say that capitalism leads to classes of people who are treated fundamentally differently. Indeed, there is clear evidence that capitalism can lead to persistent inequalities (e.g. Piketty, Shaikh), which can enable extractive political institutions. Money can buy political privileges. However, capitalism is not the only force that shapes the world. Democracy is also incredibly powerful. They are two different vectors, two different carts pulling societies around the world in different directions. Without democracy as a counterweight, we wouldn’t have the kinds of protections, rights, and guarantees that so many of us have. Are we ready to deny the legacy of democracy by insisting that we cannot remotely bring justice to wealthy criminals? Are we ready to deny the democratic values that so many of us have today? Are we ready to deny the effect that collective action for democracy has had in our institutions?
This looks impressive for Linux, and I’m glad FLOSS has such an impact! However, I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers. Maybe not. Or maybe yes! We’d have to see the evidence.
I wonder if progressive/conservative is what the charts are getting at. Heck, I wonder if we could even put it in terms of Welzel’s Democratic/protection values.
Huh… maybe my perception of Aristotle is a caricature. I don’t know why I thought of him as living in very rudimentary spaces and wearing basic clothing. This painting suggests otherwise. I wonder to what extent it is historically accurate.
There’s also some thinkers who say that thinking only ever happens through language, so talking could be more of a mapping of “thinking words” onto “communication words”.
Yes! Rhetoric, the study of the available means of persuasion! Lots of professions still do that today: speech writers, advertisement creators, academic rhetoricians, some linguists, some anthropologists or sociologists, some historians…
I agree with you: the FSF can seem unwavering in their stance, even in the face of practicality. I’m really sorry for this incredibly nit-picky detail, but I think practicality is ideological too. For better or for worse, we can’t escape ideas or be free from them, so we have to choose which we value. For example, while I tend to choose software freedom over practicality, I also have, at times, chosen practicality over freedom.
It depends on the author! Authors create symbolic universes and they get to choose the rules of those universes. You can read Robert McKee’s work for more on this.
Europe isn’t a brand, it’s a life/style.