Thread | Brutkey

@calcifer@masto.hackers.town you shouldn’t have to understand how your computer works to make it function, like you shouldn’t have to understand your car to drive it. You should probably understand enough of what’s going on to have a vague idea what’s not working when it throws a warning at you.

in software the two options we have are analogous to “you might have to pop the hood and fiddle with random engine parts to get it to start at any time” or “will start 99% of the time, but you are never allowed to open the hood for any reason” and that fuckin blows

calcifer :nes_fire:
@calcifer@masto.hackers.town

@Athena@chaosfem.tw I do see those extremes, but I also see a lot of stuff in the middle, so I don’t think those are the only choices.

Like, my kids never have to tinker with Ubuntu. Firefox starts up with no issues 99% of the time. LibreOffice Just Works for school work. But you can still open the hood and tinker if that’s your bag. Lots of things are actually like this! And that’s amazing!

calcifer :nes_fire:
@calcifer@masto.hackers.town

@Athena@chaosfem.tw I think where people get caught up a bit is one of two places:

(1) picking something that requires tinkering (intentionally or not), and getting frustrated at how much that involves

(2) choosing to tinker with something and finding out that can of worms is much bigger than you expected

Like my father in law decided his first Linux should be Arch, which even for an IT person was a bit More than what he expected!

Athena
@Athena@chaosfem.tw

@calcifer@masto.hackers.town you’re right that there’s more in the middle than I implied but there are still a lot of areas where the foss options are “requires tinkering” and “this space intentionally left blank”. I love that we have a few high quality options like blender, libreoffice, etc. but there are as many or more areas of endeavor that’s not true - freecad is great for what it is but even the free versions of commercial software blow it out of the water without any effort on stability and usability, I like darktable for photo processing but it’s crashy, has a high learning curve, and is missing a lot of nice tools compared to the adobe option, foss video editors… exist, technically, etc etc

idk. The older I get the more convinced I am that stallman was right when he said "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power.”

we as developers (mostly addressing myself here) need to do better for the people around us. too much have we been complicit or actively involved in exploiting that unjust power