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0 pointsmatheusmoreira1y ago0 comments

> Other then being lazy, which is totally ok.

It's not OK. This collective laziness and convenience is our number one enemy. People don't want to be responsible, they want some corporation to manage everything so they don't have to think about stuff.

We need more people to take responsibility and use Linux and free software and hardware. Owning the computing system means being responsible for it, and we need to get people to accept that responsibility. The less of us there are, the more business and financial sense it makes for them to just straight up ignore us as some irrelevant vocal minority.

We should all own our computers, and there should be so many of us that they have to suck it up because not doing so means they take a big hit to their profits.

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joshstrange1y ago

This is such an incredibly HN take.

What are you seeing in the world that would led you to think the average Joe can use Linux without someone like us supporting them? Maybe not day to day but they are absolutely going to run into pain points like “Netflix is low quality” or “I need to install this windows app for this new gizmo I bought”.

It’s a fantasy world that Linux desktop is good enough for most people, it just is. I love Linux and use it on all my servers but come on.

matheusmoreiraOP1y ago

It doesn't matter if it's "good enough". These are our systems, they're the only things that are truly ours. The alternative is to become serfs in a trillion dollar corporation's digital fiefdom.

My sincere wish is for "average Joes" to stop being so average. I want them to start taking responsibility for their systems so that we can all enjoy the freedom that brings. Freedom to own the computers and do whatever we want with them, not just what the corporations allow us to do.

If they keep choosing the convenient fiefdom, it's going to destroy everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.

_emacsomancer_1y ago

What people aren't generally used to doing is installing OSes. Any OS. Using OSes... Windows 11 is far more complicated, finicky than plenty of Linux installs. (People get caught up in the "you're not holding it right" for Windows/Mac issues.)

umbra071y ago

> Maybe not day to day but they are absolutely going to run into pain points like “Netflix is low quality” or “I need to install this windows app for this new gizmo I bought”.

The average Joe also faces pain points on Windows.

consteval1y ago

It’s not a fantasy, we were there at some point and we deliberately moved from it.

When Unix was the norm, everyday employees knew how to navigate a shell. In highschool I had a friend working at the bank. You know what she did all day? Ran SQL queries to make reports. No degree. She wasn’t a programmer. She was a financial analyst.

Now we have people constructing database systems in an excel workbook on a share drive somewhere, but even that’s fading. Now we have people creating systems in Discord and spending 20 hours a week moving data from point A to point B. Tasks that someone 20 years ago could trivially automate. They don’t know how anymore.

We have lawyers paying 20 paralegals to maintain and consolidate a document shared between 10 parties with 50 revisions floating around. We’ve had version control for decades. They refuse to learn. They would rather spend the enormous amounts of man hours doing what is essentially manual labor.

It’s clear that computers are a huge part of our lives. You can learn to use them or you can burn hours - but you can’t opt out.

I mean, Jesus Christ kids these days don’t know what a directory is. We had a short window of computer literate everyday people and then poof! Gone! But the need for computers is still here. And we can’t quite talk to them and tell them what to do yet.

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