

But don’t listen to me, let Stallman make the case:


Me: Really?







1. Buy computer.
2. Use computer. have the right idea.




@jeffalyanak @freakazoid @aral The desktop experience on Linux is really quite fantastic at this stage (at least it is on KDE, & probably Gnome too). I can't imagine that's a barrier for folks either.

I suspect the reasons for not switching are different for different types of user. For most people, technical & non-technical alike, however, I imagine people are very accustomed to what they have. They probably often think, "why change?"

@freakazoid @aral
I do think it varies between desktop environments, but I haven't experienced one that works out-of-the-box for general use as the Windows or Mac environments, but I generally gravitate towards desktop environments that are highly customizable.

I think you hit the nail on the head, though. The operating systems that people use already work for them. The "why change?" question is hard to overcome.

@jeffalyanak @michelamarie @freakazoid @aral but it's Steve Jobs and his obsession with hiding how things work has given birth to surveillance capitalism. Don't follow his ideas. They created the class of "normal" users you see today.

If the same ideas were put to cooking we'd only have microwave dinners: which are notoriously unhealthy.

Teach people to install their choice of OS. Make it as easy as installing a browser.

@qwazix @jeffalyanak @freakazoid @aral Honestly, I don't think we can give Jobs credit for creating a class of users, as you say. I'm quite convinced it's more that Apple developed products that gave everyday users what they needed or wanted, rather than the other way around.

@michelamarie I beg to differ. Phones had removable batteries. Then the iPhone came. The same with laptops. Jobs waged a war against user freedom and won. And now users demand that level of non-involvement. Design choices are political: european cars never lost the stick. American cars did. The same with the yearly updates. Printer inks. Messengers. Decisons of companies shape the market and (de)educate users. @jeffalyanak @freakazoid @aral

@michelamarie everybody is familiar with (federated) email, it seems simple. However every time I tried to explain the fediverse nobody listens after the words "different servers" and dismisses it as too technical. Why? Because people aren't at any given point, they are trained by their peers. @jeffalyanak @freakazoid @aral


@michelamarie @aral @jeffalyanak @qwazix The experience on Linux is not great if one needs an application that doesn't have a decent open source version or isn't packaged for their distro. AppImages are pretty Mac-like, but that's one of dozens of ways packages are distributed on Linux, versus a couple each on Windows and Mac.

I think there's no question Jobs was fulfilling a market desire. But I don't think his approach to ease-of-use was the only one possible, and I think it was on net harmful.

@qwazix @jeffalyanak @aral @michelamarie I think personal computing devices should be self-teaching rather than intuitive, which can only go so far. And not through a separate "new user experience", but by having the whole user experience be a gradual ramp to advanced use. Jobs and Wozniak could have done this easily, especially if they'd paid more attention to Alan Kay.

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