← Back to context

Comment by nebula8804

16 hours ago

Its a lost battle not a lost war. You have to adapt for the circumstances of the time. Today that seems to be using a device that is closed but gapped only to get the essentials done(government services, banking etc.)

For everything else continue to use and improve the open offerings.

In the meantime, keep fighting and supporting organizations to get laws pushed to ensure open devices can access essential services. (Administrations change, whats dire now may be hope tomorrow).

I've come to realize that a lot of closed digital services are just fluff and not needed. So I try to accept that I dont need them. Its a journey.

27 comments

nebula8804

Reply
amlib  14 hours ago

This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything.

Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

  • baq  9 hours ago

    Desktop is still useful, but it doesn’t matter. Everything important to non-techies outside of work life is happening on the smartphone, which has had hardware attestation since forever.

    • gsf_emergency_4  9 hours ago

      Those are vital points! Mobile is the battleground. No company now or ever working on classical hardware attestation will understand cryptographic engineering at a basic level..

      Thus FOSS has plenty of time (decades to centuries) to learn from for-profit tech's mistakes

      5 replies →

  • setopt  5 hours ago

    I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on.

    I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.

    • robinsonb5  5 hours ago

      For me, Ubuntu / Gnome 2 came so close to being something tech-savvy people could recommend to non-technical friends and relatives at a time when people who were happy enough with WinXP and Win7 were being corralled into dealing with the Win8 carcrash. And instead of closing that final gap it went scampering off into the far distance again, never to recover.

    • jezek2  5 hours ago

      That's normal in Linux. It's always about to get really good then everything is made crappy again, then slowly improving to get good but then the cycle repeats. I've lived through several of such cycles, it has slowed down Linux adoption a lot.

  • matheusmoreira  14 hours ago

    Agreed. It's all about leverage. Without huge numbers of users, we have no leverage. Corporations can afford to just drop us because of our software preferences. That would not be the case if there were more of us.

Gigachad  14 hours ago

Multiple devices is the answer. Otherwise you end up with people having their banking hacked because they installed a game mod.

  • Viliam1234  1 hour ago

    I am not an expert, but I think this could be improved if the smartphone operating systems had better security models.

    For example, an application needs "access to your disk storage", because it needs e.g. to save photos. Okay, let's give it access to its own directory. Or maybe to a subdirectory of "my pictures". But it doesn't need the access to the entire disk, right? Yet in Android, it is all or nothing.

    Perhaps with better system, we wouldn't have to ban installing game mods, only to make sure that those game mods do not have unreasonable access rights. Or maybe the banking operation could state "I can only be installed when no other app has an access to my private data" or something like that.

  • Zak  13 hours ago

    This leads to a massive transfer of power from end users to corporations and governments. User-owned computers and the open web limit the ability of such institutions to place demands on users. Is that worth a slight reduction in the rate of bank fraud?