Comment by agoodusername63
11 hours ago
It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users.
There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.
> There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
It's often beyond just sacrificing "any sort of convenience" - but rather "it's effectively impossible for someone who's not at least a compentent IT hobbyist to install this software".
> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.
You need to change the culture in free/open software. The current goal seems to be something like "as long as it works, and I can install it --no matter how convoluted or unreliable that process is-- then that's good enough". Mainstream users don't want to use the shell, or have to search internet forums for solutions, or use Docker, or whatever.
If you genuinely want FOSS to win, the goal should be to be better than the commercial alternatives: easier to install, more reliable, better more intuitive UIs, smaller, faster, more features, whatever.
It isn't like it shouldn't be easier on Linux either as it already is much of the time. I can open up my command line and type "yay ProgramName" and hit enter a couple times to install most things. Its even easier on a distro that uses a store for distributing applications. But as soon as you get away from that curated selection the process becomes so much more difficult very quickly. Users will give up if it is more complicated than downloading an executable and clicking on it.
It should be easy to make FOSS Web apps especially ones that favour front end (and hence web standards) for most of what they do. Someone does need to be the server though so you end up with a bit of cloud.
I think another problem is marketing. The SaaS can afford to advertise. The free libre app has to be discovered.
> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.
Better education, which is definitely not the current trend.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink
Yeah we can Properly Educate non techies all day, but when they sit down to watch Netflix and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors, I’ve yet to get a single person to care after that.
> and have to deal with low quality video because their FOSS tech stack doesn’t pass the DRM sniff test with flying colors
They shouldn't have to if the software is properly made. I am not talking about teaching normies to install Docker apps, but teaching them why FOSS is important and the implications of using corporate-owned tools.
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I'm not sure users such as myself using non free stuff, Apple in my case, are a problem. We do our thing, people wanting to use Linux do theirs, no real problem.
Freedom lost not because it was taken, but because most people didn't care to keep it.