Comment by state_less
4 months ago
Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games, but I ran it anyway. What others call showstoppers are for me inconveniences.
I have a motorolla edge 2024 that I'll load whatever open source phone OS will work well enough to place calls and browse the web. I'll keep another phone for the rare times some corporate/government overlord requires it. Many folks who refuse to use smartphones, similarly own a smartphone they rarely use for systems that require them.
My recommendation is to put as little time and energy into closed, locked down platforms as you can. Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.
Technology has a ratchet effect at scale - as a solution becomes widely adopted, it switches from being a convenience to being a necessity, because people start building more stuff on top of it. It's as true of to-the-minute accurate clocks as it is of smartphone banking.
You can still run a version of Word from 2004. It's fine, if all you need is to write some thoughts down for yourself. But the moment you need to collaborate with other people via a Word document, you'll find it difficult without the modern version with all its user-hostile aspects - and more importantly, other people will find you difficult to work with.
Same applies to other software, web and smartphones, and to everything else in life - the further you deviate from the mainstream, the costlier it is for you. Deviate too much, and you just become a social outcast.
Social Outcast here... It's pretty good.
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Word from 2004 works better than the office 365 version.
I've used it in the last three years to automate document generation in an enterprise because the latest versions of word:
1). Randomly break during automatic updates you can't really turn off.
2). Automatically upload everything to the cloud even when you tell them no.
This isn't the 90s when closed software was better. We are firmly in the enshitification stage of windows and office. Open source is better and is the only sane choice for enterprise.
Those are not words I thought I'd ever write in 2005 or 2015, but here we are.
Office 365 failed utterly today....
And we must let someone or some crowd dictate what our basic needs are. That crowd is part of our world. If we stick to our bows and arrows they come with canons and horses. Argh!
That worked fine before agricultural revolution. Since then, if you stick to your bows and arrows, you get sidelined and lose access to benefits of society and civilization.
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Which is why we need to ban together. Libreoffice isn't dominate, but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored. Also if you are using it you are not alone - you are an annoying deviation, but there are enough of you that many cannot ignore you. The more people who also use libreoffice the more power we have. If we can get to just 5% market share we cannot be ignored. (it need not be libreoffice, there are other choices that support that file format well enough which is what we care about.)
LibreOffice's best guess is that they had 200M MAUs in 2019.
I personally find that hard to believe and they don't explain their methodology to arrive at that number (presumably they looked at the downloads and picked a number of users based on feelings).
But, if that number is true, then I suppose you're not only right, but LibreOffice is already near 5% market share.
>but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored.
This is the Hacker News bubble in action. Most of the world, most of America, most of China, India, etc. haven't even heard of it. They ignore it and they thrive. Maybe you need to pay attention if you're dealing with certain European governments these days - I'm not sure because I completely ignore it and haven't paid attention since there was just OpenOffice and LibreOffice didn't even exist yet.
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> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.
Of course. I can make a choice. When the choice is between being able to login to secure services with my SIM embedded e-signature, use mobile banking and conduct official business and not being able to do any of these things, making choices are easy.
Running Linux on desktop is easy mode when compared to phones, and yes, I started using Linux on desktop in 1999 too with SuSE 6.0. Phones are way more interconnected and central to our lives now when compared to a general purpose computer running your $FAVORITE_OS.
I booted Slackware from a pile of floppies back then. I thought the Germans had a pretty good offering with SuSE at the time.
Look I get it, even back then, most folks felt Windows was the obvious choice (and still do) for their jobs and so on. Sometimes you have to make do with with the unappealing choice in front of you.
For a little more context, my cracked screen iPhone can still do banking or whatever, but I chose not to pony up $800-$1200 for a new iPhone and bought the cheaper $350 Motorolla. It works for me and I think I'm not entirely alone. There are probably some cracked phones, some handme down phones that folks could use for those situations where you really need to use the closed platform, but otherwise are free to use something more open.
Slackware always brings out the inner teen in me. I feel giddy like in the old days. I need to install and maintain it somewhere some time, just for kicks.
I support FOSS wholeheartedly, and believe that it's possible to have a device which is completely Free (not Open but, Free) from hardware design to firmware and software.
On the other hand, there are some nasty realities which bring hard questions.
For example, radios. Radio firmware is something nasty. Give people freedom and you can't believe what you can do with it (Flipper Zero is revolutionary, but even that's a tongue in cheek device). Muck with your airspace and you create a lot of problems. The problem is not technology, but physics. So, unless you prevent things from happening, you can't keep that airspace fair to everybody.
Similar problems are present in pipelines where you need to carry information in a trusted way. In some cases open technology can guarantee this upto a certain point. To cross that point, you need to give your back to hardware. I don't believe there are many hardware security devices with open firmware.
I use MacBooks and iPhones mostly because of the hardware they bring in to the table. I got in these ecosystems knowing what I'm buying into, but I have my personal fleet of Linux desktops and servers, and all the things I develop and publish are Free Software.
I also use Apple devices because I don't want to manage another server esp. in my pocket (because I also manage lots of servers at work, so I want some piece of mind), yet using these devices doesn't change my mind into not supporting Free Software.
At the end, as I commented down there the problem is not the technology itself, but the mindset behind these. We need to change the minds and requirements. The technical changes will follow.
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It’s fairly unappealing to carry around two devices also.
What about when your smartphone is required to verify your identity so you can work / earn a paycheck? What about when it's required in order for you to engage in commerce?
We're headed down a very slippery slope and the destination is a very dystopian reality where those in power can prevent someone from participating in society on a whim. I believe the destination has previously been described as the beast system or New World Order.
We are all definitely going to have to make a choice. That much is certain.
> What about when your smartphone is required to verify your identity so you can work / earn a paycheck? What about when it's required in order for you to engage in commerce?
In some cases, it already is.
We're already far on the path you described, and there is no choice to make on it, not for individuals. To stop this, we need to somehow make these technologies socially unacceptable. We need to walk back on cybersecurity quite a bit, and it starts with population-wide understanding that there is such thing as too much security, especially when the questions of who is being secured and who is the threat remain conveniently unanswered.
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We're already there. Attestation is not in your phone, but in your ID card. European passports and ID cards carry biometric data of your face, so you can be computationally verified.
I'm aware of this slippery slope for a very long time, esp. with AI (check my comments if you prefer). On the other hand, I believe that we need to choose our battles wisely.
We believe that technology is the cause of these things, it's not. Remember:
The governments believe that this is the "necessity", so the technologies are developed and deployed. We need to change the beliefs, not the technology.
The same dystopian digital ID allows me to verify my identity to my bank while I'm having my breakfast saving everyone time. That e-sig allows me to have a practical PKI based security in my phone for sensitive things.
Nothing prevents these things from turning against me, except the ideas and beliefs of the people managing these things.
We need to change minds. Not the technology.
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When that security model is based around SIM swappable hardware, this sounds at least questionable. Mobile security seems like a contradiction in itself. I would say this is also why Google is so eager to also lock down the last degree of freedom. So the joke is on you when you use it for online banking
Your comment makes a lot of assumptions, and all of them are wrong.
Exactly - if I don't have the Monzo banking app on my phone, I can't do _any_ banking.
Thinking about that now... That's not great.
I refuse to use a bank that does not have a website.
I do have one credit card that requires an app if you want to do thing online - otherwise its paper statements only. I use it a lot less as a result.
> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.
Except, this not really a choice or a reasonable work around.
Phones are still somewhat expensive, not to mention a time-sink to maintain. Try explaining to your parents or even close relatives that they need to abandon the phone they either spent $$$($) on our spend a $$ monthly on that they should really buy another $$$($) phone and use their "official" device like a company card.
Bingo, this right here. Linux desktop wasn’t a daily driver until one day it was.
Although the only problem with this strategy is that Linux got that way because of a lot of private companies that actually wanted that. Valve didn’t want to be locked in with Microsoft. Many of Microsoft’s direct competitors also don’t want to be locked in. IBM famously switched to Mac, Google has been using Mac and Linux workstations for a long time as well.
Also, web technologies like Electron made porting applications to small user bases Linux easier. If that never happened, I wouldn’t be able to use my commercial apps on Linux. This concept might be a little more of a challenge for the mobile app ecosystem, which is a mix of native wrappers like react native and native apps, and there is a high amount of dependency on native APIs for the extra sensors and hardware features phones have the laptops and desktops don’t have.
E.g., For Linux on mobile to work react native can’t be an incomplete implementation like the status quo.
It's a transient state. Food for thought: how much of Linux being a daily driver depends on you having a modern Android or iOS smartphone?
If you need a locked down phone that passes remote attestation to authenticate yourself to a remote service, then whatever you use to access the service UI doesn't really matter: the only device that's necessary to have to use the service is the one you don't fully control, and which gets to control your patterns of use.
An intuition pump I like: imagine you want to put a widget on your desktop that always shows you the current balance of your bank account. You want it to just work ~forever after initial authentication (or at least a couple weeks between any reauth), and otherwise not require any manual interaction. See how hard it is (if it's even possible), and you'll know how badly you're being disempowered already.
Interesting thought. I’d say a low to medium amount but you’re making a good point here.
Most services offer simple SMS two factor, and then if they offer an upgrade to Authenticator or passkey then I have no iOS/Android dependency.
My bank’s website works almost the same as the phone app, I think the only difference is the lack of mobile check deposit (but nobody’s writing checks anymore).
Some services like Venmo are most popular on apps but still have a website.
My remaining hooks are:
- iCloud shared photo libraries with my family. I can use those on iCloud.com but it’s a bit more of a pain. My paid iCloud storage has been migrated to more open alternatives.
- AirTags and Find My. There just isn’t a competitor that’s anywhere near as good. It’s thankfully not a very necessary product.
- Apple Watch. (AirPods actually work great on Linux, btw, even if they are missing some functionality)
- Apple Home. I could migrate this to Home Assistant.
- Apple Wallet. This is mostly convenience. Most things that use it have some kind of alternative, like printed boarding passes. But there’s…
- Ticketmaster. The mobile website tells me I must download the app or add to mobile wallet. Barcodes are dynamic and screenshots don't work. I think the only alternative is to go to the box office before the event which can be very annoying.
My daily driver is Rocky 10, but my control plane is a Pixel 6 on the ATT network but I control almost nothing on that layer. It is why I have been moving most of my core workloads off SaaS and back to local.
Personally I wouldn’t want to have an account with any bank that allowed permanently open api’s - an attacker gets one auth and then can see my balance forever? No thanks.
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My daily driver has been debian and ubuntu since Potato 25 years ago. My bank has been online only since 2006 and has worked with Konqueror and later Firefox all that time.
2FA is either a standard TOTP generator or an SMS.
Now I do have a smart phone, because I'm not a complete luddite, but I can't think of anything other than perhaps some forms of entertainment (apple tv, paramount, disney perhaps) which might not work on my laptop. I shun things like notifications of my bank balance, is that an essential thing? How did people in the 90s cope without a per-minute balance?
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Bitcoin :D
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Lots of private companies do not want to be forced to pay Apple and Google a hefty chunk of their earnings either. That's what drove Epic Games and Spotify to fight Apple.
I have a lot of use cases for general purpose computers. If I am operating an event, "inconveniences" are literal showstoppers. When I'm running sound at a performance, switching audio inputs needs to work instantly and with essentially perfect reliability.
Another use case which Linux has a lot of trouble with is operating as a replacement for a pen-and-paper notepad. When I set a computer down for a day, I should be able to turn it on instantly and see the notes that I wrote 3 weeks ago. There are a variety of reasons this doesn't work on Linux. You say "that's an inconvenience" but there are circumstances in which being able to read those notes without needing to wait 30 minutes for the laptop to get enough charge and boot up could be a matter of life or death.
If these kinds of issues are mere inconveniences, that means the computer is a toy rather than a tool.
> I'll keep another phone for the rare times some corporate/government overlord requires it.
Not having to do that is the whole point (especially as those are not rare to most of us).
This reminds me of a Woz interview in the early days of the iphone, and his solution to it not supporting multitask was also to run two phones.
I wonder if woz saying that was tongue in cheek, a poke at apple. It would be his style.
The problem is as aforementioned players pressure users and government, they can make certain aspects of the economy entirely inaccessible to unapproved platforms. Netflix and co can simply refuse to support streaming on devices which aren't hardware locked. Banks can refuse to do business. Sure banks have in person locations, but they've become fewer and more backed up.
One certain thresholds are reached, little can be done even for the committed outcast.
How about you don't forget about the majority of users out there who are unable to do the techy thing to circumvent technical issues?
It is a constant trope in technical forums.
We are a minority. Solutions which might be "inconveniences" for you, might be unsolvable issues for the rest of the planet.
> Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint
It still doesn't btw.
It can via Chrome.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-on...
Well it's true that there's a web option, but it's not the same. It's way more annoying to use IMO (it feels like all your files have to be "in the cloud" ?), and it struggles with big files. On top of that it's less responsive than the desktop version.
> Back in '99 Linux didn't run Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games, but I ran it anyway. What others call showstoppers are for me inconveniences.
It didn't ran on computer of people that wanted Excel/Word/Powerpoint or most games. I don't think the market of people wanting to use their phone only as a server is big enough for a competitive OS to arise, but I may be mistaken
What's an inconvenience for you is a no-go for many others. I'm willing to put up with certain things... others aren't.
Or their employers aren’t! We can’t all choose the software we use.
You can't buy a new less than $400 that can be google free.