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Comment by gapan

12 hours ago

> WordStar was basically all we needed, and it still is. > > Imagine if you had something that small and powerful today.

I completely agree with the first part. But why do you think we don't have that today, if we choose to do so?

3 comments

gapan

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flenserboy  10 hours ago

1. there is no longer a market for certain sorts of software, whether due to market dominance (Word), or the likely market size being too small to bother with.

2. FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode*, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions. LibreOffice is Good Enough for most users, so why go to all the effort of starting from ground level when a fork & reskin will do?

one would hope that FOSS would lead to having cool, alternate approaches to particular use problems (as in the old days, when there were myriad word processors on the market — XyWrite, WordPerfect, WriteNow, Word, etc., etc.), but Good Enough means that attention can be put on more interesting problems. what we're left with is a mediocre mass of applications.

*which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.

  • yjftsjthsd-h  8 hours ago

    > FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions

    I don't necessarily disagree that there are some issues in the ecosystem, but I don't think that's the problem. For starters, I don't think anyone is* forking LibreOffice and throwing on a layer of paint? And when I need a word processor, I personally prefer AbiWord, which is its own thing.

    In particular,

    > which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.

    This feels backwards. Alternatives tend to present a similar interface without* sharing code. In fact, even just on Linux I'd argue we have a rather lot of (re)implementations of the same things: Consider that we are in a position where Debian is shipping GNU coreutils, Ubuntu replaced them with a rust version (uutils), and Alpine has been happily shipping busybox for years (AFAIK, as long as it's existed).