Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’ve said this before here, but techy people vastly overestimate both the ability and the patience of the typical user, and it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.

  Products from big tech aimed at private individuals are designed to be as simple to use as possible, which is why they’re so popular.

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  • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Nah, I have worked in IT education and in helpdesk. Average user doesn’t have a better time getting into Microsoft products, it’s not easier for them than FOSS. The reason for Windows domination is Microsoft spending money and lobbying power to put it in front of every user.

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    • bobo@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Maybe true today, but less true in earlier times (90s and early 2000s) when Microsoft was really gaining dominance.

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      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I don’t think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.

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  • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    What about the boat loads of marketing - ads - aimed at making you believe those proprietary programs are the best? Clearly you fell for it.

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    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ve used my share of free software. Some of it worked well, but it always felt clunky, and just never as straightforward to use as a paid product.

      But sure, I couldn’t possibly have reached that conclusion on my own, it’s obviously the marketing.

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      • qqq@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Sounds like you’re cherry picking both; I’ve seen plenty of garbage that costs money as well.

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  • Ironfist79@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is that why Outlook is so intuitive and easy to use?

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    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I did say private individuals, Outlook is more of a corporate product.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And this in turn led to the younger generations being less tech-literate.

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  • lefixxx@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    People don’t have to compile their own kernel to benefit from FOSS. Their phone can run the Linux kernel and the services they use run on FOSS. The more stuff based on FOSS they use the less license fees and RnD they subsidize. Imagine if you had to pay for every FOSS instance you use. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, openssl, docker, WebKit, mySQL and whatever, the same way you pay for GSM or ARM trustzone or console-like-platform-tax

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.

    It’s a reason. Another reason is all the stuff that Microsoft was found guilty of doing during their conviction for abusing their monopoly.

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• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If it wasn’t them, it would have been other people. Computer science doesn’t rest on shoulder of a “Great Man”

  What Torvalds did was inspire a like-minded community to come together and work toward a collective good. On a shoe-string budget they constantly threaten Gate’s empire.

  Gate’s on the other hand chose to enclose the intellectual commons of computer science and sell them at a profit. He extracted a heavy toll on all sectors of human activity. And what did this heavy burden buy us ? Really NOT MUCH ! It squelched out collaboration and turned programming greedy, it delivered poor bloated software that barely worked and then stagnated for 20 years. It created a farm stall for us to live in, their innovation today is only explained as a series of indignities we will have to live with, because of platform dynamics we really, literally cannot escape the black hole that is windows for they have captured the commons and have made themselves unavoidable, like the Troll asking his toll.

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Image

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Who’s Gate?

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.

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• namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

  Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

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  • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.

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    • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If Microsoft hadn’t been around Apple would have probably defined the early PC era. The Apple II was released in 1977, 4 years before IBM decided to enter the home market with the PC.

      Or Commodore might have been the one to dominate. They sold about 5 million Amigas.

      Or it could have been NeXT after Jobs was forced out of Apple and started a new computer business.

      The winner turned out to be Microsoft, but desktop computers were well on their way to being a standard thing long before Microsoft / IBM got into the market.

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    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      ColdFusion

      I was there, 3,000 years ago

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      • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        There are at least 2 of us! I think it was widely reported that the downfall of MySpace was at least partially linked to their use Coldfusion. When they needed to scale and adapt it just wasn’t ready.

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