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

nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are shit proprietary software and good proprietary software. There are shit FLOSS and good FLOSS

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • Ironfist79@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • lefixxx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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• namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      ColdFusion

      I was there, 3,000 years ago

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      • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.

    For me it’s interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.

    That’s what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it’s a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we’ll see that, oh wonder, X11’s modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland’s. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.

    Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.

    I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.

    OK, that’s what’s called “пикейный жилет” in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.

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• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Who’s Gate?

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Frankly I have to mention one thing - while BG was in MS, the Windows world was kinda fine. He left before even Windows 7. He left after Vista, and Vista wasn’t very good, but what’s important - MS didn’t only do evil.

    I mean, yeah, not “fine” fine, but when you are saying “and then stagnated for 20 years”, Bill wasn’t in MS for most of those 20 years.

    I agree that platform dynamics suck, but I also very well remember from my childhood that I wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms like ICQ, not too opinionated and de-facto interoperable, or like Geocities, but people wanted platforms.

    It was just plainly unavoidable. Everyone wanted webpages to be dynamic applications and everyone wanted platforms.

    Yes, both are traps of evolution.

    Say, dynamic pages I wanted would be more like embedded content in its own square, as it was with Flash. Just instead of Netscape plugin API and one proprietary environment it could involve a virtual machine for running cross-platform bytecode, or even just PostScript. Java applets were that idea, sort of (no sandboxing), as always Sun solved the hard problem perfectly, but forgot to invent a way for adoption. Maybe it could be allowed access to cut buffers and even the rest of the page. But that would be requested. This would prevent the web turning into something only Chrome can support.

    Say, platforms I wanted would be more like standardized unified resources pooled. Storage resources and computing resources and notification servers and indexation servers for search, possibly partitioned to accommodate the sheer amount of data. Maybe similar to Usenet and NOSTR. With user application being the endpoint to mix those into a “social network” or some other platform. Universal application-agnostic servers, specific user applications.

    But this is all in hindsight.

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