It would be nice to have an example of their previous preaching; as of now this post basically looks like the standard “I switched from Mac to some minimalist-fetishist Linux” bait template you see posted to link aggregators every so often and tick the boxes of what appeals to users there.
Seems to be a new blog. Found it through some mailing list I am on. I think it’s different, than the usual, because of the insight of “who controls my day-to-day life: Product Owners of FAANG companies or passionate software developers who “are like me”. Therefore I found it insightful.
Kudos for doing the hard task of taking a stand. This writing resonates with me because I’m also trying to “downgrade” my tech assets into manageable solutions, as opposed to letting Google/Apple handle everything for me. I’ve been trying to get started on making my own NextCloud setup at home for myself and others, and been recently looking into things like pmOS for some of my own devices.
Good luck in the journey 🎉 (also there’s a typo in the word “als”).
More power to you. I worry the next generation of kids will know nothing but FAANG, since many (if not all) public schools utilize Google Classroom, post updates on IG and FB, and run Gmail enterprise mail. This is US-specific though, and I am not aware of how it is in EU and Asia.
My generation knew nothing but Big Tech Software™ as well, since many (if not all) public schools utilized Blackboard (where they also posted updates), and ran Microsoft Outlook enterprise mail. Same stuff, different generation. I think we turned out OK.
Agreed that the jump from Blackboard to Microsoft mail to Gmail is not that hard, maybe I did not elaborate my point properly. My bigger fear is Big Tech Software will weaponize the information they have on my kid in the future. I may be too paranoid, but I think Big Tech has enough information on my kid and her behavior and thought process to be able to subtly manipulate those when she turns an adult. :-(
Consider instead the ironic joke that has circulated a lot in recent years about how it’s actually been the Baby Boom/Gen X parents of today’s young people who used to say “don’t believe everything you see online!” and then… fell into believing everything they saw online, and so have been manipulated into consuming, like addicts, an ever-worsening spiral of outrage content pushed on them by algorithms which optimized for that.
The younger generations have grown up aware of the fact that social media tries to lead them down that path. That alone makes a significant difference in how it affects them.
I sincerely hope that is the case, though I am not convinced the awareness is where you say it is based on my personal experience (but again it is more of an opinion than backed by solid data!) :-)
Agreed, I think the next generation is going to suffer a lot because of these dependencies. Because of how deeply rooted Windows/Android/iOS is in the consumer market, businesses are not going to be keen on changing the status quo. The only way to take back control is to start encouraging others and sharing progress or experiences, which I’ll keep doing and always like to read about from others.
Honestly, I’d much rather be at the mercy of a bunch of product managers whose incentives are to deliver products that people pay folding money for, than either open source hobbyists, or product managers whose incentives are to deliver me as a product. Even better, don’t invest your ego to the point where some nameless, faceless drones on the other side of the world can hold you hostage.
They probably will ship something you like, but they will most certainly also ship things that make it hard for you to switch to a competitor and start rent-seeking. There really isn’t a good solution. Other than realizing that a computer should not be an appliance and start investing time in doing things yourself.
Sure, but it’s a continuum, not a binary, right? I live in Apple’s universe, because it hasn’t driven me away yet, but I do detest the rent-seeking and their awful services division (having worked there twice). Other people have a different point where they’ll get off of (or onto) the iOS/Android/Windows/&c train, and that’s fine. But as someone who doesn’t like Unix, and doesn’t like not paying for my services, and who simply doesn’t have the time to come to grips with the amount of fiddling it would take to get one of the free options up to par with the functionality I have come to expect from my computing devices – eh. Apple it is. For me. For now.
Well, if it is a matter of staying in the universe, or getting off, then that does sound a bit binary to me. Either you are in, or you are out. The point at which one decide to get out is different for everyone, that’s true.
In my ideal world, computers and phones would be more like houses and cars, and less like microwaves and vacuum cleaners. That is, people see it as a big investment that should last a while. And therefore they think long and hard on what they need and how they want to use it. And then they make it happen and actually are able to make use of it for many years.
If you move into a new place with a bad kitchen, or decide after a couple of years that you want to remodel the one you have, then you take some time to think about what you want. What kind of cook are you? Just heating up pre-made meals, or preparing multi-course dinners every weekend? But also: how much money you are willing to spend? You make a plan of this kitchen you want. Then you either pay some handyman to pull the pipes, install the sink, etc. or you do everything yourself, if you have the skills and are willing to spend the time. You can even hire someone to design the plan for you.
That is a big investment and it only works because it is assumed that once you have something that works for you, you can use that for many years to come. You can buy a new juicer perhaps, but the general flow still works. The problem is that people buy a computer like it was a microwave with only a few buttons and one function, but perform all kinds of operations on it like it was a complete kitchen.
The kitchen approach should be possible, I think. Theoretically. Because for all the constant drive for change, most fundamentals of computer use have remained the same for a long time. Just as the fundamentals of cooking have remained stable for many years. New trends, ingredients and styles notwithstanding.
Well, if it is a matter of staying in the universe, or getting off, then that does sound a bit binary to me. Either you are in, or you are out. The point at which one decide to get out is different for everyone, that’s true.
It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. I’m invested in the Apple ecosystem very much (iPhone, iPad Pro, Watch, several MacBook machines) but I don’t use almost any of iCloud services. I pay Fastmail to host all my emails and I also use their CardDAV/CalDAV services for contacts and calendars instead of iCloud. I keep my backups locally and don’t upload them to iCloud. I don’t use Messages in iCloud because I prefer to keep them confined to my devices (these days I tend to switch as much people as I can to Matrix et. al and get them off of mainstream messaging apps as much as possible simply because I feel that’s the right thing to do). I use Spotify instead of Apple Music and… you get the picture.
The only reason I’m not switching to non-Apple hardware is because there’s nothing better out there that would suit me, but using Apple hardware without iCloud services is doable and works in practice, and should you decide to do so, you can self host around 80% of stuff offered by iCloud.
You don’t have to go all in when it comes to The Ecosystem should you decide not to.
Oh, that indeed sounds better than I thought it was. I honestly don’t know, I’ve never owned an Apple device in my live. Initially because they were simply too expensive for me, but when the iPhone came and forced users on their app store, iTunes etc, I lost interest. Maybe I was projecting too much 90’s Microsoft on Apple.
They say shit like this, but I haven’t seen evidence of it. What people call “lock-in” tends to be “your devices work together”. I’m not tied too down in any ecosystem, so can switch any time I want. The problem is I’m slightly tired of never having to settle down.
Not long ago I tried to figure out how to stream videos from an ipad to my TV. That made me realise how locked in Apple’s ecosystem really is. My relatively recent (2018) LG TV has some support for Airplay v1 (a proprietary Apple protocol), but the ipad only supports Airplay v2, so that’s out. The TV has support for Wi-Fi direct (some sort of open standard, it seems), but iOS doesn’t support it. It doesn’t support the Chromecast protocol either, which the TV seems to support. I am using a media box with Kodi but there don’t seem to be any useful streaming options there that work with Apple, either.
Every resource I find online seems to indicate that there are plenty of options with Android, Linux or even Windows to make this work, though.
In the spirit of people typically hating on Linux: It’s 2021, streaming some video from a phone or tablet to my TV should not be difficult!
Yes, devices work together, but only as far as they’re all Apple. That’s exactly what lock-in means: you’d have to replace all your devices at once to break out of that lock-in.
Then you and I probably have very different definitions of what “locked-in” means. I experience it everywhere. “your devices work together” is in practice “your devices work together as long as you stick to the devices and apps we are willing to support and we only support stuff that is a sensible investment from a monetary perspective”.
If you think that the official app is not what you need, or you have a alternative device (e.g. not an iOS or Android phone), how many options do you have for an alternative app? “Normal” apps, I mean, that are allowed according to the terms of service. Perhaps an app you can buy even. Not something those color blind open source developers reverse engineered. In the overwhelming amount of cases, the answer is: zero.
This was the prevalent thinking during the heydays of Windows with its embrace, extend and extinguish philosophy. But then truly open standards became more popular. You can connect your Apple device to any wifi access point, it doesn’t have to be an Apple Airport. But I do remember the days when Appletalk was the only way to network Apple computers together… And of course you couldn’t easily combine that with PC networking. Don’t you think ethernet and wifi and the IP protocol are vast improvements on that situation?
Yes, that definitely is a vast improvement and I agree that generally things are ok in that part of the stack. But less so when it comes to connecting “regular” devices through things like Lightning and Thunderbolt, I believe. (I could be wrong there, I am not too well versed in that ares)
I was more thinking of higher layers. Can I also listen to Apple Music with any player and platform of my choosing?
I am a self-admitted Apple fanboy, and quite honestly I hated everything about their products and everything the company stood for prior to 2008 when I purchased my first iPhone. It didn’t take long after for me or my wife to discover just how good their products are and how well everything worked together to buy in to the whole Apple ecosystem and we have both been there since. My attitude prior to that Linux is going to take over the world (and it has in some aspect).
I agree with some of the points the author made in this article, and arguably some of the other tools he pointed out would be a good alternative, but for me my time is more valuable than anything these days and would rather use my technology as intended vs. constantly fixing and maintaining it to make it usable. I do that with some things in my life such as self-hosting, but my personal/critical pieces of technology is not one of them.
You’re more likely to see people who are invested X talking about X. The people who don’t care about X aren’t going to be as interested in talking about it.
My latest company which hired me however mandated a company MacBook
Is this common? I have been fortunate to use Linux at every tech company I have worked with over the last 16 years or so. It was a pretty big deal when the first started allowing Linux and Macs as options to Windows, but every one since has allowed Linux.
Granted, I may be self-selecting somehow. After all, an opportunity with the comment ‘Every developer gets a top-of-the-line MacBook!’ would probably not entice me to apply.
It’s pretty common for compliance reasons; my last employer required this and my current employer just sent me a macbook a few months ago. They make us keep all our private code on it so the day it arrived I installed virtualbox on it and set up port forwarding for SSH and stuck it in a closet. I basically never touch it except to do OS upgrades which for some reason can’t be accomplished over SSH.
I wish Linux worked for our developers. We’ve adopted a mandated MacBook too. People who’ve chosen Linux have generally had a much more difficult time getting their systems to work. The drivers are too finicky and the companies aren’t chosen to support the tools needed to do video conferencing.
Most companies I worked for gave you the choice of either ThinkPad with Linux or Macbook, but I’ve heard from friends about the “here’s your macbook” with varying degree of possibility to change it.
Interestingly a lot of stuff I’ve been working with simply doesn’t work on Windows, so I’ve been pretty safe from “here’s your Windows laptop”, but friends who do consulting/work at customers for a few weeks/months have told enough stories of getting handed one of those, I’d take a mac book over this any day.
Is this common? I have been fortunate to use Linux at every tech company I have worked with over the last 16 years or so. It was a pretty big deal when the first started allowing Linux and Macs as options to Windows, but every one since has allowed Linux.
very, very common esp. with Bay Area and/or start-upy companies. My last 3 jobs always had work mandated MacBooks. The other option was Windows and I def. never want to go back to that.
How is this relevant? The guy has an opinion about operating systems, but last I checked everyone does, and his isn’t novel.
My takeaway is: he didn’t like how profit-driven Apple is, so now he’s spending more money after he switched, and doing amazing things like buying music on BandCamp and using wired headphones, things that I somehow manage to do on my MacBook Pro. (Even editing text in a terminal!!)
I think you managed to completely miss the fact that this person is now putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Which is a lot harder to do these days when everything “demands” you conform to using products from specific vendors, social networks from specific companies, etc.
Here’s something you can’t do on your macbook w/ apple services that they can: own their data.
I own the data Apple stores, in most senses of the word. The sensitive stuff is end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t even know what it is. The rest I can easily enumerate or delete. This is the same sense in which I “own” furniture that I’m storing in a rented storage locker.
I’m quite used to putting money where my mouth is. I did it all through the ‘90s Microsoft/Intel hegemony, when using a Mac meant incompatibility with most of the software and hardware world, because I found Microsoft evil and Apple’s products superior. (And at the time Linux was a frustrating toy and Unix UX, e.g. Motif, was eye-bleedingly horrible.)
Ever since forums decreased in popularity, posts that provide an excuse to talk about a topic do well on link aggregators. The content of the article itself is irrelevant: it’s just a pretense.
I can appreciate wanting to live a certain kind of lifestyle according to certain principles. But the author seems to want you to think that their way is better to the “Apple way” and I don’t think that’s true. It might be better for them, but some of the things seem very inconvenient and cumbersome to me. In particular, the points about being more productive with his tools have very little to do with productivity.
I also don’t understand his point about technology made by “product managers” rather than by “technology people”. So what? There’s no guarantee that being made my by “technology people” will reflect the way I think about and want my technology to work. Sure, the latter might give me as the end-user some options for more control, but IME most of the time that’s not very relevant. And where it matters for me (my programming and writing environment, my music collection) it doesn’t matter if it’s on macOS or some Linux distro.
I think this basically sums up what I was going to reply to this comment WRT “product owners”, though some other thoughts I have need to be formed firsts.
Dang, I love this post (and the clean, ultra-minimal code used to render it). I’ve been having very strong similar feelings lately. I am totally sick of Windows/Mac, and iOS. Further, with proprietary “walled gardens” of any sort that require me to pay money to use them, and coerce me into updates I don’t want.
I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me.
This sums up so much about what I’ve been disliking about all of the above software/services. So refreshing to hear someone convey this so clearly. Cheers to the author
(P.S. the link to “tags” doesn’t work - 404 not found)
I am totally sick of Windows/Mac, and iOS. Further, with proprietary “walled gardens” of any sort that require me to pay money to use them, and coerce me into updates I don’t want.
Every time I have to help someone find an app to perform some important task on their phone or tablet, I get depressed by the sheer amount of crappy software that just floods your screen with ads, requires way too many permissions (so it can send your data to the manufacturer) and then simply doesn’t even perform its intended function properly. I really mean this - it makes me inconsolably sad for hours. I don’t even remember the Windows experience to be this terrible back in the day (late nineties, early noughts when I was still using it).
For me it’s really part of basic mental hygiene to stay away from this stuff.
The only reason this shit isn’t happening on Linux as well is because nobody uses it. There are even fewer roadblocks for any software to do the things you describe in your comment on Linux than there is in any sort of walled garden. If it’s happening in a space where you must pay at least $200 to just be able to publish an app, then it’s gonna happen in a space where it’s free. The only current roadblocks for this happening in Linux is that there aren’t enough users, and - for now - the package repos are rather tightly controlled. I’d expect an influx of users to result in a larger amount of apps being made, and that will eventually mean that the relatively tight control of the repos will diminish and the same problem will migrate to Linux.
TL-DR: You don’t want more Linux users if you want to keep your platform free of that kind of app.
You’re probably right with that. But like I said, I don’t remember any of this twenty-odd years ago on Windows etc. except for the odd “ad bar” extension getting side-loaded into your browser. What caused these practices to explode in popularity and how did people come to accept this shit? Is this carry-over shitty experience from the web?
Twenty years ago, all apps were distributed on CD through magazines or by purchasing a boxed product. A store had to curate what products they sold, so shitty apps would likely not be sold at all. Now that you can just download something it’s much easier to distribute your crap everywhere.
So, I’ve had raccoons trashing my patio/yard. I bought some IP cams to catch them in the act and scare them off. I’ve been using the “official” iOS app to watch the cameras. Tonight I decided to update it, because there were a couple small bugs I was hoping might be fixed in the new version. It turns out I was wildly wrong, and I should have trusted my instinct to never update an iOS app that works sufficiently well. Not only were those bugs not fixed, but substantial changes to the app have introduced new bugs, making it so I can no longer swipe between the different camera views. Because it’s iOS, I have no ability to revert to the previous version, leaving me completely screwed unless the developer happens to decide to fix the bug (if they even see my message pointing out the bug).
Needless to say, I’ve been totally stressed out about this all night, just like you mention. I’m at the mercy of people who have no real reason to give a shit, and because I’m already “locked in”, there’s nothing I can immediately do about it. This is why people like the article above abandon these platforms and ecosystems altogether. The only way to be free of the abusive relationship is to leave it completely. I’m closer to doing the same, every day, regardless of the cost to convenience (and honestly, how much loss is there when the “walled garden” stuff doesn’t work anyways?!).
It’s only convenient when things actually work, and you use it exactly as intended, and don’t mind being spied upon or advertised to. And then I would concede that indeed, it’s lightyears more convenient than anything OSS has to offer. However, as you point out, when it doesn’t work, or you do mind, you have absolutely no recourse.
Now, if these IP cameras used some sort of open standard for communication, at least you’d be able to choose your own app, even if you choose to stay within the walled garden ecosystem. And you’d have the freedom to ditch the bullshit and use some FOSS program that you would probably need to spend half a day figuring out how to configure. But then it would probably work, and keep working, and you might be able to fix it if it broke on update, or at least downgrade to an earlier, better version.
The demise of Aperture, iPhoto, good keyboards and the introduction of the touch bar were just a few signs that product owners were in charge who rather wanted a raise by trying something “new” instead of technical owners who wanted to help creative people getting work done.
This is exactly how I feel.
Way too much software is being developed in the Resume Driven Development these days.
Touch Bar is a prime example of this. It solves a nonexisting problem in an imperfect way. It’s a mere copycat from Optimus Keyboard, except that in Optimus each individual key was still a physical key with a small display.
The same goes for the vast majority of the web 2.0 front end frameworks, which reduce user experience, but add to the resume of people who implement all of that nonsense. The new versions of Slashdot and Reddit are prime examples — slower, less usable and accessible, but, hey, all the newest frameworks and buzzwords!
However, if iOS was never a tool to be used as one wishes, but rather being used in the limited ways Apple foresaw, iCloud never reached the potential like replacing Google Mail or Google Drive. Never open, never as powerful, no API.
It’s kind of impressive how bad Apple is at the ‘i’ part of the iMac, iPhone, etc….
But if Apple had their way, the internet would look more like a minimalist AOL and less like the organic, human-made, wonderful mess that it currently embodies.
I find it interesting how many of these articles mention i3. I see the appeal in theory, but I find myself unable to effectively use these minimalist setups. I absolutely love the idea of vim but I can’t use more than three or four commands.
There seems to be some kind of indirection or memorization my brain can’t cope with. Which leads into some interesting observations of how my broken brain successful compensates for many things but not this.
My short term memory immediately drops everything if I need to think about what order to do keystrokes in. If I try to look at a line number and use it in a command, I forget the number or the command. If I try to learn two commands one after the other, I mix them up. Sometimes figuring out what key to hit will cause me to forget where the key is on the keyboard.
I don’t have this issue when working in a “regular” window manager because I can use spatial recognition, a part of my brain that actually works. For some odd reason, I can use the same lookup table my written vocabulary lives in to store keyboard shortcuts, but only for ones that do a single “action”. You’d think I could learn vim this way, but I find this memory inaccessible when working in a terminal. Probably because my brain can’t both work on writing commands and remembering commands at the same time. When using a mouse or the arrow keys, I’m not “writing”.
Interestingly, when the arrow keys are all in the same row, I can’t use them. I forget which one is up and which one is down. No issues using WASD in games.
I often wonder what it would feel like to use a more minimalist setup. :)
I do use vi as my main editor, but I totally agree with you: much of it requires a lot of cognitive energy. I mostly use hjklweb{}dy, the occasional [[, ]], / and :s. Things like t and f (go to the next occurrence of a letter in the line) often require way too much thinking than a couple of w’s and h/l’s. I think people overestimate how useful the more advanced functionality of vi is.
I generally feel the same way about tiling and keyboard-driven window managers. There’s no way a keyboard shortcut for resizing a window is easier than using the mouse.
I think a lot of the time (and tiling wm experts correct me if I’m wrong here), a tiling window manager is putting stuff in a position for you that you were already expecting (based on your familiarity with which keyboard command is needed to place a new window where you want it, and split/move panels horizontally/vertically and stuff like that). It will definitely be faster than taking your hand up from the keyboard, repositioning the mouse cursor to the window title-bar, dragging to new location, letting go, and bringing your hand back to the keyboard. That’s one of the powerful aspects of tiling wm’s you often hear people hyping up :)
Ah yeah, perhaps not. There’s probably some upfront “cost” or “investment” to get that muscle memory and ultra familiarity with the key combinations. That said, I do think it will pay off long term. Who knows, we’ll see. I intend to spend more time in some tiling (or otherwise keyboard-driven) window manager in the future, since I’ve only dabbled casually so far!
I think people overestimate how useful the more advanced functionality of vi is.
That is an interesting point. As an Emacs user I have always envied vi users their rich command language. But if you don’t really use it, does it matter?
(Yeah, I know about Emacs easily supports vim bindings. I just don’t use them. Never got around to it, even though I use vi all the time to edit system configuration files.)
I generally feel the same way about tiling and keyboard-driven window managers. There’s no way a keyboard shortcut for resizing a window is easier than using the mouse.
The key is not having to do either in the first place. I have StumpWM configured so that most of the time I just have two windows, each filling one monitor. I have bindings to raise different windows: S-w for Firefox (‘web’); C-S-w for Chrome; S-c for the terminal (‘console’); S-e for Emacs. So I do not have to use the mouse at all. If I need to split a frame, I do, and fill it with whichever window I need. It works pretty well, better than GNOME, KDE, Windows or Mac OS by far
That is an interesting point. As an Emacs user I have always envied vi users their rich command language. But if you don’t really use it, does it matter?
What is really useful about vi isn’t the advanced stuff. It’s that the really simple stuff is so easy to do. For example:
dd deletes the current line.
dj deletes this line and the next.
d{ deletes until the end of the (next) paragraph
Simple things like those are usually more complicated in other editors. Let’s see if I can remember the Emacs equivalents:
^A (go to beginning of line), ^K (delete till end of line), ^K (delete the empty line)
^A, ^space, M-} (go to end of paragraph – had to look that one up), ^W
So, in other words, it’s (mostly) the simple stuff that makes the difference. Now, examples 2 and 3 aren’t really a big deal, because they’re fairly uncommon operations, but number 1 is a very common operation.
The key is not having to do either in the first place. I have StumpWM configured so that most of the time I just have two windows, each filling one monitor. I have bindings to raise different windows: S-w for Firefox (‘web’); C-S-w for Chrome; S-c for the terminal (‘console’); S-e for Emacs.
Am I right in assuming you have the positions and sizes of those windows pre-configured? In that case, yes, that is a good way of avoiding the need to manually move/resize windows. In my experience, however, most people who use tiling window managers let the window manager automatically move/resize windows, which usually requires at least the occasional manual intervention in order to be useful.
Am I right in assuming you have the positions and sizes of those windows pre-configured?
The keybinding pulls the window into the current frame, and normally I just have one or two frames per screen.
StumpWM is the Emacs of window managers, and in this case its frame-handling mirrors that of Emacs: you split the available space up as you wish, and mostly leave it alone after that, pulling in windows as desired. At least that’s how I use it.
It takes longer for me to remember the shortcuts than to hit command+space and type the first three letters of the application. :)
I know command+option+4 is what I need to hit to take a screenshot… most of the time. I’ve often sat for 3 seconds trying to remember what to hit. And then having to look at my keyboard to hit it. (While I’m hoping I don’t forget what I was taking a screenshot of.)
Yet I have no issues touch typing? My brain is frustrating to work with.
It would be nice to have an example of their previous preaching; as of now this post basically looks like the standard “I switched from Mac to some minimalist-fetishist Linux” bait template you see posted to link aggregators every so often and tick the boxes of what appeals to users there.
Seems to be a new blog. Found it through some mailing list I am on. I think it’s different, than the usual, because of the insight of “who controls my day-to-day life: Product Owners of FAANG companies or passionate software developers who “are like me”. Therefore I found it insightful.
Kudos for doing the hard task of taking a stand. This writing resonates with me because I’m also trying to “downgrade” my tech assets into manageable solutions, as opposed to letting Google/Apple handle everything for me. I’ve been trying to get started on making my own NextCloud setup at home for myself and others, and been recently looking into things like pmOS for some of my own devices.
Good luck in the journey 🎉 (also there’s a typo in the word “als”).
More power to you. I worry the next generation of kids will know nothing but FAANG, since many (if not all) public schools utilize Google Classroom, post updates on IG and FB, and run Gmail enterprise mail. This is US-specific though, and I am not aware of how it is in EU and Asia.
My generation knew nothing but Big Tech Software™ as well, since many (if not all) public schools utilized Blackboard (where they also posted updates), and ran Microsoft Outlook enterprise mail. Same stuff, different generation. I think we turned out OK.
Agreed that the jump from Blackboard to Microsoft mail to Gmail is not that hard, maybe I did not elaborate my point properly. My bigger fear is Big Tech Software will weaponize the information they have on my kid in the future. I may be too paranoid, but I think Big Tech has enough information on my kid and her behavior and thought process to be able to subtly manipulate those when she turns an adult. :-(
Consider instead the ironic joke that has circulated a lot in recent years about how it’s actually been the Baby Boom/Gen X parents of today’s young people who used to say “don’t believe everything you see online!” and then… fell into believing everything they saw online, and so have been manipulated into consuming, like addicts, an ever-worsening spiral of outrage content pushed on them by algorithms which optimized for that.
The younger generations have grown up aware of the fact that social media tries to lead them down that path. That alone makes a significant difference in how it affects them.
I sincerely hope that is the case, though I am not convinced the awareness is where you say it is based on my personal experience (but again it is more of an opinion than backed by solid data!) :-)
Agreed, I think the next generation is going to suffer a lot because of these dependencies. Because of how deeply rooted Windows/Android/iOS is in the consumer market, businesses are not going to be keen on changing the status quo. The only way to take back control is to start encouraging others and sharing progress or experiences, which I’ll keep doing and always like to read about from others.
Honestly, I’d much rather be at the mercy of a bunch of product managers whose incentives are to deliver products that people pay folding money for, than either open source hobbyists, or product managers whose incentives are to deliver me as a product. Even better, don’t invest your ego to the point where some nameless, faceless drones on the other side of the world can hold you hostage.
Yes, those product owners are probably more likely to ship something I’d want to use, more so than enthusiasts who believe society peaked at xterm.
They probably will ship something you like, but they will most certainly also ship things that make it hard for you to switch to a competitor and start rent-seeking. There really isn’t a good solution. Other than realizing that a computer should not be an appliance and start investing time in doing things yourself.
Sure, but it’s a continuum, not a binary, right? I live in Apple’s universe, because it hasn’t driven me away yet, but I do detest the rent-seeking and their awful services division (having worked there twice). Other people have a different point where they’ll get off of (or onto) the iOS/Android/Windows/&c train, and that’s fine. But as someone who doesn’t like Unix, and doesn’t like not paying for my services, and who simply doesn’t have the time to come to grips with the amount of fiddling it would take to get one of the free options up to par with the functionality I have come to expect from my computing devices – eh. Apple it is. For me. For now.
Well, if it is a matter of staying in the universe, or getting off, then that does sound a bit binary to me. Either you are in, or you are out. The point at which one decide to get out is different for everyone, that’s true.
In my ideal world, computers and phones would be more like houses and cars, and less like microwaves and vacuum cleaners. That is, people see it as a big investment that should last a while. And therefore they think long and hard on what they need and how they want to use it. And then they make it happen and actually are able to make use of it for many years.
If you move into a new place with a bad kitchen, or decide after a couple of years that you want to remodel the one you have, then you take some time to think about what you want. What kind of cook are you? Just heating up pre-made meals, or preparing multi-course dinners every weekend? But also: how much money you are willing to spend? You make a plan of this kitchen you want. Then you either pay some handyman to pull the pipes, install the sink, etc. or you do everything yourself, if you have the skills and are willing to spend the time. You can even hire someone to design the plan for you.
That is a big investment and it only works because it is assumed that once you have something that works for you, you can use that for many years to come. You can buy a new juicer perhaps, but the general flow still works. The problem is that people buy a computer like it was a microwave with only a few buttons and one function, but perform all kinds of operations on it like it was a complete kitchen.
The kitchen approach should be possible, I think. Theoretically. Because for all the constant drive for change, most fundamentals of computer use have remained the same for a long time. Just as the fundamentals of cooking have remained stable for many years. New trends, ingredients and styles notwithstanding.
It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. I’m invested in the Apple ecosystem very much (iPhone, iPad Pro, Watch, several MacBook machines) but I don’t use almost any of iCloud services. I pay Fastmail to host all my emails and I also use their CardDAV/CalDAV services for contacts and calendars instead of iCloud. I keep my backups locally and don’t upload them to iCloud. I don’t use Messages in iCloud because I prefer to keep them confined to my devices (these days I tend to switch as much people as I can to Matrix et. al and get them off of mainstream messaging apps as much as possible simply because I feel that’s the right thing to do). I use Spotify instead of Apple Music and… you get the picture.
The only reason I’m not switching to non-Apple hardware is because there’s nothing better out there that would suit me, but using Apple hardware without iCloud services is doable and works in practice, and should you decide to do so, you can self host around 80% of stuff offered by iCloud.
You don’t have to go all in when it comes to The Ecosystem should you decide not to.
^ this. I use Nextcloud, but I do enjoy me little a copy and paste between my Mac and iPhone, as a treat.
Oh, that indeed sounds better than I thought it was. I honestly don’t know, I’ve never owned an Apple device in my live. Initially because they were simply too expensive for me, but when the iPhone came and forced users on their app store, iTunes etc, I lost interest. Maybe I was projecting too much 90’s Microsoft on Apple.
They say shit like this, but I haven’t seen evidence of it. What people call “lock-in” tends to be “your devices work together”. I’m not tied too down in any ecosystem, so can switch any time I want. The problem is I’m slightly tired of never having to settle down.
Not long ago I tried to figure out how to stream videos from an ipad to my TV. That made me realise how locked in Apple’s ecosystem really is. My relatively recent (2018) LG TV has some support for Airplay v1 (a proprietary Apple protocol), but the ipad only supports Airplay v2, so that’s out. The TV has support for Wi-Fi direct (some sort of open standard, it seems), but iOS doesn’t support it. It doesn’t support the Chromecast protocol either, which the TV seems to support. I am using a media box with Kodi but there don’t seem to be any useful streaming options there that work with Apple, either.
Every resource I find online seems to indicate that there are plenty of options with Android, Linux or even Windows to make this work, though.
In the spirit of people typically hating on Linux: It’s 2021, streaming some video from a phone or tablet to my TV should not be difficult!
Yes, devices work together, but only as far as they’re all Apple. That’s exactly what lock-in means: you’d have to replace all your devices at once to break out of that lock-in.
Then you and I probably have very different definitions of what “locked-in” means. I experience it everywhere. “your devices work together” is in practice “your devices work together as long as you stick to the devices and apps we are willing to support and we only support stuff that is a sensible investment from a monetary perspective”.
If you think that the official app is not what you need, or you have a alternative device (e.g. not an iOS or Android phone), how many options do you have for an alternative app? “Normal” apps, I mean, that are allowed according to the terms of service. Perhaps an app you can buy even. Not something those color blind open source developers reverse engineered. In the overwhelming amount of cases, the answer is: zero.
This was the prevalent thinking during the heydays of Windows with its embrace, extend and extinguish philosophy. But then truly open standards became more popular. You can connect your Apple device to any wifi access point, it doesn’t have to be an Apple Airport. But I do remember the days when Appletalk was the only way to network Apple computers together… And of course you couldn’t easily combine that with PC networking. Don’t you think ethernet and wifi and the IP protocol are vast improvements on that situation?
Yes, that definitely is a vast improvement and I agree that generally things are ok in that part of the stack. But less so when it comes to connecting “regular” devices through things like Lightning and Thunderbolt, I believe. (I could be wrong there, I am not too well versed in that ares)
I was more thinking of higher layers. Can I also listen to Apple Music with any player and platform of my choosing?
They offer a web interface, so yes? That sounds more like a rhetorical question, however.
I am a self-admitted Apple fanboy, and quite honestly I hated everything about their products and everything the company stood for prior to 2008 when I purchased my first iPhone. It didn’t take long after for me or my wife to discover just how good their products are and how well everything worked together to buy in to the whole Apple ecosystem and we have both been there since. My attitude prior to that Linux is going to take over the world (and it has in some aspect).
I agree with some of the points the author made in this article, and arguably some of the other tools he pointed out would be a good alternative, but for me my time is more valuable than anything these days and would rather use my technology as intended vs. constantly fixing and maintaining it to make it usable. I do that with some things in my life such as self-hosting, but my personal/critical pieces of technology is not one of them.
I think that humans integrate their tools into their self image, otherwise the comments on this post wouldn’t be angry.
You’re more likely to see people who are invested X talking about X. The people who don’t care about X aren’t going to be as interested in talking about it.
Is this common? I have been fortunate to use Linux at every tech company I have worked with over the last 16 years or so. It was a pretty big deal when the first started allowing Linux and Macs as options to Windows, but every one since has allowed Linux.
Granted, I may be self-selecting somehow. After all, an opportunity with the comment ‘Every developer gets a top-of-the-line MacBook!’ would probably not entice me to apply.
It’s pretty common for compliance reasons; my last employer required this and my current employer just sent me a macbook a few months ago. They make us keep all our private code on it so the day it arrived I installed virtualbox on it and set up port forwarding for SSH and stuck it in a closet. I basically never touch it except to do OS upgrades which for some reason can’t be accomplished over SSH.
I wish Linux worked for our developers. We’ve adopted a mandated MacBook too. People who’ve chosen Linux have generally had a much more difficult time getting their systems to work. The drivers are too finicky and the companies aren’t chosen to support the tools needed to do video conferencing.
Most companies I worked for gave you the choice of either ThinkPad with Linux or Macbook, but I’ve heard from friends about the “here’s your macbook” with varying degree of possibility to change it.
Interestingly a lot of stuff I’ve been working with simply doesn’t work on Windows, so I’ve been pretty safe from “here’s your Windows laptop”, but friends who do consulting/work at customers for a few weeks/months have told enough stories of getting handed one of those, I’d take a mac book over this any day.
very, very common esp. with Bay Area and/or start-upy companies. My last 3 jobs always had work mandated MacBooks. The other option was Windows and I def. never want to go back to that.
How is this relevant? The guy has an opinion about operating systems, but last I checked everyone does, and his isn’t novel.
My takeaway is: he didn’t like how profit-driven Apple is, so now he’s spending more money after he switched, and doing amazing things like buying music on BandCamp and using wired headphones, things that I somehow manage to do on my MacBook Pro. (Even editing text in a terminal!!)
I think you managed to completely miss the fact that this person is now putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Which is a lot harder to do these days when everything “demands” you conform to using products from specific vendors, social networks from specific companies, etc.
Here’s something you can’t do on your macbook w/ apple services that they can: own their data.
I own the data Apple stores, in most senses of the word. The sensitive stuff is end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t even know what it is. The rest I can easily enumerate or delete. This is the same sense in which I “own” furniture that I’m storing in a rented storage locker.
I’m quite used to putting money where my mouth is. I did it all through the ‘90s Microsoft/Intel hegemony, when using a Mac meant incompatibility with most of the software and hardware world, because I found Microsoft evil and Apple’s products superior. (And at the time Linux was a frustrating toy and Unix UX, e.g. Motif, was eye-bleedingly horrible.)
Ever since forums decreased in popularity, posts that provide an excuse to talk about a topic do well on link aggregators. The content of the article itself is irrelevant: it’s just a pretense.
Hence, the
asktag.I can appreciate wanting to live a certain kind of lifestyle according to certain principles. But the author seems to want you to think that their way is better to the “Apple way” and I don’t think that’s true. It might be better for them, but some of the things seem very inconvenient and cumbersome to me. In particular, the points about being more productive with his tools have very little to do with productivity.
I also don’t understand his point about technology made by “product managers” rather than by “technology people”. So what? There’s no guarantee that being made my by “technology people” will reflect the way I think about and want my technology to work. Sure, the latter might give me as the end-user some options for more control, but IME most of the time that’s not very relevant. And where it matters for me (my programming and writing environment, my music collection) it doesn’t matter if it’s on macOS or some Linux distro.
I think this basically sums up what I was going to reply to this comment WRT “product owners”, though some other thoughts I have need to be formed firsts.
I think we’ve all been through a phase like that, it’ll pass.
Dang, I love this post (and the clean, ultra-minimal code used to render it). I’ve been having very strong similar feelings lately. I am totally sick of Windows/Mac, and iOS. Further, with proprietary “walled gardens” of any sort that require me to pay money to use them, and coerce me into updates I don’t want.
This sums up so much about what I’ve been disliking about all of the above software/services. So refreshing to hear someone convey this so clearly. Cheers to the author
(P.S. the link to “tags” doesn’t work - 404 not found)
Every time I have to help someone find an app to perform some important task on their phone or tablet, I get depressed by the sheer amount of crappy software that just floods your screen with ads, requires way too many permissions (so it can send your data to the manufacturer) and then simply doesn’t even perform its intended function properly. I really mean this - it makes me inconsolably sad for hours. I don’t even remember the Windows experience to be this terrible back in the day (late nineties, early noughts when I was still using it).
For me it’s really part of basic mental hygiene to stay away from this stuff.
The only reason this shit isn’t happening on Linux as well is because nobody uses it. There are even fewer roadblocks for any software to do the things you describe in your comment on Linux than there is in any sort of walled garden. If it’s happening in a space where you must pay at least $200 to just be able to publish an app, then it’s gonna happen in a space where it’s free. The only current roadblocks for this happening in Linux is that there aren’t enough users, and - for now - the package repos are rather tightly controlled. I’d expect an influx of users to result in a larger amount of apps being made, and that will eventually mean that the relatively tight control of the repos will diminish and the same problem will migrate to Linux.
TL-DR: You don’t want more Linux users if you want to keep your platform free of that kind of app.
You’re probably right with that. But like I said, I don’t remember any of this twenty-odd years ago on Windows etc. except for the odd “ad bar” extension getting side-loaded into your browser. What caused these practices to explode in popularity and how did people come to accept this shit? Is this carry-over shitty experience from the web?
Twenty years ago, all apps were distributed on CD through magazines or by purchasing a boxed product. A store had to curate what products they sold, so shitty apps would likely not be sold at all. Now that you can just download something it’s much easier to distribute your crap everywhere.
So, I’ve had raccoons trashing my patio/yard. I bought some IP cams to catch them in the act and scare them off. I’ve been using the “official” iOS app to watch the cameras. Tonight I decided to update it, because there were a couple small bugs I was hoping might be fixed in the new version. It turns out I was wildly wrong, and I should have trusted my instinct to never update an iOS app that works sufficiently well. Not only were those bugs not fixed, but substantial changes to the app have introduced new bugs, making it so I can no longer swipe between the different camera views. Because it’s iOS, I have no ability to revert to the previous version, leaving me completely screwed unless the developer happens to decide to fix the bug (if they even see my message pointing out the bug).
Needless to say, I’ve been totally stressed out about this all night, just like you mention. I’m at the mercy of people who have no real reason to give a shit, and because I’m already “locked in”, there’s nothing I can immediately do about it. This is why people like the article above abandon these platforms and ecosystems altogether. The only way to be free of the abusive relationship is to leave it completely. I’m closer to doing the same, every day, regardless of the cost to convenience (and honestly, how much loss is there when the “walled garden” stuff doesn’t work anyways?!).
It’s only convenient when things actually work, and you use it exactly as intended, and don’t mind being spied upon or advertised to. And then I would concede that indeed, it’s lightyears more convenient than anything OSS has to offer. However, as you point out, when it doesn’t work, or you do mind, you have absolutely no recourse.
Now, if these IP cameras used some sort of open standard for communication, at least you’d be able to choose your own app, even if you choose to stay within the walled garden ecosystem. And you’d have the freedom to ditch the bullshit and use some FOSS program that you would probably need to spend half a day figuring out how to configure. But then it would probably work, and keep working, and you might be able to fix it if it broke on update, or at least downgrade to an earlier, better version.
This is exactly how I feel.
Way too much software is being developed in the Resume Driven Development these days.
Touch Bar is a prime example of this. It solves a nonexisting problem in an imperfect way. It’s a mere copycat from Optimus Keyboard, except that in Optimus each individual key was still a physical key with a small display.
The same goes for the vast majority of the web 2.0 front end frameworks, which reduce user experience, but add to the resume of people who implement all of that nonsense. The new versions of Slashdot and Reddit are prime examples — slower, less usable and accessible, but, hey, all the newest frameworks and buzzwords!
It’s kind of impressive how bad Apple is at the ‘i’ part of the iMac, iPhone, etc….
But if Apple had their way, the internet would look more like a minimalist AOL and less like the organic, human-made, wonderful mess that it currently embodies.
I find it interesting how many of these articles mention i3. I see the appeal in theory, but I find myself unable to effectively use these minimalist setups. I absolutely love the idea of vim but I can’t use more than three or four commands.
There seems to be some kind of indirection or memorization my brain can’t cope with. Which leads into some interesting observations of how my broken brain successful compensates for many things but not this.
My short term memory immediately drops everything if I need to think about what order to do keystrokes in. If I try to look at a line number and use it in a command, I forget the number or the command. If I try to learn two commands one after the other, I mix them up. Sometimes figuring out what key to hit will cause me to forget where the key is on the keyboard.
I don’t have this issue when working in a “regular” window manager because I can use spatial recognition, a part of my brain that actually works. For some odd reason, I can use the same lookup table my written vocabulary lives in to store keyboard shortcuts, but only for ones that do a single “action”. You’d think I could learn vim this way, but I find this memory inaccessible when working in a terminal. Probably because my brain can’t both work on writing commands and remembering commands at the same time. When using a mouse or the arrow keys, I’m not “writing”.
Interestingly, when the arrow keys are all in the same row, I can’t use them. I forget which one is up and which one is down. No issues using WASD in games.
I often wonder what it would feel like to use a more minimalist setup. :)
I do use vi as my main editor, but I totally agree with you: much of it requires a lot of cognitive energy. I mostly use hjklweb{}dy, the occasional [[, ]], / and :s. Things like t and f (go to the next occurrence of a letter in the line) often require way too much thinking than a couple of w’s and h/l’s. I think people overestimate how useful the more advanced functionality of vi is.
I generally feel the same way about tiling and keyboard-driven window managers. There’s no way a keyboard shortcut for resizing a window is easier than using the mouse.
I think a lot of the time (and tiling wm experts correct me if I’m wrong here), a tiling window manager is putting stuff in a position for you that you were already expecting (based on your familiarity with which keyboard command is needed to place a new window where you want it, and split/move panels horizontally/vertically and stuff like that). It will definitely be faster than taking your hand up from the keyboard, repositioning the mouse cursor to the window title-bar, dragging to new location, letting go, and bringing your hand back to the keyboard. That’s one of the powerful aspects of tiling wm’s you often hear people hyping up :)
Faster doesn’t mean easier.
Ah yeah, perhaps not. There’s probably some upfront “cost” or “investment” to get that muscle memory and ultra familiarity with the key combinations. That said, I do think it will pay off long term. Who knows, we’ll see. I intend to spend more time in some tiling (or otherwise keyboard-driven) window manager in the future, since I’ve only dabbled casually so far!
That is an interesting point. As an Emacs user I have always envied vi users their rich command language. But if you don’t really use it, does it matter?
(Yeah, I know about Emacs easily supports vim bindings. I just don’t use them. Never got around to it, even though I use
viall the time to edit system configuration files.)The key is not having to do either in the first place. I have StumpWM configured so that most of the time I just have two windows, each filling one monitor. I have bindings to raise different windows: S-w for Firefox (‘web’); C-S-w for Chrome; S-c for the terminal (‘console’); S-e for Emacs. So I do not have to use the mouse at all. If I need to split a frame, I do, and fill it with whichever window I need. It works pretty well, better than GNOME, KDE, Windows or Mac OS by far
What is really useful about vi isn’t the advanced stuff. It’s that the really simple stuff is so easy to do. For example:
Simple things like those are usually more complicated in other editors. Let’s see if I can remember the Emacs equivalents:
So, in other words, it’s (mostly) the simple stuff that makes the difference. Now, examples 2 and 3 aren’t really a big deal, because they’re fairly uncommon operations, but number 1 is a very common operation.
ct is really simple in vim/evil-mode. I think I’d need to reach for the mouse to do that in pure emacs.
Am I right in assuming you have the positions and sizes of those windows pre-configured? In that case, yes, that is a good way of avoiding the need to manually move/resize windows. In my experience, however, most people who use tiling window managers let the window manager automatically move/resize windows, which usually requires at least the occasional manual intervention in order to be useful.
The keybinding pulls the window into the current frame, and normally I just have one or two frames per screen.
StumpWM is the Emacs of window managers, and in this case its frame-handling mirrors that of Emacs: you split the available space up as you wish, and mostly leave it alone after that, pulling in windows as desired. At least that’s how I use it.
I pretty much never spend time resizing frames.
It takes longer for me to remember the shortcuts than to hit command+space and type the first three letters of the application. :)
I know command+option+4 is what I need to hit to take a screenshot… most of the time. I’ve often sat for 3 seconds trying to remember what to hit. And then having to look at my keyboard to hit it. (While I’m hoping I don’t forget what I was taking a screenshot of.)
Yet I have no issues touch typing? My brain is frustrating to work with.
i3 (and now sway) has ruined every other desktop for me.