Comment by dataflow
4 months ago
> I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out.
The problem with this approach is then you get a generation of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever) software did it.
Invest time in learning your technologies, whatever they are. There's valuable knowledge in proprietary stuff just as there is in OSS.
I agree with your point in principle, and yet I installed Ubuntu on my work laptop this January after using Windows professionally for my entire (5 year) career. I've found myself moving in the opposite direction from the person in the root comment, because I find that it's getting harder and harder to find tolerable proprietary software. It feels like everything is glacially slow, laden with ads and tracking, reliant on an internet connection for basic functionality, or some combination of the above.
"There is valuable knowledge worth learning in the technology" != "this is strictly better software on every axis and you should switch to it for your daily work"
As someone that learned to program on BSD and shortly thereafter, Mac OS X and Linux....
I honestly don't know how people use Windows machines as a dev environment 24/7. It would drive me mad. Everything's so wonky and weird. Everything from symlinks to file permissions is just backwards and fucky.
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I mean this in the nicest possible way: 5 years is likely not long enough for the “just work, stupid” desire to really, really, really set in. Nor is a couple of months enough time for the potential rough edges of desktop Linux to set in.
Given that I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop since I was 11, I'm not worried.
The reason I switched was because Windows didn't work. Win11's desktop makes early-2010s KDE look like a smooth, bug-free experience. My laptop (a 10th gen X1 thinkpad) was plagued with driver problems. At least twice a month, I'd have to reboot when I joined a meeting and discovered my mic wouldn't un-mute. Switching to Ububtu solved both of these problems, and I don't have to deal with an awkwardly bifurcated environment where a couple of my CLI tools run in WSL while everything else is native. Oh, and my Zephyr build times are a good 25% faster now.
After 17 years of using Linux I realized that I was tired of tinkering with shit, so I caved and bought a macbook air. Not even two years later I was back on Linux, because I realized that the amount of tinkering I do on Linux is actually very small; the experience I already paid my time for means that Linux is simply easy for me to use, while MacOS is a pain in the ass in innumerable small unexpected ways. The path of least resistance, for me, is to continue with Linux.
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I’ve been using Windows throughout my childhood and start of my CS career - now I use Windows for specific software (audio/music) and Linux for developing (about 8 years I guess). I had a 1-year stint with macOS because I was developing an iOS app, and have been the troubleshooter for people with macs at my previous job, so I consider myself somewhat ‘multilingual’ when it concerns OSs.
As a power user, Linux is just so much nicer. I constantly get frustrated, especially with macOS, about stuff that I can’t easily. In Linux my stuff works and if it doesn’t it can be made to work (usually). In Windows/Mac it’ll often take considerable effort to make the system work the way I want, or it’s just not possible.
I think with proprietary software ‘it just works’ is only a thing if you’re happy with the basic experience that is tuned to the average person. If you have more complex needs, you should be using Linux (and if you know your stuff or use the right distro, things will likely also ‘just work’).
FYI, Ubuntu is a heavily advertised distro. Its pretty bottom barrel for quality.
If you want a modern linux distro, try Fedora Cinnamon or something that isnt on Debian branch.
It is not surprising that you posted this flame bait from a throwaway account.
What is wrong with Debian?
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Frankly there is no value in learning user-hostile proprietary technologies in a way that the owner of said technologies actively wants to discourage and prevent.
Like learn the proprietary tech in the environments it's intended to be used in but if you can't use it in that environment I personally wouldn't waste my time with it. With FOSS tech at least you can make the argument that you can learn stuff by maintaining it properly but with a proprietary stack in an unsupported and actively user hostile environment the best you are going to do is learn how to maintain a fragile truce with the software gods.
Peeling all the way all the politics / idealism from your comment and the value proposition between these two options is basically the same, with the difference being that on a proprietary stack there’s a higher chance of things breaking in a way that you low/no likelihood of fixing. It’s all good and well that it seems like this makes you personally want to throw up in your mouth a bit or whatever, but you are claiming objectivity that clearly isn’t here.
Yeah I'll learn as much as I absolutely have to in order to get my paycheck. Any more and you need to give me a raise.
That's not a good way to make money. It's not how FAANG pays people, and if it is how your employer pays people then you should always be learning so you can change to better jobs.
A funny thing about "never work for free" advice is that a lot of highly paid jobs (investment banking, high end escorts) are about doing tons of client work for free in a way that eventually gets them to pay you way too much when they do pay you.
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> Frankly there is no value in learning user-hostile proprietary technologies in a way that the owner of said technologies actively wants to discourage and prevent.
Security research. And, uh, applied security research.