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. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
Even this "I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out" is a hard-gained insight. Hackintosh is one of those things that made me understand this. Nothing like spending weeks to get your hackintosh working smoothly with all the hardware just to find out that the next update breaks everything. I've come to see it as a necessary part of the journey
This is my current state of thought. Proprietary software perceives me as an enemy who needs to be locked out of as many features as possible to allow for more money to be extracted out of me while also investing the least amount possible back into the product. The only timeframe where proprietary software is groundbreaking and at the forefront of technology is when they have not yet captured and locked in a large market share.
In my experience, doing a hackintosh actually teaches you that Apple hardware is not that special and macOS works only because they make it easy for themselves.
Then it becomes clear that if you don't really have an absolute need for macOS it is not worth the trouble since Windows/Linux actually make better use of the hardware with little trouble in comparison. By extension you develop a feeling that desktops Mac are really overpriced and don't have much of an advantage in the Apple Silicon age, since efficiency don't get you much but the performance delta for a given price is insane.
In fact, buying a PC that is equivalent to a base Mac Studio will cost you 1k euros less, even if you go with "nice but not that necessary" things (especially for a personal computer, like 10G networking).
But yeah, you also learn that it's better to not waste time trying to confort to Apple agenda, but that's also true for real Macs in my opinion.
This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this effect.
Meanwhile, the article is clear about how proprietary code absolutely prevented the author from understanding why the Wifi and Bluetooth failed with specific apps.
I know plenty of people with stamps who don't care to fiddle with their OS or change their own oil. People who work on putting things in orbit and beyond, people who build bridges, people who design undersea robots and airplanes. They're most definitely engineers.
This is the reason I still buy older cars. I can't stand owning a car only to find out that I can't work on it myself. Even if I don't have the time or tools needed for a specific job, if its something I could do on my own it means the job should be that much easier and cheaper to have a mechanic do.
I fully empathize - and yet, there are benefits from tinkerers/hackers messing around on proprietary hardware/software. Hackintosh - and similar communties - led to projects like Asahi Linux, Nouveau, Panfrost, etc.
> 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.
Back in the day it was alright because Microsoft gave you a fairly good dev environment in the form of Visual Studio, with the focus of it being squarely on desktop application development instead of tinkering with the system or running web services. It didn't stop people from doing it anyways but it's part of the reason why everything is so janky. Then the web took over and Microsoft tried for ages to make .net and Windows Server work until they realised they can't tune an OS that was never meant for backend development and just put all their focus on WSL. In the year 2024 there is almost no reason to be doing any non-desktop dev in a Windows environment unless it's on WSL. And you get the benefit of having an actually sane window management system and external display handling unlike MacOS, not to mention how nice PowerToys is.
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.
I work in IT, so I’m paid for my time to solve all kinds of issues with Windows. At home, such issues are unpaid work. Linux has the advantage of having issues be mostly of my own choosing. Stick to the golden path and you’ll hardly ever have them. And the easy configuration and recovery options allow you to jump into a new install with minimal hassle.
Everyone will have the same headaches with Windows as Microsoft’s choices are required these days. Millions of people have quite lucrative jobs solving them. I’d rather not bring work home so I run Linux.
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’).
It is _stable_, not outdated. You are practically guaranteed that if you’re running Debian Stable, and live only within the official apt ecosystem, you will not have software-based instability.
Debian Sid makes a better desktop distro than Ubuntu. The drivers are up to date, the instability is greatly exaggerated and installing nonfree codecs is easy (so easy with virtually any distro that it shouldn't even enter into the equation...)
This said, I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is rolling release yet more stable than Sid. Rolling release + extensive testing + automatic snapshotting gets you the best of all worlds.
Yeah, that’s why when I update my Arch MacBook Air once a year or two it works well, but Debian dies and needs to reinstall for some unknown reason. Before that, I believed Debian is so very stable. My experience shows the opposite.
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.
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.
I learn the interesting stuff, I just don't learn proprietary tech that I really don't ever want to be dependent on for my wages.
In fact most of the essential skills for my job I've learnt in my own time, and continue to learn. I invest my own money in equipment and training courses. I love learning. But only when it's interesting to me, not because it'll make more money to somebody else. If it'll make you more money, pay me.
> 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.
