Folks. Richard Stallman was a fucking weirdo, but free software is the key. Root everything. Jailbreak everything. Run free software. Liberate all the machines. Download FlightGear, install the bombable plug-in, and take a go at the Pentagon.
imagine using android as your main os.
In many countries such as India, an Android smartphone is their first and only computer. If you are not including the older Nokia phones. This is the norm for at least hundreds of millions of people
I have no solution beyond "open source good" but proprietary OSs/software/websites are increasingly being designed to force power users into only being able to experience software as if we were computer illiterate.
People already are using tablets as full computers. In low income areas especially, teachers receive full mf essays typed out on the students' phones.
Personally to make it fun again the answer for me is Linux and just enjoying that. Trying different distros and such. Playing around with weird things. But I get that most people don't want to and have no need to do so.
Straight android would be sad for me and when Mac or Windows or whatever frustrates me by restricting my abilities I get angry.
Most people aren't like that though. I compare it cars. Like I have no interest in building a car from parts or having a project or whatever. When it refused to start I'd just be pissed not excited to solve the problem.
Would it be strictly good to know how your computers work under the hood? Sure but it'd be strictly good for me to know how to repair a car? Yes but I don't.
What's really bad is companies using this lack of knowledge of everything to control. Happens in computers. Happens in cars.
This is why we need communism.
I can tell the edibles are kicking in because I'm writing really long comments.
I hope physical keyboards continue to stay because I struggle typing things on a tablet.
Touchscreens for typing have always been a horrible mistake and a step down. "Oh I have a giant screen on my phone now" shut the fuck up you can't type a coherent sentence without an AI correcting your spelling, grammar, and word choice!
but you can't buy a modern phone with a slide out keyboard :deeper-sadness:
I mean yeah, without physical homerow key indicators it's tough to type without having to constantly look. I can almost do it with two thumbs on my phone, but even then I think it's dependent on my peripheral vision and glancing occasionally.
it's middle class (lol) privilege to not want to have a device literally designed to extract as much personal data for capitalist profit?
I don't wanna go outside, that's where all the people who hate me are.
:downbear: The latest encroachments like TPMs and locked bootloaders affect everyone, nerd programmer or not. Just because they don't understand why beyond "device won't do the thing I want it to" in a lot of cases, like my mother's 1 year old roku box getting dropped support for netflix, and being about as useful to her as a brick after that point. She doesn't need to know the words, or be into nerd shit like HDMI encryption to experience that.
Or my grandfather whose chromebook was dropped from updates because it was too old after only 3 years.No one is worried about devices being made more simple to use. They're all "real" computers that can be simple, they can be complex, they can be anywhere in between that you want so long as they aren't intentionally locked down.
It does what you need until google, microsoft, or apple decides your device is "too old" and then oops too bad you better chuck it in the trash and buy a new one
As alternative options are more and more restricted they will only tighten the thumbscrews, because they can.
Do wish you wouldn't put words in my mouth and talk down to me about "gamer oppression" and treats.
That's a separate problem. But there's never going to be a time when your average layman decides to flash a new operating system onto their computer because the current one stopped being supported. Operating systems themselves should be maintained much longer by the people who make then, which isn't going to happen for anything popular right now with capitalism. The simplicity isn't the problem. iOS is a thousands times better for 99% of people than Windows or Linux or macOS. It has way more sophisticated features than the old barely-updated ones like Windows. It actually has application sandboxing which makes it actually secure unlike Windows. But weird tech nerds would complain that you can't write a program that deletes all your documents the second you run it.
weird tech nerds would complain that you can’t write a program that deletes all your documents the second you run it
or that you can't run your own apps without it getting approved by Apple, or use any browser that isn't a safari reskin, etc. sandboxing is good but most of the Security(tm) features are just to enforce apple's walled garden to keep you buying more iphones
yeah but Android literally lets you install apps from wherever and also has sandboxing. iOS isn't dumb because it's simple, it's dumb because of capitalists. Everything else about it is really great. I love using my phone because I don't have to think about where programs are installed or any other junk like that.
This is why I don't care about things like GNOME desktop. It's a garden and it's walled, but there's a fence gate through which you can leave if you want. Go use another desktop. Not so on an iphone and most androids anymore, because they want your data, to show you ads and sponsored apps (on android), and to force you to pay monthly for "features" like call blocking and tethering. Imagine telling someone who is being harassed "no you can't block your stalker's number unless you pay $5.99 a month for our call screening service". Absolute ghoul shit.
You can have application sandboxing and stop the 99% of users from deleting all their documents unintentionally, while still allowing weird nerds to do so if they want to. Make me tap the version number in settings 57 times and then write "I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING I'M A WEIRD NERD WHO WANTS A BROKEN PHONE" in a text message to your mother on a full moon while holding the phone at exactly a 123.4 degree angle if you must.
okay but that's basically useless. It doesn't actually help anyone other than weird nerds who think of themselves as special. And it provides a way for someone to trick grandma into breaking the sandbox. And for iOS at least, there is nothing else to really access. It's not like you're going to access the data structures or storage of the OS, because doing so isn't documented or supported in any way and doesn't need to be. The APIs apps use is the operating system. The only thing I think iOS would really benefit from is downloading apps from outside the App Store.
"Basically useless" I will be the judge of that, considering I own the phone. "Who think of themselves as special" because doing anything that isn't apple-approved with my phone is hubris?
It's exactly like I'm going to access everything, why wouldn't I? It's heavily customized BSD under all of it. Downloading apps from outside the app store is a solid reason. Not having to pay $4 for a dedicated shovelware app to perform some basic function that computers do easily is a good reason. Lowering the bar to entry for writing your own apps is another.
ya got me i had a windows 98 pc in my adolescence and was basically forced to learn how a computer works, and maybe thats not for everyone, but when people dont know what a filesystem is that makes me personally upset and thats whats important
Why do people obsess over file systems? They're not actually very useful. There is no law of nature that says "An operating system must have a built-in file system!" The Windows and Linux file systems are garbage. They're simultaneously used for the operating system itself, program data, and documents and pictures. That's nonsensical. Data should be stored in a data structure that makes sense. You can barely even do file search on Windows and Linux, but every phone app has pretty sophisticated features for instantly searching file metadata in pictures and so on. To even have a photo library on any system you have to build an SQL database of the photos, otherwise it's far too slow to search through them. File systems are really not that useful. And they only complicate the kernel and operating system features. The only reason Linux has such a prominent file system is because that was all the hotness back then with turning everything into a file (which turns out is not actually that useful compared to just having useful APIs like iOS and Android have).
Android and iOS still have file systems, the user just isn't allowed to look at them
even on mac they make it obnoxiously hard to browse outside of a short list of curated user folders.
Because they might as well not even be file systems. They're just data structures that the OS developers control for storing data. You can run Linux with an almost empty tmpfs root file system, and barely touch the file system at all. There's nothing fundamental about file systems other than being the most prominent way to allocate and track persistent storage space.
Has anybody tried making a partition that’s really just a sqlite3 binary blob?
It sounds like SQLite still requires a couple dynamically sizeable files for storing the database, so it probably isn't possible. You'd have to have a key-value store that can allocate blocks for the different files it needs.
It seems really bizarre to me, because you'd think a large tech company would have found a performance reason for throwing out the file system and disk partitions and using the device directly for storage, but it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Probably wouldn't even be that hard for a team at a big company to implement a basic file system stripped of all the hierarchical/metadata stuff and use that.
I guess it really comes down to the fact that every application needs something like the program heap to store variable sized objects, and the file system is the closest thing to that currently.
Key-value stores, relational databases, logs, anything you can think of. It just depends on what you're storing. There just aren't a lot of data structures implemented because file systems work well enough. I think it would be cool if there was a block storage alternative to file systems that was more like virtual memory.
For example: Pangolin: A Fault-Tolerant Persistent Memory Programming Library: https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/presentation/zhang-lu
Only designed for embedded devices though.
File systems are especially annoying because they have all sorts of metadata that makes them less reliable. Does a file have the correct permissions? Is it writable? Is another program using it? Is it fragmented?
An iOS or Android app has no use for file permissions or ownership or creation date or even sub-directories, in its own sandbox directory, so that's just extra overhead and extra code (in the file system driver) that provides no benefit, but can still potentially cause problems.
I don't know if I've ever seen a single Windows application that correctly handles every error case when using the file system. You'll get all sorts of unfriendly errors, crashes, and freezes because of stupid things like file permissions or some obscure file system "feature". And that doesn't even get to file path string encoding, maximum files in a directory, max file size, etc. that also have to be considered when writing robust software. And every thing that isn't considered is another thing that will end up hurting the end user. And all of these things vary slightly between operating systems, and developers don't typically use a custom file system on top of the OS file system, so it means there isn't a consistent programming environment, and even more error cases have to be considered (and these types of things do produce real errors that affect users). How often do SQL databases and key-value stores produce errors? (probably only as often as the file system they're implemented on top of do)
i upvoted for a minute, but changed my mind and have removed it
i hope that makes you feel bad
edit: in fact, communism is when everyone is using arch linux
vegan btw
People definitely forget that there were plenty of privacy-invading shit in the beige-box days ('member BonziBuddy?) and that it took decades before even half of web traffic was using HTTPS.
A while back I remembered bonzi buddy out of the blue and started searching. Somehow I came upon an ebay listing for a bonzi buddy plush toy that was going for like 700$ and people were bidding on it.
"They care that the object that lets them relax with funny videos after work keeps breaking" - think you kinda accidentially hit the nail on the head of why this line of thought pisses me off. Historically, large amounts of culture were produced + recreated by the people who participated within it. While the printing press and, in this case, its more modern counterparts offer liberationary potential, they also entrap us. Smartphones, other than their cameras, are designed exclusively for consumption, and therefore make consumption the only form of relaxation for most people. What does it mean for society that most of those videos are picked by an algorithm designed by a private company to maximise profit? What does it mean that piracy is made much harder, so private interests can make media disappear overnight? What does it mean that you require the approval of a business to share a program you made with someone else? If someone only uses the big social media sites, as app-centered mobile devices strongly encourage, then most of their social activity is now entirely devoted to capital. I'm not saying that everybody should use the command line - I'm saying that these devices are engineered to reproduce a caste of tech elites, and keep the masses in their MrBeast feed bags, far more than they're engineered for human utility. I've become entirely unhinged while writing this, but hopefully I got some kind of point across.
“Art belongs to the people. It must leave its deepest roots in the very thick of the working masses. It should be understood for the masses and loved by them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and the will of the masses and raise them. It should awaken artists in them and develop them.” - Vladimir Lenin
How to make computers fun again? Simplify. There’s a whole community of people doing green computing, essentially developing skills for being “the techie” as society collapses. Recovering cheap microcontrollers out of mass produced electronics. Hacking together computers from parts that weren’t designed for each other. Lots of radio wave shit
There’s a whole community of people doing green computing
Can you point me in the direction of this community? Sounds fun to check out but all I see is industry apologetics and greenwashing shit when searching for the term in isolation
Off the top of my head, collapseos is a cool project. I know there’s a lot of work around DIY urban agriculture that used arduinos and stuff for automation. I’d love to see more actually communities about it though
people use the computers they can afford that do what they need them to
Yeah, I can see desktop and laptop computers going back to primarily being for business use and for expensive hobbies.
aside from buying a PC, I just use the magic of piracy and/or play ancient games, and I barely spend any money on gaming
i basically am just now getting over the fact it isnt 10 years ago
life after 30
everytime i feel old sitting at my desk with my chunky home built PC i realize how much shit i can get done compared to my android phone. i just don't see mobile exceeding the capabilities of desktop/laptop computing for another decade at least. in the end it's a tiny device that is basically a slow, crappy computer and they have physical limitations that will mean they will never get much better.
tablets still suck because they have all the disadvantages of a phone and none of the advantages of a desktop/laptop.
it was so fast from "computers are nerd shit" to "computers are necessities" in the 90s/00s it was like whiplash. so now we can return to being niche again. ballwark of open source/freeware stuff.It's crazy how tech illiterate people are these days. It's cos kids first bit of tech is always some streamlined apple crap that does everything for them and makes certain tasks virtually impossible.
Im pro gamer in that sense. Kids who grew up installing mods on Minecraft by having to get into %appdata% and all that are so much more technologically capable.
Or kids who grew up with Apple II's and had to program their own games by copying code from a magazine
I mean I basically use android as my main OS on my phone and it's not that bad. I can emulate GameCube and PS2 games for my epic gaming needs when I'm away from home, apps are easy to install and sideload and piracy is very easy.
There's modded YouTube apps without adverts, there's browsers with extensions and add ons, you can get different music and video players if you want, there's basic file access and actual file management, I've used adb commands to customise some stuff like running 120Hz refresh rate in power saving mode, dozing apps quicker, etc.
I grew up on a Windows XP computer and know how to use it, and do stuff in CMD and the cursed multi management consoles, and installed Linux on my laptop. I just don't use it because it's shit and slow, and I can't afford a decent PC.
