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Comment by black-tea | Hacker News Reader

I'm a trained musician but I'm not going to complain when my plumber doesn't quite sing in tune. It just doesn't matter. I have a pretty well-trained eye for typography too, but when the choice is between systems that are free, fast, privacy-respecting, and functional and systems that are pretty but completely out of my control I'm never going to choose the latter.

I'm not sure what posts like yours are trying to achieve. Are you just complaining about how nobody has managed to make something that is free and perfectly well "designed"? If so, why not try to do something about it rather than complain? You'd probably make a lot of people happy if you did. To me it seems more like you are saying that your priorities are with superficial design rather than anything actually relating to work, hence my original comment.

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i agree with you about the plumber. it doesn't matter. but imo that example is not really an analogous situation. what if your instrument was always out of tune? or if a member of your ensemble couldn't keep time? i bet that would prevent you from making a record or being productive otherwise as a musician.

as a full time developer and someone who does notice these little things, i care a lot about good design and visual polish. in order to get my work done, i have to use these interfaces for hours on end, after all. if it doesn't particularly bother you, hey that's great. even if not intentional, this and your original comment come off as a bit disparaging, so that reply isn't terribly off base.

Linux desktop is more like an unpolished trumpet, with a few dents. After a small amount of tuning, it plays the perfect note every time. You can take it apart, and adjust the internals. If you wish, you can turn it into any other type of instrument.

Then you have macOS, perfectly round, so shiny you can see your face, including the insides... the nicest looking trumpet money can buy. But it comes in one piece, only the shop can re-tune it, and has only one button, and sounds exactly the same as the other apple trumpets.

And Windows... average looking a trumpet, which everyone recognises, operated like a kazoo. Sometimes it plays the wrong note, or stop during a performance. You can retune it, but it will de-tune itself randomly. Sometimes it will recommend the shop's other instruments, and report back to the shop what you've been playing. But the shop now wants to rent studios, instead.

These analogies are fun. Reminded me of that Neal Stephenson book, "In the beginning was the command line".

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