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Tech savvy users are not just the minority. They're also cheap. They've been conditioned by the FOSS movement to think all software should be free as-in-beer. (The people who started FOSS didn't say that, but that's what it's become.) They say they want free as-in-freedom, but since they are not willing to pay for it they don't exist. Those who pay set the agenda for everything.

Developing a truly polished operating system with a whole ecosystem of services is far, far beyond what volunteers and hobbyists can achieve. It's just too much work. It also requires focus and coordination and someone who is able and willing to say no. Without that the FOSS community rewrites everything over and over again instead of doing the not-fun parts of programming like fixing bugs and edge cases.

TL;DR: we get what we pay for. We don't pay for freedom so we don't get it.

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Where are these weird anti-FOSS statements being bred from?

> Those who pay set the agenda for everything. And this different from non FOSS software how?

> Developing a truly polished operating system with a whole ecosystem of services is far, far beyond what volunteers and hobbyists can achieve.

As someone who uses Linux as my primary workstation I disagree. My coworkers that use Mac or Windows seem to have about the same number of issues overall. I mean- look at the article this is about. I’m pretty confident that would be much harder to get away with in the Linux community. Gnome shell is more polished than windows or macOS were at the same age.

> It also requires focus and coordination and someone who is able and willing to say no.

Clearly you haven’t dealt with the Gnome folks who are perfectly willing to say no to features some users scream for. Or read any of Linus’s rants about nvidia.

Edit: formatting

I crap on FOSS a bit because I like it and wish it got more traction in the mainstream. I intend it as constructive criticism.

I've been a FOSS user and sometimes contributor since 1994 when I installed Linux with floppy disks, and have consistently watched FOSS lose the mainstream because they don't grasp the critical importance of UI/UX.

I want to write "it has to just work" on a sledgehammer and bash people about the head with it over and over again until they understand that user experience is f'ing EVERYTHING and every installation or setup step required to adopt something roughly halves adoption.

This is largely because we are in an age of time and attention poverty.

Is it really a goal of most FOSS projects to attract the mainstream? IME some of the highest-quality and longest lived projects know who their users are and provide an extremely high quality product.

I don't want to see Arch Linux, for example, to start prioritizing for attracting non-technical users who want it to "just work."

Well you should be thankful our predecessors took making things "just work" seriously enough to remove your need to boot using toggle switch sequences.

Oh come on! It is not because I spend most of my life inside a terminal that I don't prefer simple things over complicated ones.

Technical doesn't mean "unnecessarily complicated", it means "rich, expressive and built for users that are willing to spend some time to learn" (at least it should)

Sorry then. I had read something anti-foss the other day (probably on Reddit) which seemed to have a hidden agenda behind it like in the old days. As far as having a “it just works” experience- sticking with the Lenovo and Dell professional lines has worked out pretty well for me.

> They say they want free as-in-freedom, but since they are not willing to pay for it they don't exist. Only paying users matter.

Citation needed. If you look at app store pricing models the opposite seems true. If I were going to take a random guess I would say that tech savvy users use open source software to avoid anti-consumer bullshit more than anything else.

If enough people said to Apple "hey, this stuff is not acceptable and we won't pay for it" and then they actually did follow through, Apple would stop.

My point is that the vast majority of people don't say that, only a very tiny minority. The vast majority of people want convenience, not control. They want their stuff to "just work" because even if they do have the technical knowledge they don't have the time to screw around with fixing their computer. Apple is giving the market what they want as evidenced by actual buying behavior, not posts on HN.

My other point is that while there probably are enough tech-savvy people who care about freedom to support a viable alternative platform, the majority of these users are not willing to pay for anything so there is not in fact a market for it.

Basically what it boils down to is that people don't actually care. Even the vocal people who say they care don't care because they won't open their wallets or change their buying habits. If you won't actually do anything about something, you don't care. Whining on the Internet is not doing something.

> They want their stuff to "just work" because even if they do have the technical knowledge they don't have the time to screw around with fixing their computer.

And that's why I picked up an MBP this year; it's caused me way less grief than my various Linux boxen have.

It's the opposite for me. Pop!_OS has caused me the least amount of grief. I tried switching to it as my main workstation but, sadly, Zoom doesn't run very well (in my experience). It crashed often and started using 100% CPU on all my cores.

> Basically what it boils down to is that people don't actually care. Even the vocal people who say they care don't care because they won't open their wallets or change their buying habits. If you won't actually do anything about something, you don't care. Whining on the Internet is not doing something.

People aren't buying features off a list. In a situation like this a missing feature has to be so important that it completely disqualifies the product, which is a very different thing from a willingness to open the wallet.

It's similar to how you can get a kindle with or without lock screen ads. If the only option was with ads, you'd see more people buying that version because it becomes artificially hard for them to say "I don't want ads". Even though they're willing to pay for the feature.

And for convenience vs. control, well, this firewall bypass doesn't help convenience.

> If enough people said to Apple "hey, this stuff is not acceptable and we won't pay for it" and then they actually did follow through, Apple would stop.

“The market will price this out” doesn’t actually work because it assumes that 1. Apple’s product strategy is done to match market desires perfectly and 2. The decision to buy is solely predicated on this particular thing. The first is false because nobody can do that and the second is because people buy Apple products for other reasons than just that. I personally know many people (although this sample is of course unbiased) that buy Apple devices for a number of reasons (they work well, they look nice, they have good support) but hate that they can’t do thing on them. But their purchase decision doesn’t reflect their opinions on this particular issue.

I'm happy to pay for good FOSS and open hardware and I'm paying. Also I'm trying to avoid any proprietary and especially cloud-connected things. You are generalizing too much, there are enough people who are happy to pay for trustworthy software and hardware. Just noone cares.

> Tech savvy users are not just the minority. They're also cheap.

Bologna. I spent $4,000 for this MBP, and I've spent many hundreds on accessories, and thousands of dollars on software to run on it. I do everything on it. It is the center of my digital life.

That being said, the day I go to do something on this machine and find that I can't is the day I go buy a sub-$1,000 PC laptop, and go back to Linux (which I ran on the desktop for 19 years). Apple should be very careful how hard they squeeze here.

I think that's a false false assumption.

With trust you get trade. Trade is commerce and the more trust you have the more money changes hands.

If I could firewall my phone I would upgrade every year no question.

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