No, please don't suggest Linux or FOSS alternatives. They are all dead on arrival. I need Office, not LibreOffice. I need Photoshop, not GIMP. I need Illustrator, not Inkscape. I want Windows, not Proton.
I need a computer, not a tinkerer's toy.
I don't care to computer either, because that's not what I consider computers to be at my point in life. I use tools, not tool tools.
Computers are tools to run software. Software is what makes (or breaks) the computer a useful tool. A computer without software is just as useful as a lump of pig iron: handy as a paper weight but no more.
Closed software which locks your data in its grasp may be OK for some purposes but in the long run it nearly always ends up causing problems - try opening an older Word file in current Word [1] for an example of such.
Firstly I have raised two bugs against LibreOffice in the last decade where it can't open files it created and can't print a spreadsheet.
Secondly the specifications for proprietary software are not necessarily closed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form...
The only thing here is that crap software is crap software. And Word is crap software.
I'm an adult with duties and responsibilities and limited time now, not a naive teenager with too much time, too little money, and a bad case of acne. I simply do not have the time, energy, nor will anymore.
Note: Also, I'm cursed. I've killed more Linux installs (barring Android) than I can bother to count at this point, for something as bluntly mundane as updating them. I cannot rely on Linux (again barring Android).
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given the HN audience, but come on. Ordinary people use computers because they need or want to do something, and a computer will help them do it.
Good point. Is something a tool still if the user has no choice but to use it?
Certainly it is no longer "an extension of the mind-body and will" as some philosophers define "tool".
Is it a crutch? And does that imply that we have become "disabled" or are now "differently abled but dependent"?
I think the GP's appeal to simple dignity of labour and clear purpose troubles me for other reasons though.
All tools shape their users, and none more-so than a computer. So much indeed that I think it deserves a different status. It's a different quality of tool than a hammer. Today, it very much uses you in equal measure to you using it.
Calling computers (mere) tools seems a little dismissive.
And in that regard I think the GP shows a typical nonchalance around what they _think_ is their (very mysterious and serious) "doings".
When a system already defines all the possibilities for what you can make and do, and these days it even curates, censors, "corrects" and extrapolates for you... what is left of that glorious will to action (doing)?
Has it been magnified such that it's "AIA" = AI aligns with IA (artificial intelligence is aligned with intelligence amplifications) and the tool is a lever (bicycle) for the mind?
Or are we cranking the handle on a auto-cookie-cutter machine that gives a choice of three shapes? That can feel a lot like "doing" stuff too.
The closer one is to that kind of "doing on rails" the more vulnerable to being replaced by a robot/algorithm.
OTOH, remembering how to see computers as engines of possibility rather than certainty again (as Ada Lovelace did), seems to me more where humans fit with computers. YMMV
Seeing as this needs demystifying for some bizarre reason...:
* Office work (including literally Microsoft Office documents, no substitutes acceptable).
* Occasional specialist work (CAD, Adobe Illustrator, etc.)
* Play; a man needs his vidja gaemz and some cold beer at the end of a long day.
You made it sound like they were somehow special, like, I dunno, particle physics that could only run on a custom quantum computer.
Now you're specific, looks like those are all perfectly normal and ordinary things, right?
I also had to use a very specialist CAD system. In those days the only things it would run on were Sun Microsystems and HP Unix boxen.
Other than Microsoft's monopoly grip, and your need to interface with other use ^H^H^Hvictims of that monopoly, is there any reason you wouldn't try a friendlier, more socially conscious solution?
Daring to ask about a problem will inevitably devolve into "You're committing heresy." and getting taken for a ride about changing my entire process and environment when that was never my inquiry nor even desirable.
As for socially conscious: Paying for good, practical software that serves my needs is a good thing. Both for myself and the developers, a win-win.
FOSS has a social contract problem. There are many open source developers who need/want money for their labor who get shut down and even coerced into free-as-in-beer for daring to ask for compensation, and many more project derelicts strewing the land abandoned due to lack of resources.
I see no fact here.
If you think about it computers have done as much to reveal and create new ends as they have to satisfy existing ones.
You remind me typical pro-Russian men who claim they are non-interesting in politics with no realizing their choice "not to be interested in politics" is a pro-war choice.
Recently I needed to de-duplicate 150,000 photographs from my dead father's NAS. I spent about 3-4 days trying to find an OSS solution that did the job and actually worked unsuccessfully. In the end I found some proprietary software (PhotoSweeper) that did the job in a couple of hours and cost $10
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
Metaphorical you of course. Parent does not want to run it. I believe this is a moral error and a coordination failure, and that saying a computer that is out of your control is "more of a computer" while a computer that actually does what you say is a 'toy' is disingenuous.
It is an unfortunate fact that you pay for freedom with effort. IDK if it ever was not so.