Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

I have only met two types of people in tech. Those that use Linux because they value some combination of transparency, security, freedom, privacy, and community. And then the people who buy Macs. I guess windows users still exist out there somewhere, probably.

A Linux user has access to a huge ecosystem of software they could pay to add any feature to they wanted, especially with the capabilities of self hosted LLMs these days.

Why would anyone with this much freedom pay money for proprietary software they are not allowed to change, with no external accountability it is free of backdoors and can be maintained long term?

This is so strange to me.

View on HN

> Why would anyone with this much freedom pay money for proprietary software they are not allowed to change, with no external accountability it is free of backdoors and can be maintained long term?

Because getting the F/LOSS alternative to feature-parity is going to require a multi-million-dollar investment, and using the proprietary product is $30 / month?

This really isn't rocket science. You're not going to get tens of thousands of people to throw $10 / month at random borderline-MVP F/LOSS projects in the hope that they'll eventually mature - especially when there isn't even anything resembling a mature project management structure around it. Without serious corporate backing, most of those projects will go absolutely nowhere.

> Because getting the F/LOSS alternative to feature-parity is going to require a multi-million-dollar investment,

That may have been true a year ago, but these days FOSS software can be extended by anyone with a GPU and some imagination, or any proprietary software can be rapidly reverse engineered and clean-roomed as open source. I have added features to most software I use every day.

Adding a giant pile of vibecoded garbage to a questionably-engineered hobby project does not usually tend to result in stable and production-ready software suitable for betting your livelihood on. Besides, those tokens - and especially those GPUs - aren't exactly free either.

If anything, at the bare minimum you're still going to need to pay a domain expert to judge the LLM's design documents. A hands-off "Clone Adobe Premiere Pro, make no mistakes." might eventually result in something vaguely Premiere Pro-shaped, but Good Luck convincing any members of the project's F/LOSS community to play whack-a-mole with your unmaintainable LLM dump to actually make it work.

When experienced software architects use LLMs to produce software they have actually read the code of and iterated on, they can get actually maintainable results and you cannot tell an LLM was involved. Commits to the Linux kernel are up 400% this year according to Torvalds. We all know that means unlabeled LLM help is involved, and if the quality bar is just as high, who cares?

For instance, even if it triples the wall time, you can say "Generate mathematical proofs for every function" and watch it fix a ton of its own bugs.

I have added tons of features to FOSS software I use with my own consumer GPUs and that is only going to get easier and require less hand holding to get correct and maintainable output.

There is indeed a middle ground between yolo one shots and hand coding every line and hand debugging every error.

As a Linux OS maintainer myself, LLMs have made debugging and fixing obscure bugs 100x faster freeing me up for more time to solve new problems.

> We all know that means unlabeled LLM help is involved, and if the quality bar is just as high, who cares?

Torvalds also committed code that doesn't compile. So I dunno if the quality bar actually is as high.

Let he who has never committed broken code cast the first stone.

Most of the Linux users I know in-person, are just people fed up with Windows. They'll happily pay for software.

This is new, it wasn't like that last year. But this year? People who have SteamDeck, saw it works, and then went and installed Linux on their own devices.

This was the type of insight I was looking for. Maybe there is a differently motivated new gen of Linux user after all.

I like F/LOSS software, but I'm no Stallman. Let's be honest, flawed proprietary products I can't improve but am still forced to pay for are a regular part of day-to-day life. I have no meaningful influence over the products I buy in the supermarket, or my apartment building's elevator programming, or the entertainment cluster of modern cars.

All else being equal I do prefer the F/LOSS alternative - and even pay extra for it - but I am not against paying for an obviously-superior proprietary alternative. The real question has always been "Do the F/LOSS alternatives to this proprietary Windows-only software suck badly enough that dual-booting the nightmare that is Windows is the lesser evil?", and in a lot of cases my conclusion has been that the preferred option is to... not use any version.

To give a concrete example: FreeCAD is basically unusable, and Fusion 360 is the obviously-superior proprietary alternative which doesn't run on Linux. Do I want to design my own 3D-printable parts badly enough to deal with Windows so that I can use Fusion 360? Ehhh, I think I'll just stick to mostly printing ready-made assemblies I download off the internet. Would I pay €10 / month for a hobbyists Linux version of Fusion 360 (which is free for Windows and macOS)? Heck yeah, zero doubt!

Appreciate the perspective, but as a career hacker, none of these are excuses that register with me.

> I have no meaningful influence over the products I buy in the supermarket

I have talked to staff at small markets to stock items that give me reason to shop there more often. It is amazing what people will do for regulars.

> or my apartment building's elevator programming

Hacked elevators many times. You can buy elevator operator keys for most cities on ebay. Look for pentesters keychains.

> or the entertainment cluster of modern cars.

I have jailbroken or replaced systems like these more times than I can count.

> FreeCAD is basically unusable

I use FreeCAD to make things all the time, and it is easy to hook up automation tools and scripts to. It has come a very long way in the past couple of years.

Because it just doesn’t matter to most people.

Your comment reads like a vegan trying to moral grandstand over meat eaters. IME it’s unlikely to do much except annoy anyone who’s not already aligned with your viewpoints.

People who build their entire businesses on open source software who could not be where they are without it and refuse to pay it forward annoy me. Annoyance all around!

My question remains. What is the appeal of paying someone for proprietary software anymore when you could pay dramatically less or nothing to get exactly the software you want because of the hard work of the FOSS community?

Selling binaries is no longer a viable business model anymore for a technical customer, or so I thought.

> Selling binaries is no longer a viable business model anymore for a technical customer, or so I thought.

You thought wrong. I'm not gonna vibecode my own Photoshop, nor am I gonna be happy with the FOSS alternatives. Spending what I make in a few hours of work to have a commercial product that satisfies all my need still is a savvy business and time-saving investment.

I'm a hardcore Linux user, though over time I stopped being so strict on the ideology side, especially since it's become clear that it's because of FOSS that Big Tech has grown so large, greedy and complacent. It's because of FOSS that selling software hasn't really been viable for decades.

I'd rather pay smaller companies for their product, than stubbornly stick to FOSS-only, which indirectly goes to support Big Tech and the destruction of small businesses.

FOSS and profitability are not mutually exclusive. I would rather just pay people who enable my right to inspect or modify any software that runs on my computer, but I appreciate the honest perspective regardless.

My own companies are 100% FOSS by the way. Hackers with spare time will immediately see how to use it for free in their own homelabs, but the companies with more money than time would rather pay us than figure out how to run complex systems that require multiple people to manage securely in production. Everyone wins.

IMO an ethical business provides value in convenience without us having to take user freedoms away. Small companies acting like the big ones does not make me want to give them money personally. I -only- pay for software if it is FOSS.

I ran archlinux for 10+ years and then switched to macos... macos is a lot of suck but I have spent a considerably less amount of time configuring my workstation. Although today with LLMs it's a different story. If I want xorg to behave in any niche way I could just ask codex and it'll just do it... No more looking through forums.

I also use software that just runs better out of the box on macos than on linux..

The integration with the iphone is pretty nice, I copy something on my phone, I paste on my macbook, you can probably do that with android + linux but idk how.

> I have spent a considerably less amount of time configuring my workstation

Complete opposite for me.

On NixOS I enable KDE with i3 and rofi, and there's little to adjust.

On MacOS, I need yabai, karabiner, raycast, shottr (costs money), one of those hideous tray management tools that work by capturing your screen (facepalm)... For yabai I need to disable system integrity protection. With every update my setup breaks, and I need to spend countless hours debugging and setting everything up again... And it's still subpar to what I could have in Linux.

Interesting, I know several Arch people (including myself) that were forced onto Mac for work and absolutely detested it. I'm the type of Arch user though that sets it up the way I like it and leave it alone. Are you a continual tinkerer?

An employer tried to make me use MacOS once. I tore it down to the Darwin kernel and shell tools and then built X11 and my window manager of choice and a typical Linux toolchain until it was MacOS in name only.

They finally gave up enforcing software rules with me and I became the one exception allowed to install Linux.

AKA “I chased OCD down the rabbit hole on my employer’s dime”.

They wasted their own time by thinking they know what tools an engineer will be productive with better than the engineer. Such thinking is insulting, and deserves to be undermined.

Also once on the other side of this transition, I was by far the most productive engineer in the company. Did the initial rewrite of their entire product that their entire team built over years, by myself, and that new code is still what they use today.

They gave me their strongest allowed counter-offer to try to keep me when I left. Left anyway because there was nothing left for me to learn there.

As a designer who uses Affinity on Linux (notably designed a zine for 404 Media using it and wrote about it): Portability is a major concern with stuff like this, and part of the reason people get so insanely crochety about Adobe not porting their apps to Linux.

Yes, if an app works for you, awesome, and it’s obviously ideal to use open stuff. But we live in a society and as good as PDFs are, you’re probably not going to get a print shop to install Scribus just because you want them to.

(Affinity, it should be noted, is free to use, but closed-source.)

Context if it helps: https://www.404media.co/the-weird-way-the-404-media-zine-was...

The base must be free, but applications are a different story. They are not causing any lock in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com