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by coffee_beqn
1384 days ago
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The thing is that is just not what most people want out of a computer. Force everyone to use OpenBSD and they’ll still just use the browser and a few consumer apps. They won’t magically care about how computers work or spontaneously set up a programming environment. Those who do buy a real computer (which are cheap! and a click away on Amazon) and go work in tech. Schools also (I hope!) still use PCs to teach technology. You can get a programming capable computer for free since most people consider a 5 year old computer (with 4-8 cores and 8-16GB RAM) to be ancient useless garbage. You have choices of form factor at $100.
Everyone could buy a $70 old office liquidation computer that’s perfectly capable of servicing their emailing and document editing needs. But instead they buy $1200 phones. I think Steve Jobses most powerful idea was that other things should be computing devices too.
Computers haven’t gone anywhere. You can buy one at the big grocery stores. |
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One example: When I encounter a word I don't know, in my native tongue or another language, how can I find out what it means? I can copy it to some service like google translate or an online dictionary. Maybe I even think of looking for a browser extension? But all these things are work and complicated. So I probably just read on. On my kobo reader, I can long press a word and get the dictionary entry. So I use that regularly to look up and learn new words which I would not if I always had to take out my phone and go online. Back in the day, google+ had a translate button, that would instantly translate text inline, which made it super easy to follow or even talk to people who wrote in a different language.
These kind of features are empowering! They use computers at what they are good at and they benefit most users who don't want to learn to program or customize their system. But they are few and far between in commercial systems or open source alternatives. An empowering system is not just one that you can customize, but also one that enhances the users own capabilities in meaningful ways. And there is a plethora of low hanging fruit there, we sadly are just too often stuck between "good enough" and "works for me"