[noosphr]

They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.

To quote CS Lewis:

>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

[gchamonlive]

> They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.

If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform. Nothing prevents you from gutting Ubuntu and making it your own. You can't say the same for Windows though.

So I guess is not a matter of monopoly of idiocy, but whether you can do something about idiot decisions when they are made. This is why an open platform will always win. It's just architecturally better for the end user.

[fasterik]

>If you know better just hack it your way.

While this might be technically true, I also think it's a lazy argument that ignores practical reality. It's basically a way to avoid any kind of accountability or self-reflection on the part of developers. "Users aren't happy? If they don't want to make the change themselves, they can fuck off." This is a toxic attitude which I see a lot in discussions of free software.

In practice, 99% of the time it's not worth the time and effort to fork and maintain a large project. Even in a free ecosystem, users get locked into specific products and technologies. This is why sane technical leadership and responsiveness to user feedback are important, even (especially?) in open source projects.

[gchamonlive]

Can you tell me an instance where users got locked into a dying ecosystem in Linux?

What I can tell you is that CentOS, which was used extensively in servers, died and you didn't really see much issue, at least not as much as compared to the pain and suffering users are having to go through now that Windows is the dying place.

What's lazy is the repetition of this realist fallacy of the technical lockin, when in fact what you really have is what you see, an open platform you can very well just leave for another when you disagree with the current vendor.

Dislike Ubuntu and you can very well migrate. That's the practical reality.

[fasterik]

There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland. These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.

I actually did leave Ubuntu because background Snap updates were randomly crashing running applications. Now, I'm fairly happy with Fedora, but it's far from perfect. I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.

[gchamonlive]

> These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.

> I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.

I understand it's frustrating when your distro or OS starts acting up. It's a means to an end, it should get out of your way and let you do your work.

On the other hand, it's impossible to appeal to everyone, so every decision will make some people happy and others unhappy. There's no way around it. The only thing that matters is whether we can live with it or not, in which case the option is to fix it or move on.

It's frustrating but nobody owes you anything. The sooner you realise this the better.

I for instance wasn't happy with anything available. The closest thing was hyprland so I made my own micro-distro on top of it: https://github.com/gchamon/archie. It's way less work than you think in the age of AI, but it does require you intimate knowledge of the system.

[swiftcoder]

If the expected Linux experience is "go build your own if you disagree", then I'm not clear how that is any better than being told the same by Microsoft/Apple

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland.

I run Gentoo on one machine and Alpine on several. I promise, none of those are required.

[heresie-dabord]

> If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform.

The GP already knows about FOSS. He uses OpenBSD and Guix and in his own words this is his "small, happy place".

Guix in particular is an excellent example of FOSS innovation.

[joe_mamba]

>If you know better just hack it your way. ... It's just architecturally better for the end user.

As an end user I want the product/tool to serve me well out of the box, I don't have time to hack it to fix what I dislike about it on my own dime. That's what my job is for.

[codedokode]

This is not always available. What smartphones "serve well out of the box", meaning zero telemetry, root privileges, open source, not requiring an account in a foreign country (and not spamming notifications about this), and working? Google Pixel requires time to fix, despite costing like 3-4 ordinary smartphones.

The same probably can be said about laptops. Linux is great but buggy, and proprietary OSes do not pass the requirements.

[zbentley]

Tangential, but how is

> The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated

Holding up in 2026? Pretty poorly, I’d say.

[smackeyacky]

How ironic. Reactionary old fart mostly known for writing moralistic children’s novels wants you not to listen to moralistic crusaders. I shall take his advice.

[kwertyoowiyop]

CS Lewis certainly got it wrong, if he believed that the greed of robber barons can ever be satisfied. I’ll take the moral busybodies, if I have to take either.

[luqtas]

CS Lewis: a prolific author of fantasy, science fiction, and Christian apologetics

[maleldil]

Does that mean what he says is less valuable?

> Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Said by a monster himself, but doesn't make it any less true.

[Scroll_Swe]

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.