I agree with the post, but it is not just operating systems, and it has been going in the 'closed wall' direction since before WinXP.

We had programs like 'pidgin' that allowed chatting with different protocols, whereas now even I (a Linux nerd with 30 years IT experience) have no clue how to take a backup of my Whatsapp/Facetime/... conversations. Completely closed protocols are winning over open ones.

There is a similar process going on with websites; they used to be open and readable for everyone. Today I cannot access most pages that are sent to me via mail or that are linked in forums, unless I create an account and agree to share everything with 799 partners. Never mind that all links are now safelinks.protection.outlook.

I have the same trepidations. It's getting damn near impossible to get a haircut or a surgical procedure or a parking place without carrying a cellphone. The trend is toward all technology that is permitted becoming mandatory, and all technology that is not mandatory is becoming forbidden.

So much of the free as in whatever software sector (and much of the telecomm infrastructure that it relies on) is now subject to change without notice, mostly because it is tolerated, funded or owned by very business-oriented mega-corporations who (note: corporations being people in the USA, please do not think I am casting aspersions on any of my flesh-and-blood brethren) have tempered their avarice to the extent that they want to move only somewhat faster than everyone else, and only break things that slow their progress. So the list of things that are going to get worse before they get better is bound to get longer before it gets shorter. Progress is our only product, love it or leave it. I could give you 37 or 38 pages of examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to die of legal fees.

That brings me to Viktor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way".

I'd widen the scope to demand kids having unmediated, self-managed contact with reality, preferably physical one. Should be encouraged to tinker with everything, computers being only part of it. Not having any such kind of play is the original cultural death.

I'm curious how many people started their hobby or career by just dabbling in Paint or whatever other bundled Windows program. The equivalent of that does still exist to some extent (is Garageband included by default on iOS? Or MacOS for that matter?), but the world has clearly changed. And sure, there's a whole world of apps out there that you could go and download, but 90% of it is garbage, and the remaining 10% is locked behind a login and choice paralysis, so it'll never be discovered by kids today unless they get lucky (recommendations by other people, seeing someone else doing something cool and asking what that app is).

Ivory tower is right when you're talking about Linux. I've heard "Linux is for the big tech companies now" enough times to make me gag.

Sorry, I agree with the sentiment of wanting a computing environment that’s easy for kids to approach and not too much walled garden, but “last bastion of hope is Windows”???

> To use a computer, especially for programming, is the purest form of creation that man has ever dreamed up.

Literature? Poetry? Sonnets? Film? Romance? Brewing? This is an incredibly uncultured take.

Reminder that only programmers, by and large, care about anyone’s digital creations. Anyone can appreciate romantic verse more than your C# program that spins a cube.

This reminds me of Louis Rossman's Clippy rant. No, Clippy wasn't "just there to help". He represented not the end of some bygone era, but the beginning of the current one: in which operating systems attempt to get ahead of the user and shape their behavior to the vendor's needs, rather than simply doing what the user commands.

Similarly, Windows XP represented the beginning of the current, telemetry-encrusted, handholdy, locky-downy era in computing, not the idyllic past. It was the first Windows to feature product activation, and to send vital data about your system back to Microsoft for license enforcement purposes. When I read that news, I noped out of Windows pretty much for good.

It was also released in the era when Microsoft started seriously talking about Trustworthy Computing, whose fruition is the very problem the author laments. The only reasons why Windows back then wasn't even more locked down is because of backwards compatibility concerns, and with the DOJ breathing hotly down their necks they could ill afford the backlash if they tried. But the XP-era Palladium initiative is just now coming into reality, and may be in full force in Windows 12, which will doubtless require a signed code path from boot loader through application code.

There's also the issue that in the past, most Linux users had exposure to Unix, even if it was just their collegiate shell account, and so had some passing knowledge of Unix culture and values. People who weren't up to speed on this culture were richly rewarded for being at least willing to learn. These days, most Linux users come from a background of exclusively using Windows or (the non-Unixy bits of) macOS, are disappointed when Linux doesn't look and behave exactly like those, and if they be developers, feel the need to Change Fucking Everything so that it does. This perfectly explains GNOME. It's deeply embedded in GNOME's DNA. The founding document of GNOME is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", where the definition of "not suck" is literally "look and behave exactly like Windows". So we're already well into a culture of least-common-denominator-ism, even in the open source world, for ~20y and counting.

I dunno, maybe that last bit is a bit too "old man yells at cloud". But the 90s hit way different in computing, even compared to the immediately following decade. (Linux was legitimately cyberpunk. Instead of the anodyne, if not exactly welcoming, blue splash screen of Windows, we were greeted by the text-mode chatter of dozens of kernel and user-mode systems, each line having been written by some human whose name you could find by examining the source code or its history. The voices of the street finding its own uses for newly-cheap PCs.)

My exact thoughts the last week.