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▲ amlib 14 hours ago

This may sound silly but I think desktop linux "winning" is of the utmost importance right now. Free software is pretty much shut off from the appliance/mobile computing platforms but if a sizable portion of personal computers remain using free software it will be hard for the big corporations to fully close the web or make platform attestation truly required for everything.

Preserving such mindshare into the future might enable us to show people why they should care about free software and perhaps finally obviate how much malfeasance the perpetrators of closed platforms can do contrasted to the remaining open platforms on pcs (assuming people don't just completely abandon pcs...). This may also help push and convince law makers into legislating in favor of free software and open platforms.

▲baq 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Desktop is still useful, but it doesn’t matter. Everything important to non-techies outside of work life is happening on the smartphone, which has had hardware attestation since forever.

▲gsf_emergency_4 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Those are vital points! Mobile is the battleground. No company now or ever working on classical hardware attestation will understand cryptographic engineering at a basic level..

Thus FOSS has plenty of time (decades to centuries) to learn from for-profit tech's mistakes

▲Imustaskforhelp 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Mobile is the battleground but you are forgetting how damn easy it is on android (atleast right now before google's attestation) it is to install f-droid and then install open source.

People don't even do that. They don't even search for software on f-droid first and try the UI. Nope they go to play store and search software which is going to advocate for closed software because ads/review buying...

You really have to expect something from the general populus as well imo. Maybe they don't know about f-droid but people say to me its not about knowledge but rather caring, they don't care and I don't know wtf to say to that.

It's a very weird chicken and egg problem.

▲gsf_emergency_4 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Within the mobile space there are other possible Schwerpunkte and appstoretech is the most obvious one to work on. It's also one where superior technology could win out over feelings--> why NLNet wants to fund:

https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/eligibility/

>‘decentralized app stores’, a technology that uses the F-Droid app store architecture, for organizations or other entities that wish to distribute their apps to a select user population (e.g. employees), plus an app distribution system that makes it simple and cost-effective for developers to distribute their applications to multiple app stores.

For mixed approaches, I like to think about why Google et al haven't beaten Apple at the appstore game (outside China)

You mention chicken and egg which suggests that there's a 2-sided-market type of problem to try to solve here even if one isn't well-versed in marketing

▲Imustaskforhelp 7 hours ago | parent [-]

When I mean the chicken and egg problem I mean this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286#45565446 and originally this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45565346

Basically that people expect a lot from open source yet they want it right now but nobody mentions anything about donating to them or they will donate to it once the software gets a lot of features but the software will only get it if you donate to them in the first place imo otherwise the whole situation would feel entitled.

There is no reason to expect good UI/UX from open source when at scale, the society doesn't fund open source with donations at all. They are severely underfunded but I don't know what people want from them. Nobody cares about it. Oof.

This is a chicken and egg problem that open source can get really good if people donate to the creators but they will only donate (I doubt that actually as well now) once it gets good but ... it will only get good once they donate.

Open source is stuck in this chicken and egg problem. I was thinking about how the creators of deltarune/ undertale if they were open source, I just checked and undertale has made 114 million $ in sales and its price is 10$ which might be worth it...

10$ isn't that bad and people still pirate it, I think this model can be decent for games which is why people don't open source games. Imagine the amount of money that could've lost if lets say undertale was open source. I am pretty damn sure that nobody would've donated 114 million $ to them if it was open source.

Just some thoughts. I have mixed opinion now. Its a chicken and egg problem and actively hurts the devs financially in the process as well and people don't want anything to do with open source aside from us people who already know about it. Like wtf. We are taking a cut for a ideology and uh I am just a bit speechless. Its messed up & my question is: can we change it? I genuinely didn't want to be pessimistic but I don't think that there is much of a way, is there? I want to find some hope to cling upon but I genuinely can't find any hope. Everyone I talk to is so down right pessimist or nihilist or doesn't care about open source for a fix that I feel like I am in the wrong for looking for ways to change and now I genuinely doubt if change is even possible.

▲gsf_emergency_4 7 hours ago | parent [-]

NLNet (backed by EU) is a society that also funds opensource dev by donations

https://nlnet.nl/donating/

They should get more wellknown

Judging by the lack of upvotes and nondisclosure of how much they get, my guess is that 99% of people have for some reason conflicted feelings about funding opensource even from taxes

▲Imustaskforhelp 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I just want a organization that I can trust and share about to have maximum benefit to society for open source.

Now there are 2 ideas that I have: One, to raise more awareness about open source and how it has some gems. The best low hanging fruits of privacy for the world might be f-droid, signal (doesn't require any specific hardware as long as they have android) and grapheneos(depends if they have a pixel)

But that being said, I thought that if I share about open source and how it can be good but it requires your funding to fix the chicken and egg problem. People would feel convinced to donate.

I might say them to donate to nlnet. But I don't think many people would.

I don't think open source needs an evanglist or somebody telling somebody else to do something. I am deeply pessimistic about the state of open source in the sense that it's out of my control and my trust of human society is eroding day by day.

Literally nobody I talk to makes me feel like something can be done about this / gives hope and I doubt it so much now. I was so much optimistic about its future but I am genuinely pessimistic now and the only reason I try to be hopeful is that I don't want hopelessness. I don't want to sit down and watch but fucking hell, the world sure damn well wants me to.

The only hope I got was maybe through raylib creator's github post about history of raylib which inspired me and it seems like the best way for open source could be to become a teacher but I have conflicted opinions about it because I like building things that are niche solutions to niche problems I have. That's how I started loving open source more. Some solution which I can always use. which I have starred with me. Not sure if I should even be a teacher or something else or if how that fixing my own problems attitude goes towards teaching. I don't fucking know and I am tired of pretending that I know. idk wtf is wrong with the world that good things can happen but they won't. We are in a fucked up world in which mediocrity is benefited and like I have convinced myself that maybe this is the equilibra of altruism/evilness in the world maybe directly governed by biology/physics/the laws of the universe. But I can't but see how things got better in the past yet it seems that people have just accepted that things can't change now. How were people in the past doing so many massive changes like french revolution. I was asked by my teacher 3 years or more ago to write about it and I made things on the spot because I read one book (everything is fucked a book about hope) and uh I just somehow translated that people wanted hope and french revolution provided it. I always thought that if we can show the world something which can be better which just requires all of us to put in a little effort, then things would get better since we would all logically agree that this is the better thing, just like how I can show them hope and then we can have another thing like french revolution (I mean something's that good like democracy), but now I am wondering if that's how the things work. Maybe I was naive but I need to do more research on french revolution's hope idea, idk.

▲setopt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on.

I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.

▲robinsonb5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For me, Ubuntu / Gnome 2 came so close to being something tech-savvy people could recommend to non-technical friends and relatives at a time when people who were happy enough with WinXP and Win7 were being corralled into dealing with the Win8 carcrash. And instead of closing that final gap it went scampering off into the far distance again, never to recover.

▲jezek2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's normal in Linux. It's always about to get really good then everything is made crappy again, then slowly improving to get good but then the cycle repeats. I've lived through several of such cycles, it has slowed down Linux adoption a lot.

▲matheusmoreira 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. It's all about leverage. Without huge numbers of users, we have no leverage. Corporations can afford to just drop us because of our software preferences. That would not be the case if there were more of us.

▲ 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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