Looks interesting but having to use it from their website feels… not great. I’d rather have something that I can still use on a train or when my router dies. Or when they decide to shut it down.

They claim that everything runs locally and doesn’t phone home. Then why do they charge 500 to 2000 bucks per month for a version that you can host on your own machine?

There seems to be an unofficial offline version but that hasn’t been maintained for years.

Have you seen how some Linux users treat people who don’t use exactly what they think is the hottest shit? Even towards people who use as much FOSS as they can but still need some proprietary stuff for certain use cases because FOSS alternatives are not quite there yet. It’s annoying as hell and comes up in every single discussion that vaguely fits the topic. I would say the comparison to Mormons is not that far off.

I’m all for moving as many people away from closed systems as possible. But tribalism and victim blaming achieves the exact opposite. Why would anyone move to something where the community makes them feel unwelcome from the start?

If we want people to use Linux, we have to be patient and help them overcome their pain points, not go “haha you dumb”.

Instead of being condescending, you might help people solve the problems that keep them from switching. Or just stay quiet. Whatever you prefer. This elitist attitude is one of the reasons why some people won’t even try Linux because they fear they will be ridiculed as soon as they need to ask for help.

Use whatever makes you happy and matches your needs. Ignore the haters.

I use arch btw. And Ubuntu. And Windows. And an iPhone. Does it matter?

I wouldn’t call it Stockholm syndrome. The problem is that even a single application that’s critical to your workflow can keep you from switching, even if everything else is much better.

I’ve switched to Linux on my laptop about 6 months ago and the overall experience is pretty good. A few annoyances that I can’t seem to fix but overall pleasant. But there are still some things that keep me from doing the same on my main workstation:

• I just can’t get used to RawTherapee or darktable for developing photos. Everything takes me three times as long to get the results I want and at hundreds of photos per shoot, that adds up really quickly. I’m sure I could learn those tools and get as comfortable with them as I am with Adobe CameraRaw but that would cost me weeks or even months of productivity and I just can’t afford that right now.
• Similar problem with general graphics stuff. I’m sure that Gimp and Inkscape are amazing tools if you’re used to them but coming from tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, they’re so different that the switch feels like hitting a brick wall at running speed. Krita is nice but it seems to focus heavily on painting which is my least common graphics use case. I really hope that Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer will get ported to Linux at some point even if that means the open source purists will probably kill me.
• A lot of my existing software projects are written in C#. Most of them are cross-platform and run on Linux servers anyway, so that’s not the problem. But neither VSCode nor Rider are quite as comfortable as VS2022. No, I won’t just port everything to Rust.
• Steam on Linux has made amazing steps but getting some games to work is still pretty fiddly and reminds me of gaming on DOS in the 90s when you had to dig through half a dozen config files before you could play your new game.

All those problems can be solved with enough patience but to be honest, I’m in my late 30s and free time is getting rare so I’d rather spend it on something that brings me joy or on learning something entirely new instead of relearning an existing skill.

And no, this not a criticism against Linux or its community. I’m just trying to give an insight into how small problems can make the switch incredibly hard, even for someone who has a degree in computer science, has worked with Linux machines for about 20 years now and would love nothing more than to leave Windows behind.

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Remind me…

• Which country checks tourists’ social media for anti-Trump posts on entry?
• Which country regularly arrests (and in many cases deports) both their own citizens and foreigners without consulting a court?
• Which country spies on its own citizens to figure out if they may have had an abortion?

But sure, even thinking about doing something about a right-wing party that has been classified as extremist by multiple courts and explicitly lists several human rights violations as their goals… that’s a step too far…

The work is mysterious and important.