@pagrus But this is the problem. "there are plenty of issues" sends them running for Apple or Microsoft - which I then have to support.

The original post was a rhetorical question. Computers fucking suck. Computers are broken, and capitalism broke them.

@tindall Oh I am in complete agreement with your sentiment, make no mistake. I can personally only think of a handful of people for whom the Chromebook + Crouton solution is worth considering

@pagrus I used to have a Chromebook, they're great devices. But yeah crouton is janky as hell despite working really well in my particular case.

@tindall yeah I am trying to get used to treating that machine as a permanently temporary tool

We need to build a Mac-like ecosystem that isn't governed by unrestrained greed. We need to build an ecosystem of devices interacting seamlessly over open protocols, an ecosystem where plugging a USB drive into a Linux machine, then a Mac, then a Windows 10 machine doesn't fucking result in losing data (this happened to me).

We need tech without profit motive, innovation without rampant exploitation.

We need more projects like GNU and Linux and Rust and Mastodon.

This was all triggered by the fact that my grandfather is getting a new computer and is deathly afraid of losing his Quicken and WordPerfect data.

He's right to be afraid of that. The world of tech moves too quickly and with too little thought for users to be trusted.

My honest advice for him is to keep his XP machine off the Internet and keep using it. It's working fine, and his wife has an up to date Win10 machine for e-mail.

I should never be giving that advice. XP is 12 years old!!!!

@tindall Reminds me of all those W95 and DOS machines hooked up to the lab equipment at my university. I forget just how we got the data off those and into our computers for analysis.

@tindall Might elementary OS be the distro you seek?

@USBloveDog eOS is necessary but not sufficient, as with all current Linux-based operating systems.

@tindall I'm trying as hard as I can, with the resources that I have!

@vertigo well, thank you!

This is the thing. A lot of people are trying, but we're working within a system that has an interest in making us fail. This makes things very difficult.

@tindall I can't agree enough. I realise I'm in the minority when it comes to computer/tech use: I want to fiddle with it, hack it and make it my own.

I'm also very aware that this is not good UX practice. The things I enjoy (the challenges of getting something working the way I want it) are, for most people, technical hurdles they don't want to jump.

Tech should be open and inclusive.

@gid I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, honestly. It would be so, so easy to provide an "auto-settings-GUI" toolkit with a GUI framework, where you give it a data structure and some annotations and it creates a settings GUI for you. It would be auto-updating as you changed the app, never miss an option, and be simple to use.

@tindall I'm not so sure. I mean I'd like that to be the case, but looking at all the different options available now, I'm not sure it's possible to have a UX framework that works for a majority of people. I think the best approach that's achievable is to provide an experience that makes the fewest assumptions, and is the least opinionated, as possible.

@tindall
I really like the idea of an auto-settings toolkit that allows easy customisation of UI and workflow, but the eternally difficult question is going to be "what are the sane defaults?".

Also you'd probably need to work on standardising the backends this toolkit interfaces with for it to gain any reasonable traction. Otherwise there's not enough benefit for people to move away from what they're already familiar with.

@gid @tindall the good thing these days is you can accomplish most common tasks through the browser, so the OS underneath is a lot less important than it used to be.

ChromeOS is one option, although I dislike the fact it gives Google free reign to spy on people.

Good GNU/Linux distros for noobies might be Mint and Elementary. But when people are used to Windows being preinstalled by default, it can be a bit of a tough sell.

@tindall Not to be "The Plan 9 Guy" again (oh who am I kidding, I totally am) but Plan 9's model would be ~infinitely~ better for interoperability.
That's kind of the key word imho. Interoperability. Most of the crap that the major companies are pushing out are not interoperable.

@moonman planX

@tindall your setup is shockingly similar to mine (non-s model number, different OS/WM but same arcane level)

but yeah i love it but also i hate that it's not usable for most people and any work i put into this machine isn't gonna help anyone else except fellow nerds who already don't need help

@dn3s @tindall same...

@dn3s Exactly. I wish I could make a setup as useful as mine for my mom, who spends all day reading and typing classical Chinese into and out of five to ten windows. A tiling WM with workspaces would save her like an hour a day.

But I can't because Windows, and learning curves.

@tindall
That's pretty impressive, we all have that one computer we're attached to despite its imperfections. Mine is the Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8 with windows. I'm happy with my main machine (Dell XPS 15), but I sometimes wish they still made good quality Windows 10 tablets in the Lenovo's little size.

@tindall Auuuugh I feel you.

I love me some OS X but Apple's hardware direction is so incredibly bad!! I can't in good conscience give them any more of my money. Windows has truly become a shitshow, so I'll be making the jump to Linux for my next laptop.

I desperately miss the integrity computers had back in the 90s. ;~;

@tindall I'm working on a ten year old macbook with a once-replaced hard drive and twice-replaced battery. My iMovie is from 2011 and no longer runs. Closest thing on the market to it is Chromebook, but that's a stretch. No clue what I'm gonna do when this thing breaks in a way I can't replace.

@tindall I mean, you just have to work in a different way, and learning a different way is always good for ourselves.

I also spent years of "over-configuring", but drastically reduced my wishes because it just sounds more simple and efficient to use the standard things: when setting a desktop for somebody who never owned a computer, the vanilla Ubuntu is perfectly OK, even if after trying Windows 10 for some months, I think it would be more attractive and fun for beginners.

@tindall in the case of relatively advanced users, the constraint of *not-being-root* can sound like horrible in the beginning.

But after thinking about it, I am much much more productive since I don't spend ⅓ of my time configuring-in-text-files (even if I still like the approach) and just stick on my main tasks: I am not able to switch between workspaces by typing Meta - $number as I am used to do since many years (it was a big pain in the beginning), but there are other way of doing it.

@tindall the company security manager wants their data sucked by tech giant companies? OK, that's fine for me if they validated it.

@Mycroft @tindall I think Apple's "no user-serviceable parts inside" approach to usability only works if you have an army of service personnel and users who are willing to be dependent on them.

I think things need to be simpler inside, not just on the surface. Something closer to VPRI's approach, though it will necessarily need to be a compromise since starting from scratch is impractical. So maybe closer to Arch Linux.

@phryk @tindall Does anyone know any companies working on RISC V laptops? Is that possible?

@d6e Currently, I'm only aware of an embedded microprocessor actually implementing RISC-V. A comparatively powerful device with 320+ MHz, but probably not what you're looking for.

I think there's an 1.6GHz chip design in development which is currently being evaluated on FPGAs tho, so it might not be *too far* off.

@tindall

@phryk This would be extremely cool.

@tindall Indeed. I'd also love to see RISC-V processors with embedded FPGAs for uploading custom/specialty cores into them and choosing yourself what sort of stuff you need hardware acceleration for :3

@phryk Gosh the drivers would be hell, but that would be really cool.

@tindall Actually, if I'm reading this person on #riscv on freenode right, that's actually a feature that is going to be present in the 1.6GHz chip… D:

@phryk @tindall Sweet! I didn't know there was an irc channel

@d6e Neither did I. But when it's about techy stuff you'll find topical channels on IRC just by trying out obvious channel names often enough. :)

@tindall