Why do we care about freedom???

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[freemedia2018]

GNU commands plus a little metadata plus a GUI = a handy little control panel that would let a lot of people do some command line tasks with an app-like interface.

That's a lot easier to do than fix all the other things wrong with free software right now.

Fuck your freedoms, fuck your licenses. I just want to use my fucking computer

So do I.

When I use a Mac or Windows, I don't get to use my computer except when they "allow" it. So that's not going to work for me. Also the command line refuses to die, simply because it is more powerful. Every. Single. Time. There are lots of people who do not want less power, and the command line co-exists nicely with other things. I rarely find myself on the VT these days, though I am a fan. I have a few term windows open right now.

[smcameron]

"If you want to know terminal, you have to be white male neckbeard incel virgin who hates women".

WTF. Go screw yourself.

1. Whining won't change anything. Either change it yourself, or shut up.
2. "the terminal" you whine about is miles better than the windows bullshit you're pining for, your opinion is simply wrong.
3. If you think this response is unreasonable, review what it is a response to, and ask yourself what the hell you expected.

[freemedia2018]

WTF.

I can definitely understand why you're offended, but you're talking to someone who generally is in favour of free software and is obviously having a bad day.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, and it wouldn't carry the least amount of authority if I chose to. But just for fun, why not let her rant? Her complaint really isn't doing any harm. She's not posting this as an article in ZDNet or anything.

[smcameron]

why not let her rant?

Well I didn't mean to suppress any ranting (Alright, I did write "... or shut up", so I retract that bit, and apologize for that bit. Carry on.)

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[smcameron]

or shut up

Nah,...

Agree.

[anon666]

for the record: windows is basically a unix system

not even trying to troll or anything, its a historical fact

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[O01eg]

Fuck your freedoms, fuck your licenses. I just want to use my fucking computer, I don't want to fucking type shit into fucking terminal. I'm tired of that, I have no idea what is going on, some cryptic text bullshit, etc. Have anyone thought about humans? How are we supposed to use that shit?

Fuck. I have nowhere to go. Windows and MacOS are too expensive and Linux is unusable. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUUUUUCK.

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary usability, deserve neither liberty nor usability"

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[GunChleoc]

What you could to to change this is participate in the pieces of software that lack a decent GUI and help them develop one. Even if you should not contribute any code as such, good testers with a fresh view on the software are valuable.

And being able to use terminal or not has nothing to do with gender.

I agree that having better GUI is important, because people who are not techy can't participate in the freedom without lots and lots of help.

[SteveSmith]

This rant should be directed towards the individual pieces of software themselves. If you don't like a game/software that requires editing a config file or typing stuff into terminal, find one that doesn't require that.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Jastiv]

I'm not going to write a whole essay on the topic right now, but that is a really good question. Why do we care about freedom? In particular, freedom in free software games, when in practical terms they are often "less fun" than some of their "proprietary" counterparts.
Fun is usually the measure for games, in terms of how "good" they are as opposed to "evil" but evil measures what? Amount of money you can waste in a game in micro transactions? Amount of workers exploited to produce the game? Amount of your time wasted that could be put to better use? Amount of utter boredom, sheer torture and depression you put yourself through because you keep playing a game that is no longer fun, but is instead "addictive?

Anyway, I care about free software games because I care about artistic freedom. Games should be infinitely modifiable. I've played to many games that frustrated me, when I knew that with just little game play tweaks, small graphic redesigns, a bit of bug squashing etc, they would be perfect. Instead they become unplayable and because they are proprietary there is little I can do about it.

[freemedia2018]

I actually agree with part of what Lyberta is saying-- the frustration.

In 2013 I was a very happy user. For most of 2014 I was a very happy user. It's been increasingly a shitshow ever since then, for reasons I wish people paid more attention to.

At one point I even called for Stallman's resignation-- but not because he made crappy software. Just because the FSF was not listening to people, and they weren't listening for too long. I'm still on the fence about John Sullivan myself, though there is potential for some of this to start improving. I'm not at all happy that Stallman is no longer on the board, nor am I happy that he stepped down for the reason he did.

But the software really does suck a lot more than it did a few years ago-- and I don't think that's an accident. It's not easy to prove, and most people simply don't care. But they should.

Two relevant articles by Mako: https://mako.cc/writing/hill-when_free_ ... etter.html https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/in-defense-of-negativity

[GunChleoc]

And being able to use terminal or not has nothing to do with gender.

It does. It does a lot. Female thoughts are largely dominated by emotions and yet using terminal requires user to be emotionless machine who can input extremely complicated commands under stress. It requires user to be male, ...or female who spent a shitload of time to be more male-ish, more rational.

Well, I am female and didn't have to spend a shitload of time to become more male-ish. I think it has more to do with having a mathematical/engineer's brain or not, and this difference comes in all genders. We have to be careful about assumptions here. The flipside of the coin is that females may expect all males to be able to fix a broken car, which is of course not true.

I never had the patience to learn vi though

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[freemedia2018]

I am female and didn't have to spend a shitload of time to become more male-ish.

The command line uses predominantly keywords, over symbols.

That entire concept was invented by a woman, who was told by every colleague that it "would never work"-- even after she proved that it did. Today this affects most language use (even at the lower level.)

Not that Bash syntax is the best example of this. I think we need a friendlier command line for some people, something that can run on top of the usual tools.

In fact when I was teaching the command line to someone who already knew Python but had never used the command line I tried to get them to install UNXUtils, which happened to be a reasonable-sized download and simple installation in the days when I used it. After it tried to install what appeared to be an entire OS (maybe Cygwin grew, I don't know) I finally said "You know what? Don't worry about it. I'll write you a command shell for Windows that works almost exactly the same on GNU" -- and now they have a full GNU installation, native ELF support and all. (I did write that shell though.)

Just one example of a friendlier (simpler, more consistent-- a little less flexible of course) command line: instead of this syntax t="$(ls)" you would use this:

ls | var t

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[freemedia2018]

As one of the first computer programmers, Hopper used binary code to program the Mark I computer. But she had a vision for a better way: She created the first computer language that used words to tell computers what to do.

Whenever you see "fi" instead of "}" you can thank Hopper.

Most languages found a compromise, even COBOL USED-DASHES-BETWEEN-WORDS-LIKE-THIS.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[freemedia2018]

Is that sarcasm?

Just opinion-- and not the best example, but where I come from "}" is overrated at least. I still use it, in javascript. I hear it does amazing things in C, and is deprecated in coffeescript.

[Jastiv]

Wograld has
anim
and then
mina

for animations. It is kind of cool for the Wograld archetypes.

[freemedia2018]

I'm actually not a fan of the convention (which didn't begin with Bash) of reversing the spelling: if/fi case/esac

I was offering fi as an example of the broader convention (popular in Pascal) of using commands instead of braces. Python uses indentation in a similar way.

I fell in love with the Python way for a while, but I ultimately went back to command pairs. Sure, the commands get tedious sometimes. So does indentation. I would say when I create the choice for myself, the commands are less tedious but still a bit tedious. No convention is perfect, only preferred.