How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too - <AUTHOR> http://larrysanger.org/2019/01/how-and-why-i-transitioned-to-linux-how-you-can-too/ <comment><USER2> I've used Linux on the desktop for over a decade. Currently, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on x64.

It still sucks for the average user. The GUI is lipstick on a pig. As soon as anything goes wrong, it's back to the command line. You look up the problem, and there will be a dozen articles about it, all contradicting each other. Look up what it takes to create a desktop icon for something. (Hint: the top result in Google won't work.)

I'm currently restoring a Ubuntu system after a hard drive replacement. I've been at this for a day now. Typical little stuff:

\- OpenGL frame rate is terrible. The default install turns out to be running OpenGL in the Mesa emulator. Time to install a driver. There's lots of advice on that. Get it from the NVidia site? From Ubuntu? From a driver-aggregation site? (Scary). Want the open source version or the closed source binary? Need CUDA support? Five choices of driver. Finally pick the latest open source version and it works.

\- File restoration isn't working properly. I used iDrive for backup, and now it's time to restore. I've restored one or two files from iDrive before, but now I have to restore a lot of them. The interface is a bunch of Perl scripts, with a command line menu system from the 1970s. After much struggling ("Restore From" means the name of the machine that was backed up), I get the restore running. It runs, but about 8,000 files don't restore out of a few hundred thousand. The message is just "FAILED". Files with "&" in the name don't restore. Files with "__" in the name sometimes don't restore. Working on that. Looks like most of what I lost was part of old builds of a big program, but there are a few files I'd like back.

<comment><USER3> I have infrequently fooled around with Linux only a handful of times in the last 15 years. I recently installed it on my laptop but was disheartened to see how much you still need the command line to do some very basic things.

Installing a program (not from the Ubuntu Software Center) and getting a launcher icon into the start-menu-equivalent took way too much time and Googling.

<comment><USER4> That's true, but on the other hand, you have some 15000-30000 packages installable from software center that are guaranteed virus free, with automatic updates. (And they are liver and gratis to boot), so the average user rarely if never needs to go there.

<comment><USER5> > installable from software center that are guaranteed virus free

This is not true. Repos can, and have, been hijacked. Packages can and have had malicious code inserted. Hell, projects can and have accidentally accepted stealth backdoors in the guise of bug fixes or feature commits.

The repo system is not a panacea for security.

<comment><USER4> This is all true for any distribution system.

However, in addition to e.g. hacking the actual developer/distributor, on Windows, you have to be wary of a rogue versions on e.g. download.com that rank higher than the genuine one, and of google ads for trojaned VLCs and stuff.

It is no panacea, but it is very significantly better than the Windows world (and the Mac world outside of the app store)

Furthermore, modern snaps have limited privileges and file system views, so a backdoor is much less effective; I assume appimages and flatpaks have similar mechanisms (and if not, they should).

Situation is far from perfect, but it is about a billion time better than Windows whichever way you measure it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I switched to Linux about ten years. I basically got tired of having an OS I paid for (in buying a computer) not really be "mine". Lately, I have had few problems installing and running Linux on the various cheap laptops I've bought.

Ubuntu with a Mate GUI "just works", has all the software I need and lacks BS like the Windows 10 interface.

I don't really think there's any objective barrier to using Linux for a significant percentage of people - people who don't need Adobe Creative Suite or similar monopolies. But this is the same population who probably won't both doing something unusual given they have no strong motivation.

<comment><USER7> > Ubuntu with a Mate GUI "just works", has all the software I need and lacks > BS like the Windows interface.

How do you figure? Every part about Ubuntu, from keybindings to menus to window management to user interface expectations, are directly copying windows.

<comment><USER8> You pay for Windows, but Linux is free. Windows is filled with ads; Linux has none. Windows is slow; Linux is less slow. Windows tried to pull some weird tablet hybrid nonsense; Linux desktops are just desktops. Cinnamon, Mate and KDE took the very best parts of old Windows and made them better. Gnome and Pantheon ripped off macOS and they're also great. Every single one of them is more polished and more useable than Windows 10.

But seriously, who in their right mind would tolerate advertisements in software that they paid good money for?

<comment><USER9> I have never seen an ad in windows in my entire life on any of my machines. Apparently it is the first thing I disable when I open up the settings on a new install. It's gotten to the point that I'm almost curious about it. Ubuntu has the amazon integration which bothers me about just as much.

Ubuntu tried to pull some weird netbook phone hybrid that didn't work well on any type of device. 8 years we had to live with Unity.

I'd say that the UI of Windows 10 is about ten years ahead of anything in the linux world (and I doubt linux well ever be as polished). I say that as someone who is possibly going to do the switch to linux this year, but I'm in for a rough transition.

<comment><USER10> > I'd say that the UI of Windows 10 is about ten years ahead of anything in > the linux world

Windows 10 is really really nice these days...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have used Linux for some time (I do not remember how many years), and it works very well. I uninstalled the desktop environment (I don't use it (but I do use X, with a window manager, which is not the same as the desktop environment); I use the command shell to start programs and for almost all other purposes too). It is much better than Windows!

Someone mentions restoring a Ubuntu system after a hard drive replacement. I used a live CD, to run tar with --numeric-owner and other options I do not commonly use, and gzip, to make backups onto three DVDs, and then to set up the partitioning and boot loader on the new hard drive, and then to restore all of the files. And then the new system just worked fine when booted, with no problem (actually the first time I misconfigured the boot loader, but after I corrected that, it booted fine).

Some people are disheartened to see how much you still need the command line to do some very basic things. I rather see, is good that such thing can be done by command line programs; you don't need the GUI to do so many thing like Windows needs.

But if you don't like Linux, you do not need to use it; there are other systems. But I find Linux is good.

<comment><USER12> "Some people are disheartened to see how much you still need the command line to do some very basic things."

I am more surprised how someone can do serious IT work with windows. A nightmare for me.

<comment><USER13> At my internship for a large logistics company I shadowed the system administrators a couple of days.

There was so much clicking involved that It made _my_ left index finger start hurting. Adding a MIME type to IIS seemed like a chore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I started using Ubuntu Linux about 8 years ago, about the same time I started my CS degree at school. Over the years, my interest in Windows shrunk to essentially just PC gaming. When school got serious I stopped gaming as much, and all my needs from both school and personal computing were met with open source tools.

Every once in a while I would try a new distro as live CD, just for kicks, and to see how things are different. I learned how to use my own window manager and terminal program. I found that the necessary elements needed for working Linux are actually quite small, and most everything beyond that is for convenience.

When you learn to use the terminal, your entire perspective on how to use a computer changes. No longer are you wasting time swishing your mouse around, clicking on folders and icons. Instead, you live on the keyboard, using hotkeys, personal aliases, tab completion, STDIO piping, dot files, terminal based text editors... There's a lot to master.

But don't feel put off by this, we actually have a lot of fun in the terminal. We can play music with MPD/Ncmpcpp, play Tetris, retrieve HN articles and view comments, retrieve 3-day local weather with animations, we can even browse webpages. It's actually a fun world in the terminal, and we can eliminate the need for otherwise fatty software.

If you're looking for something that Just Werks as a Windows replacement, any Ubuntu derivative will be fine. If you're looking for something that requires more work but might spur interest (i.e. hobby), you might try Arch or Gentoo. And if you're looking for rice examples, check out Reddit/unixporn.

<comment><USER15> > But don't feel put off by this, we actually have a lot of fun in the > terminal.

I believe you. I grew up on a C64 and later DOS and really, I don't miss it. It's nice to have the console just in case but I don't want it to become something I have to use again. It always was that "waste of time" you're describing there and I've never seen it the other way around. I can do that swishing with one hand. One finger even or my nose if I have to. A double click does it. A GUI where I can see all the options, select them, apply and run. So...human.

Every time I use my Linux laptop I find myself googling up commands or god knows what weird solutions to problems that should be easy and are in their equivalent on Win. It's such a waste of time and I feel lost if I can't go online to do it.

There is a long way for Linux to get there and I see a solution where you can have both. It does not contradict itself. But the biggest problem out there I see is the aversion (or even hate) in relevant parts of the Linux community towards everything GUI.

<comment><USER16> "One finger even or my nose if I have to. A double click does it. A GUI where I can see all the options, select them, apply and run. So...human."

Blech. Do you remember when games like Leisure Suit Larry went from text input to "click the right pixel"? All sorts of exploration and hilarity was lost.

You can see all the options because there aren't as many.

<comment><USER17> > All sorts of exploration and hilarity was lost.

About games, I agree with you. But when doing work, or even non-gaming fun things on a computer, "exploration and hilarity" are damn near the last things I want to be expected of me. I want to get things done in a _cognitively_ efficient way, even if that's not the most _temporally_ efficient way.

That means: if an application wants me to learn new skills, they should be limited enough as to be relevant to the immediate task, discoverable, and with a clear, immediate path towards competence.

No "Well, you want to do $x in a GUI, but have you considered learning the CLI? it's much more flexible, and the next 10 things you might want to do with $x will be so easy (once you've mastered the CLI)!" I may never need to do 10 more things with a given program/task; I may be happy to do what I need inefficiently but in a familiar way; if I do need to do more in the future, I'll set aside time to learn how rather than getting interrupted on my way to a specific goal unrelated to leveling up my proficiency at something.

The attitude of many people and ecosystems in the Linux community seems to be like that. The tools themselves are fine once you learn to use them, but the people and conventions that proliferate those tools seem to often lose sight of their (desktop, not power/dev/sysadmin) users' needs for immediate specific task-accessibility, discoverability, and incremental increases in proficiency rather than "exploratory" or deep-end-first learning styles.

I say this as someone who spends just as much time obsessively, wastefully over-customizing my development workflow/shell/etc. as most programmers I know. I do that for fun, but while I find it fun, I recognize that most of my users do not, and likely never will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I switched to Ubuntu in 2006 and ~3years ago my girlfriend wanted to switch too (I did not talk her into it).

Yes there are problems, but for me the reasons to use linux (and firefox instead of chrome) are trust and politics.

Maybe it's just me, but I really dislike software preventing or forcing random functionality because google, apple, ms or even canonical want me to. In this respect linux is in my opinion the best option.

As for the "things should just work" argument some people use - part of it is probably still valid, _but_ I think linux is in some respects (handling of updates, security, installation process,...) way ahead of windows for example.

Some anecdata on that: It takes ~5min when I need to do something on a windows or mac machine for me to get frustrated due to me not knowing UI details or the OS simply getting in my way (forcing updates on reboot for example). Maybe it's me, but then I'm working in web development for a while, so I suspect I'm of average intelligence.

The availability of professional software is a limiting factor in some areas (design and gaming come to my mind). But for development work I can't complain. The trend for web-based software helps too.

Think what you want about linux, all software has flaws - maybe we can get rid of some of them :)

<comment><USER19> > Some anecdata on that: It takes ~5min when I need to do something on a > windows or mac machine for me to get frustrated due to me not knowing UI > details of these OSes.

Honestly, these things do take a lot of time. People think using Windows effectively is a trivial thing they already know, apparently because it's a GUI and it looks like it should be easy. It very much is _not_. I think the most important thing is, regardless of what OS you choose for your tasks, it should be based on your knowledge of how to use them properly, not lack thereof. Because whatever you end up preferring (I prefer Windows), there really _are_ tasks in which your life is easier in one OS compared to another (I have Linuxes handy for this reason), and if you aren't aware of where each one shines, you're going to miss out and make your own life harder than it needs to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been using Linux as my primary OS for about a year now, and while I agree that Linux has come a long way, it's definitely not ready for prime time just yet. Here's why:

\- GUI performance is bad. I have a reasonably high end system, but switching between desktops is choppy unless I turn my resolution down to 1600x900.

\- Trackpad support is bad. It works but feels clunky. You really feel the difference when you use a Macbook for the first time in a while.

\- Hibernate doesn't work. I've tried and tried to get this to work but haven't succeeded. So now I either need to keep my laptop plugged in all the time or shut it down (which is annoying, because I encrypt my hard drive so I have to enter two passwords to start).

\- Bluetooth doesn't work well. I have to run a command to restart my bluetooth service every time I connect, and still sometimes have to re-pair my headphones. I use a wired connection now to avoid dealing with it.

I bought a Linux-native laptop (System76 Galago) thinking things would work out of the box, but this hasn't been the case. (Also, the Galago's battery is awful so I wouldn't recommend it even if everything worked well.)

The next time I'm ready to drop $1500+ on a laptop, I'll probably just get a Macbook.

<comment><USER21> > GUI performance is bad.

This depends heavily on the GPU drivers used, which in itself is probably a problem, but is far from universal.

I didn't have any issues with Bluetooth & hibernate for years now, I am surprised you'd have hibernate problems on a System76 laptop as I don't even have a 'Linux-friendly' laptop per se and hibernate works.

> The next time I'm ready to drop $1500+ on a laptop, I'll probably just get a > Macbook.

I use MacBooks sometimes at work and I'd say that past 2015 they've not been on the right track. The keyboard and cooling especially. Software-wise, macOS is indeed more 'uniform' in terms of hardware, so it's easier to make sure everything 'works', (which is not really a fair comparison to Linux, which works well on a much wider range of hardware, including the 2015 MBP).

As for macOS itself, you don't really have much in terms of customization options, which you may prefer, but that also means if you don't like something you're stuck. Be however prepared to pay $20-30 for every little utility from a decent file manager to window snapping, (that's right, macOS doesn't ship with a proper file manager and doesn't really support window snapping the way you'd expect out of the box).

<comment><USER20> I agree with what you're saying on the advantages of Linux. I _want_ it to be awesome. I love all the customization and the fact that I don't need to worry about the bad decisions of some company affecting my desktop experience (e.g. the awful mac touchbar with its persistent Siri button), but right now there are so many quality of life problems that the experience is sort of ruined for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny. I recently switched from Linux after 10 years back to Windows.

I ran Arch Linux for about 7 years. After systemd I spent years justifying why I used it even though it would constantly break and require a reformat more often than Win7 did. I went to Ubuntu, and it was marginally more stable. But even there, I was bitten too many times. Libicu upgrades breaking everything, updating packages breaks the package manager or ruins systemctl settings. Really, the whole problem that pushed me back to Windows is a combination of constant systemd nightmares and bad package maintenance.

I've... Kind of been loving Win10. Sure, it's marginally more evil than Linux, (but less so than Google and Apple products these days), but at least I don't have to constantly wipe my machine or keep it out of date to keep using it. Weird how the tables have turned.

<comment><USER23> Because system upgrades never break things in Windows 10, right? Seriously, if updates are problematic for you and you don't care about running the "latest and greatest", move to a stably-supported distribution like Ubuntu-LTS, Debian or even CentOS. They won't be "out of date" as long as they're in their support period. Updating every 6 months like vanilla Ubuntu does is just pointless churn, and don't get me started on what Arch does...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a pleasant way to run a Linux laptop today with decent drawing/touchscreen support, HiDPI, and working dock/undock multi-monitor support?

I have used various distros on and off over the years, but today I can run Windows 10 on a Surface Book 2, and the non-development portions of my experience are spectacular, for the low, low price of selling my soul: lazy file syncing with OneDrive, pen support combined with OneNote is spectacular. Unfortunately, WSL only gets me so far when I want to use more than vim. For better or worse, I don't get to spend all of my time coding, so I'd like Linux with a real, modern notebook experience that can let me get my work done without praying to the gods that my external monitors come back on when I plug in.

<comment><USER25> My strategy has for a long time been to run Windows 10 for all of my browsers and games and paint programs and then run a virtual machine of linux with VirtualBox. I just use terminal Vim, so I run the virtual machine headless and ssh into it with a cygwin terminal.

It's a bit janky but no more janky than actually running Linux on a laptop. No worries about my HDMI projector connection working, no fighting with wifi, games on Steam work, and I get a full Linux for development.

The magic comes from proxying my development servers (like Django's) through the guest machine into Windows. I've got it set up so that if I type `localhost:8000` into any Windows browser, it hits my virtual machine's localhost.

So yeah, complicated, but from what I can see it gives me the best setup I know of with the least amount of fighting with the operating system.

<comment><USER26> I love this. Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there is a way to make a true dual system on Windows, with full graphical support (even if it is the Linux console), where you can flip between Windows desktop, Linux Desktop (if desired), and Linux console with a "switch desktop" hotkey.

I think I will try this on one of my windows computers. I can't switch from Mac to Linux because I use too much non Linux software, but most of it is on Windows. Adobe suite, Ableton, Native Instruments, etc.

Does anyone know a way to virtualize Linux like the thought above please?

<comment><USER25> You can certainly install a windowing environment into the virtual machine. I've done this a few times when I actually needed a windowing environment inside of Linux for complicated servers or doing things across multiple ports. It works just fine, and VirtualBox even has a "seamless" mode where it sort of feels like you have windows from both environments.

If you can set up Linux, you can set this up too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've used Linux since the early 1.x kernel versions, but for my next laptop I'm thinking about switching to a MacBook. Not because of the software (I prefer Linux to macOS), but because of the hardware.

Apple seems to be the only manufacturer that so far escaped the race to the bottom and which still produces somewhat premium hardware. I want: a hidpi screen with lots of nits and a good contrast, a trackpoint or a huge touchpad, good battery life and somewhat light weight.

In the past Thinkpads worked really well for that, but recently I had multiple issues with Lenovo hardware. I'm currently using a X1C3 and originally considered upgrading to a X1C6 or T480s, but given there are known issues such as the throttling bug ([https://github.com/erpalma/throttled](https://github.com/erpalma/throttled)) that Lenovo hasn't fixed in over half a year I'm very close to giving up on Thinkpads.

<comment><USER28> I've heard good things about the XPS line, but I'm surprised you'd move to a Macbook over _throttling_. My understanding is Macbooks are notorious for throttling, the last MB Pro bug being the worst in recent memory. If anything I'd blame Intel.

<comment><USER27> Regular thermal throttling is fine. The Thinkpad issue that I mentioned is a software bug in the firmware that throttles the CPU way too early/often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tangentially-related rant (since the author is pushing Ubuntu): I wish Canonical would offer an 'End-User Desktop Support' offering. Right now Ubuntu Advantage is available for $150 per year, but that's only for enterprise (you have to order at least 50 units).

I think it would be interesting if Canonical offered an equivalent product for home users, understanding that the $/year would be higher. That would give all the people moving to Ubuntu an option to support the people making the OS.

I do see that donations are accepted (the prompt is on the _Your download will begin shortly…_ page), so at least there's that!

<comment><USER30> You'll never get end users to pay more per seat than an enterprise product. You just need to find a way to make the end user product sufficiently worse that enterprises won't care about the price difference, they'll just buy what they need.

<comment><USER31> When you have a minimum of 50 seats, it's not really $150 per seat.

It's $7,500 + $150 per seat over 50

$150 for a single seat would be significantly less.

<comment><USER30> What value prop are you going to offer to get a consumer to pay $150 a year for Linux support? Enterprises will pay it because they have a value prop and because Windows seats aren't free. From a consumer's point of view, Windows _is_ free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I prefer to use macOS as my main desktop environment; where I can easily drop into a bash shell if the need arises. Mac also gives me access to standard iOS development tools. I keep Linux vms running for server-side development and experimenting. Sometimes I wish I also had a Windows machine so I can stay abreast of the .Net ecosystem, but nowadays I don't really have the need. Each environment/OS is a tool with its own strengths and weaknesses. Don't limit yourself to just one environment. Learn how to secure yourself in each environment. Use Tor, encryption and other tools to stay as safe and secure as possible. Your privacy can be invaded on Linux, Windows, or any other OS, so unfurtanely the burden of keep your system and date secure still remains.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have been using Ubuntu on and off since about 2005. Last year I switched from OSX on a dated macbook to Ubuntu on a newer Dell XPS. On the whole I am happy with the switch: with many of the apps that I use based on electron (slack, atom, mailspring) or directly in the browser (google docs), it is hard to notice the difference. I do most of my work related writing in latex, so this has also not been very noticeable.

I don't like latex slides and I give presentations frequently for work. The only thing that has proved consistently annoying is that LibreOffice Impress is nowhere near as good as keynote.

</comment><comment><USER34> _> If you're a serious gamer, Linux won't satisfy you (yet)._

That's moot. Linux gaming today is a lot better than ever before, considering advances in graphics APIs (Vulkan), increasing amount of native Linux games and rapidly improving support for Windows games through Wine, dxvk, vkd3d, including projects like Proton integrated into Steam client and etc.

Many former Windows gamers find it acceptable to switch. So at the very least, give Linux gaming a try and see for yourself.

<comment><USER5> While the work Valve has done improving the Linux gaming situation is actually quite impressive, 'serious' PC gamers already do enough configuration tweaking and working around problems already, it doesn't strike me that they'll really want to deal with even more of that.

<comment><USER34> My point is, that Linux is already well usable for gaming, including for very demanding games. "Serious gamer" is too much of a generalization, to assume what people are willing or not willing to do to configure their systems.

Many gamers are actually very much into tweaking things as you say, from custom PC builds to game mods and other customizations. They see configurability as a benefit, not as a downside. So Linux is a natural fit.

Besides, Linux gaming is quite accessible today without any extensive manual tweaking (while you can always do that if you want to, a lot more than on Windows).

<comment><USER5> Let me put it this way. What's the best damn GPU on the market right now? I'm actually not sure, but I'd bet good money the top 3 slots are nVidia. Even if you use the nVidia proprietary drivers, the data says you're suffering a performance hit for it. God help if you're using nouveau, because you just wasted hundreds of dollars.

The kinds of people I think of when you say "serious gamers" are not going to be very happy with the idea that they're locked out of the best kit. These are people for whom their computer's primary purpose is probably playing games. Why would they sacrifice needlessly?

> So Linux is a natural fit.

If it were a natural fit, they'd be interested in using it. Data suggests they aren't.

<comment><USER34> _> The kinds of people I think of when you say "serious gamers" are not going to be very happy with the idea that they're locked out of the best kit_

Again, generalizations like "serious gamer always does that" are not helpful. Lot's of people are not satisfied with Windows for many reasons. Would they switch to Linux if they could play their games? Many would and already do, and I wouldn't call them not serious.

Performance variations are not uniform. I.e. it's not a given that Linux always reduces performance. Proper made games actually perform better on Linux. Of course if you are using translation layers like Wine, some performance hit is expected to compensate. That's not necessarily a bad trade- off for those who want to switch, as long as result is well playable.

 _> If it were a natural fit, they'd be interested in using it._

They are, increasingly.

<comment><USER5> > Again, generalizations like "serious gamer always does that" are not > helpful.

Then why did you make a generalization in the first place and keep making it? I didn't introduce the term to the conversation you know.

Let's ask a simple question: would your conception of a "serious gamer" include literally anyone who plays PC games at all? You have to have some line you're drawing somewhere right? Well, I can't read your mind so I'm using my own line, which is drawn where someone considers gaming to be a very high priority to them, and it seems unlikely to me that that kind of person is willing to make that trade off for some nebulous concept of "privacy".

<comment><USER34> _> Then why did you make a generalization in the first place and keep making it_

I didn't introduce it either, I simply referenced what the article used, to disagree with the point that Linux is not suitable for "serious gamer", as to say that there are gamers today who switch to Linux and who aren't any less serious than others.

 _> Let's ask a simple question: would your conception of a "serious gamer" include literally anyone who plays PC games at all?_

I'd say someone who prefers to have good hardware to be able to play more demanding games is serious enough about it. Many Linux gamers do that as well. What's the reason to claim they aren't serious?

<comment><USER5> Ok, if that's the line we're using, then that includes anyone who isn't satisfied with the on-die GPU. That's a sufficiently broad definition of "serious" to include quite a lot of people who would sacrifice performance and compatibility for privacy, so I agree your statement is applicable to that group.

That's just not the group I think of when someone uses the term "serious" in this manner. Sure, they're on the spectrum of seriousness, but if I were to tell you that someone was a "serious cigar smoker", do you honestly imagine a guy who smokes machine rolled every few months?

<comment><USER34> Not sure how smoking is relevant here, but I know many who play demanding games on Linux, using high end GPUs, CPUs, custom PC builds and etc. It's as serious as it gets. And "must use Windows" isn't something they care about, as Linux users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you are thinking about Linux, this is pretty much the worse approach possible. My advice would be to switch to open source applications first, to ensure that you will have a suite of software that meets your needs and that you will be able to transition your data. If the switch looks viable, spend some time using your chosen distro on live media, to ensure that it will work with your hardware. If the live media does not work, either try a different distro or set the transition aside. Then make the jump if, and only if, it looks like you will be able to make a total transition. Backing up your data and telling the distro's installer to use the entire drive vastly simplies everything from installation and support to everyday usage.

Linus itself is an excellent operating system that makes life for end users a lot easier, but I suggest the applications first approach since it is not for everyone. Even using this approach and testing it on live media first is bound to have a few hiccups, yet it is a lot better than starting out by learning everything from scratch or by troubleshooting major issues.

<comment><USER36> Did I suggest that people follow my precise route? I'm not sure I did. I was just reporting how I did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The fact that he gets the name of MS's office suite wrong tells me perhaps he isn't all that bound to MS turf in the first place...

<comment><USER36> I'm not, really. Before they moved to the crowd (I refused to follow them there), I used to be an Office expert. I knew the software inside and out. I still use Word 2007. But no, I never did install Office 36 _5_ (I see my mistake now!).

<comment><USER37> haha maybe I shouldn't have judged based on a typo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So 2019 is _finally_ gonna be the year of Linux on the Desktop?

(Pardon me if I seem a little skeptical, I've heard this song before...)

<comment><USER39> blender is getting fun; inkscape reaches 1.0, gimp might evolve

methinks if libreoffice gets a bit leaner and featured it might be

<comment><USER40> I thought Libreoffice was fine enough until I started working in an office with people on Windows.

I ran into so many compatibility problems I could barely believe it. Couldn't edit each other's headers, no maths support worked between the two, images and other objects would get randomly shuffled in the documents (one image showing up where another used to be). To say nothing of the minor niggling display differences reminiscent of the old IE6 box model problems.

I had to start sending documents in PDF, but then they couldn't edit them. That alone was enough to move me back to Windows.

For better or worse, I don't think Libreoffice can move forward until interoperability can be presumed.

<comment><USER41> Use OnlyOffice. It uses the Microsoft xml formats internally and I've found it work miles better for compatibility than Libreoffice. Plus it looks nicer :) you can install it as a snap.

<comment><USER42> I'm surprised that the desktop software is AGPL. When I first looked at the website I initially thought it was proprietary...

Github Link: [https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE)

One question though: What desktop UI API are they using? Is it using the native APIs, or using Electron under the hood?

<comment><USER41> No idea but definitely javascript. My Nextcloud server uses OnlyOffice in the browser so I can edit my documents like with Google Docs or Office 365. It's the same code I'm sure in the browser and on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Talks a lot about privacy, but adds Google Analytics to his website.

<comment><USER36> I didn't even know that was running. I'm going to remove it.

</comment></comment><comment> rv-de That guide is way too long and convoluted to successfully win over any regular Joe or average Amanda.

For example the recommendation to learn about partitioning and stuff is "funny". Just install Linux Mint 19, accept the suggested partitions and be done already.

<comment><USER36> It's not meant to win over an average Joe. It's meant to maybe win over the sort of people who read my blog--technical or semi-technical, intelligent in any case, capable of thinking outside the box...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I had similar experiences switching from macOS to Ubuntu. I wrote an article about this, where I compare the two OSs as "Home and Hotel" [1].

1: [https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/](https://fman.io/blog/home-and- hotel/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I am using Ubuntu since version 6, inkscape gimp web programming been handled really well till date. Only complain is engineering drawing, for which AutoCAD level replacement yet to find.

</comment><comment><USER46> What's really funny is that I use Linux desktops at home and work, a Macbook with OS X at work, and dual boot the home desktop to play games and barely notice anything.

</comment><comment><USER36> Author of the article here. I just noticed that it had been posted on Hacker News. Thanks to se7entime!

</comment><comment><USER29> >1\. Pick a distro.

>2\. Put the distro on a thumb drive or DVD so you can boot to it from there.

>3\. Create a partition big enough for the Linux distro.

>4\. Install the Linux distro in the partition.

>5\. Configure Linux so you can use it on a daily basis.

I think there's a critical step missing from this list, which applies to the 'non-techies' reading the post.

(At first I wasn't going to post this, thinking that the article was only for technically-minded people, but the author calls out notes for non-techies at various points.)

The critical step is: Tell your support person, and your other users!

Many people have a support person. At work, this is your IT person. At home, this may often be a family member. For example, I am the support person for my father.

If you have a support person, let them know what you would like to do. Point them to the article, and to the other pages that you're looking at.

Be respectful of your support person's time. It will take at least an hour to go through all of the above steps; longer if something doesn't go exactly right. If you do this out of the blue, run into a problem, and have to lean on your support person unexpectedly, understand that you will be taking them away from something else unexpectedly.

Be prepared for your support person to say "If you do this, I won't be able to help you." If they say that, then accept it. If you need to go back to them for help, don't be surprised if they say "You're going to have to wipe everything and reinstall".

Back up your stuff! Do this before making Step 3. Make sure those backups are good.

You may also have other users. If your family shares a machine, then your family members are other users.

Talk to those people. Let them know what is going to happen. Even if you are just adding Ubuntu as a new partition, you must assume there will be a time when you have to leave the computer unexpectedly, another user will come in, and be presented with a weird lock screen or login screen. Walk people through at least the Ubuntu login and lock screens.

Let your other users know, if the machine is locked, restarting into Windows may mean that anything still open under Linux may lose data.

Again, be respectful of everyone's time. If you're the parent, then you can certainly say "I'm doing this tomorrow at 3 PM; come to me first before you try to use the computer after that time.", but if your child then comes back with "I had planned on working on $PROJECT at 4 PM tomorrow", responding with "Well, you should've planned your time better." is BS.

If you're interested in running Linux on your desktop, then you can definitely do it! But please, recognize that (most of) you have people in your life who fulfill either the 'supporter' or 'co-user' role, and they deserve to be brought into the loop.

(Source of rant: I once had my Dad upgrade several versions of macOS in one single jump, on some random weekday. Of course the upgrade took longer than expected, and also the jump of several versions caused lots of UI things to change. That led to multiple unplanned hour-plus-long phone calls in the middle of my workday, as this was my parents' only computer.)

<comment><USER36> Good point.

My support person was my 12-year-old son. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yawn! Really this discussion all over again? Just use the right tool for the right job. I wonder whether carpenters also discuss their hammers and screwdrivers like that. </rant>

</comment><comment><USER48> The author says he switched because of "Then came 2018, with its stunning revelations and outrages by Facebook, Apple, Google, and others. With privacy and free speech—in short, digital autonomy—deeply under threat"

Comparing Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple is apples to oranges. What did Apple do that threatens customer privacy and free speech?

You don't need to switch to Linux to stop using Facebook and Twitter...

<comment><USER34> _> What did Apple do that threatens customer privacy and free speech_

Apple affects many things negatively by being extremely pro lock-in and patent aggressive. So I'd say it's a good thing when someone stops using Apple's products and switches to Linux instead.

<comment><USER48> It's not a good thing if you like seeing software devs get paid :)

<comment><USER34> The company doesn't need to be a nasty anti-competitive jerk to pay developers.

<comment><USER49> What's anti competitive?

<comment><USER34> It's when instead of competing on merit, companies focus on controlling the market through monopolization techniques. I.e. simply banning competition.

Lock-in (i.e. refusal to support interoperability), patent aggression, forbidding competing technologies in their store and so on and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Nothing he says Is dependent on the Linux kernel so he could have run WSL under Windows 10. For Linux builds of GUI apps he could use a free X server.

I wonder if this can be applied to the majority of people. If the app is available for Windows then use the Windows version (e.g. Chrome at least until Edge uses Chrome engine) otherwise use the app under WSL.

Microsoft has made it easy to run GNU tools under Windows such that you don't need to be constrained to Linux installs for that.

<comment><USER51> WSL can be pretty slow for some tasks. It's REALLY slow for me when creating lots of files, like a git clone might do. See, for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948601)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> If you have Windows-only software, you can always just be a "pirate", flip Microsoft off and block all updates, telemetry and whatnot. Use what you want, give nothing back heh

<comment><USER53> > If you have Windows-only software, you can always just be a "pirate", flip > Microsoft off and block all updates, telemetry and whatnot

It's an awful lot of work to maintain this, and of dubious value with the end result being running a second-rate OS.

<comment><USER5> Windows is a first rate OS saddled with some stupid bullshit that's been piled on top of it. And be fair, maintaining a Linux configuration just the way you like it is a lot of work too. If it weren't, there wouldn't be hundreds of slightly-different distros.

<comment><USER53> > Windows is a first rate OS saddled with some stupid bullshit that's been > piled on top of it.

I'm sure there are good bits of Windows - Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for them. But I've never experienced Windows as a first rate OS - it's always had bullshit on top (and beneath) it.

> And be fair, maintaining a Linux configuration just the way you like it is a > lot of work too. If it weren't, there wouldn't be hundreds of slightly- > different distros.

Maybe "just the way you like it", but "functional and not sending your private information off to a dubious corporation" is pretty easy.

When there are issues with a Linux install, it's usually transparent enough to debug. Windows? Opaque all the way down. Ask for help online? They say "check your anti-virus; if that doesn't work, reinstall your OS". In what world is that sane?

<comment><USER5> > Maybe "just the way you like it", but "functional and not sending your > private information off to a dubious corporation" is pretty easy.

Sure, and that's great if that's all you want out of a personal computer.

> When there are issues with a Linux install, it's usually transparent enough > to debug.

Bull. I've been using Linux for decades and it's always the same story. You have a problem with X, you do a search for your problem with X, you find a dozen solutions that don't apply to you because you're on a different distro or they're from 2013 when half the software stack was different. Of course the error reporting is vague and the documentation is out of date, referring you to the source for details. If you dare go somewhere to ask about your problem, you most likely get told you're using the wrong distro. It really isn't all that different from the situation on Windows.

<comment><USER53> > > When there are issues with a Linux install, it's usually transparent > enough to debug.

> Bull. I've been using Linux for decades and it's always the same story. You > have a problem with X, you do a search for your problem with X, you find a > dozen solutions that don't apply to you because you're on a different distro > or they're from 2013 when half the software stack was different.

Ok, so in some cases there can be complications. But once you've found (a/the) solution, it makes a sort of sense. In contrast, in the cases I've successfully found a solution to a problem on Windows, the reasons usually remain opaque. This, surely, is a side-effect of running a proprietary OS, and one I no longer have patience for.

For example, when I was dual-booting Windows 10 on two desktops a couple of years ago, I ran into major problems just getting Windows installed (taking far longer to ultimately install than it ever took me to install _any_ Linux distro, from Ubuntu to Arch to Void to GuixSD).

I had downloaded the official Windows 10 image from Microsoft onto a usb thumbdrive and went to install. During the installing process, it failed with an obscure message about missing drivers. I try on the other differntly- configured desktop (different motherboard etc). It's the same thing. I think perhaps it's an chicken-and-egg issue with trying to install via a usb3 port (i.e. maybe it's missing usb3 drivers or something). Seems unlikely, but I try booting from a usb2 port. No luck. For good measure, even from different usb ports. But it doesn't matter, it's always the same error message during install. Seems like something which would be easy to debug, since there are in fact lots of Windows users, but I can't find anything similar described.

I finally find a post on some obscure forum which describes a similar problem. The suggested solution: wait until you get the 'drivers missing' error, and then unplug the installation usb thumb and plug it into a different usb port. (So it doesn't matter which usb port you start with, it will always 'miss' the drivers until you unplug it and plug it into another usb port.)

I thought: what a stupid solution, surely it won't work, but what the hell, let's try it for shits and giggles. Of course, that was the solution. That's completely opaque. The solution might as well have been sprinkling the machine with chicken blood while playing the Beatles' White Album.

I don't know how many hours were wasted trying to resolve that. After a year or so, I ended up wiping all of the Windows partitions. Too much headache.

It sounds like you have better experiences with Window. Perhaps you have the right magic touch that's needed.

<comment><USER5> I won't disagree that Windows has this issue, I just disagree that Linux doesn't have equally frustrating diagnosability issues. Just because you haven't personally encountered them does not mean they don't exist.

<comment><USER53> There are certainly irritating problems which can arise on Linux, I'm not in any way denying that. But on Windows, the closed nature of the OS makes certain things particularly irritatingly opaque and inflexible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to hold onto the hand-rails for so long and won't just dive in to Linux. I was guilty of hanging on to the dual boot for a few years but never ended up using the Windows side or any of those programs that I thought were so fundamentally important to my life.

I am not sure why people can't just give Ubuntu a go on a brand new machine rather than maybe run it on Virtualbox. It is like cars and bicycles, people will spend all their money on a car but want or insist on some second hand stolen junk when it comes to buying a bicycle. In so doing they never get into cycling and spend even more money on their car. Then one day they hear about climate change and maybe decide to get the bike out the shed.

I feel this is the same story here, since when has there been any information privacy with these commercial operating systems? DOS 6.22 with a locked floppy drive was probably the last time. So to suddenly wake up to the 'scandal' of Facebook et al. selling your every mouse click is a bit special.

These are just observations, obviously Ubuntu linux is the best operating system there is and I would not change for a paid for OS if you paid me.

<comment><USER5> > I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to > hold onto the hand-rails for so long and won't just dive in to Linux.

Well it doesn't help that Linux desktop is backed by one of the most condescending cultures that ever stalked the internet.

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the way Linux works just doesn't jive with a lot of people? Like, everything has a middleman involved. Drivers for your hardware? Have to be merged into the kernel. Applications? Should go through (all of) the distro package repo(s) unless you want it to be a pain in the ass.

We get it, you find value in the way these things work, some of us don't.

<comment><USER55> > Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the way Linux works just doesn't > jive with a lot of people? Like, everything has a middleman involved. > Drivers for your hardware? Have to be merged into the kernel. Applications? > Should go through (all of) the distro package repo(s) unless you want it to > be a pain

…? This is a really strange perspective, since I've found Linux to _remove_ middlemen. No more searching a manufacterer's website for some garbage closed- source driver that has a dozen vulnerabilities and no support. No more waiting for Microsoft to roll out fixes; you can apply your own changes yourself.

<comment><USER56> > No more waiting for Microsoft to roll out fixes; you can apply your own > changes yourself.

And now you have to, forever, since you're no longer using a package manager to get updates to your custom buggy horror show.

> No more searching a manufacterer's website for some garbage closed-source > driver

Please point me to the source for the drivers for my rtx2080. That would be super helpful!

<comment><USER57> >Please point me to the source for the drivers for my rtx2080. That would be super helpful!

There are cases where good hardware has no drivers for latest windows, like I had a Wacoom tablet that the vendfor would not result drivers for newer Windows version but continued to work out of the box on Linux. The fact that NVIDIA are jerks and not providing at least documentation for the community to make drivers is not the fault of the Linux community or the fault of us the NVIDIA customers,

The proprietary driver work well enough for my 970 but my next card will be an AMD one</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pinterest: Building expanded gender options on signup - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/building-expanded-gender-options-signup <comment><USER2> What a waste of effort. Identity politics infects signup forms.</comment>


Google Quietly Rolls Out WDYL.com: A Range Of Google Product Results On One Page - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/google-wdyl/

<comment><USER2> This gives me the same feelings I had when I first used Cuil.</comment>


Show HN: Digital Legacy, sending messages automatically when you've passed away - <AUTHOR> https://legacy.binomads.com <comment><USER2> I hope I never receive any message from this service, but good idea anyway :)</comment>


ReactOS 0.4.3 Released - <AUTHOR> https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-043-released <comment><USER2> Actually, they are trying to be like the Windows XP/2003 base and not the newer Windows. It is because Microsoft makes their APIs secret and undocumented in modern Windows and over time people figure them out.

ReactOS shares code with WINE to run Windows apps, the older the better. 64 bit Windows can't run 16-bit apps and that is what NTVDM does for ReactOS running 16-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows programs.

ReactOS has a small memory footprint of about 48M of RAM or so, because it doesn't have services for it like BITS etc and just runs Windows Apps and Drivers. So it is better for older PCs to run on because of the small memory footprint.

I have donated to ReactOS, HakuOS, and AROS before because I want to see them get ready for consumers to use them as an alternative to Windows that isn't Linux. ReactOS is a Windows alternative, HakuOS is a BeOS alternative, AROS is an AmigaOS alternative. It is a chicken and egg situation where people don't want to develop for it or support it until it has good enough apps for it that can surf the Internet, do Office documents, etc like Windows can.

<comment><USER3> ReactOS runs Win16 in 64 bit mode?!

Good to know if I get around to exporting some of my late father's musical compositions from software dating from the Win 3.x era once I no longer have an XP installation.

<comment><USER2> ReactOS is only 32 bits I think, I might be mistaken. NTVDM is a virtual 16 bit machine so if ReactOS was in 64 bit mode NTVDM would run 16 bit programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > improvements to ReactOS' implementation of NTVDM has seen several more DOS- > era games now running successfully. Strategy fans in particular should enjoy > a trip down memory lane with the likes of Age of Empires and Command & > Conquer.

Isn't Age of Empires a Win32 game? (Its system requirements are "Win 95 or Win NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3".) Why would it need the NTVDM to run?

<comment><AUTHOR> it does not need. But some fixes were made fot this game too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading about ReactOS like 10 years ago in a _paper_ computer magazine, I wish alternative OS implementations like ReactOS and Haiku would get more exposure.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love the effort of ReactOS. I really hope they ever reach 1.0

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. I mean, jeez.

At this rate, one day I will be able to run Rainbow 6 Rogue Spear and Deus Ex on ReactOS.

I did not say that day was anywhere near now.

<comment><USER8> I'm impressed that they managed to get _Blender_ working:

[https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/14095/bl...](https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/14095/blender.png)

Wow. Firefox, too.

<comment><USER7> That is impressive. I don't care about it quite as much though, because that's OS.

<comment><USER9> "Because that's OS"? What do you mean? In this context it is quite ambiguous since it can't mean Operating System. I chuckled when I thought you could mean 'Old Shit':

I don't care that you can run Rainbow 6 and Deus Ex, that is old shit, can it run the latest Call of Duty?

<comment><USER7> It's Open Source. I don't need windows to run it.

<comment><USER9> Haha ok yes, that makes more sense ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Part of me wishes ReactOS was a basis for TAILS. I like TAILS but a lot more normal non-techies could use it if it was more a more windows friendly transition.

<comment><USER11> ReactOS isn't particularly friendly to Windows users. You would be better off with something like LXDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Site certificate issuer's certificate has been revoked?

<comment><USER13> Firefox claims it's a valid certificate. Are you using Chrome?

<comment><USER12> I'm using Safari. It says, for the GlobalSign Domain Validation CA - SHA256 - G2,

        This certificate has been revoked

Both Chrome and Firefox work fine. How should I troubleshoot this problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ReactOS used to be a free and opensource alternative to Windows, with binary compatibility. It is an excellent project from technical point of view. However I am no longer sure about its utility.

windows 10 is last version of windows (continuously updated like a service), and free for most users. This takes away one of the advantage (free) of ReactOS. Microsoft may well opensource windows, before they catch up and hence taking away second advantage.

<comment><USER15> Windows 10 just cost me $200, on a new computer. This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced reinstall due to an incompatibility between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (the HD was accessed by Windows 7 on another computer, after still other Windows 10 problems that began the whole debacle.) So that's one computer and $200 that Windows 10 has cost me, lately.

<comment><USER16> "This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced "

Wow, that's quite a claim!

<comment><USER15> I had a lot of problems after Windows 10 took over, but finally, an accidental unplugging during a Win 10 reinstall killed the motherboard. Not likely a coincidence, not something I'd have been doing except for numberless problems.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


EtherDFS – The Ethernet DOS File System - <AUTHOR> http://etherdfs.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> MS-Net is another option for connecting DOS boxes to linux servers running samba - it's a neat way of running diskless DOS boxes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-Net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-Net)

<comment><USER3> >MS-Net is another option for connecting DOS boxes to linux servers running samba - it's a neat way of running diskless DOS boxes.

Actually it seems to me like a non-option or a non-available option (unless one finds the program and license on some garage sale or the like).

<comment><USER2> It's on the MS FTP server (which seems to down at present - withdrawn?). There are plenty of mirrors - first one on Google is:-

[http://www.kompx.com/en/network-setup-in-dos-microsoft- netwo...](http://www.kompx.com/en/network-setup-in-dos-microsoft-network- client.htm)

<comment><USER3> Well, that is the "normal" MS DOS network driver/client, not the MS-NET you linked to on Wikipedia, which is much earlier and was (mainly) "server side":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-Net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-Net)

>The system also supplied the program REDIR.EXE, which allowed transparent file access from DOS machines to any MS-Net based server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a problem most of us have in 2017. I wonder what the use case is for having a bunch of DOS machines.

<comment><USER5> Sidenote:

If anyone wants to make a new-school 64 bit DOS-alike, that would be really kool. thx.

<comment><USER6> FreeDOS seems to have a 64-bit version on Sourceforge, but it's a year stale and I can't vouch for its functionality. Still, might be worth a look: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/dos64/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/dos64/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Read this article I posted on my gopher.

:D</comment>


RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms - <AUTHOR> http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

<comment><USER2> Really good animations, really good points, but I don't recall seeing any _concrete_ suggestions in any of these.

Are they just high-profile, high-quality rants, hoping to get _others_ to come up with changes? Or is there something more concrete backing these that isn't disseminated with them, preventing their (really good?) ideas from being implemented?

I've only seen a few, but are others more _useful_? They're all _interesting_ , but those aren't the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Right. I really like his point about the schooling being a factory, with people going through based on date of manufacture. I absolutely think it would be awesome if you could go through your grades at your own pace, in different subjects. A software based approach to learning would be excellent for this.

But of course this is completely antithetical to his latter point, which is that group based learning/problem-solving is important. You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

The happy medium might be to structure elementary education more like college, with the ability to take 100 level classes in the 4th year or whatnot. But of course, this is far more expensive than the batch method because you have to have many more classes. To support so many classes you have to have many more children, which means vastly larger schools, so you might only be able to do it in densely populated cities.

<comment><USER4> > You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

Isn't this how adults learn? (And children too, when out of the classroom.) If you want to learn something new, say how to program in Haskell, what do you do? You probably don't try to find an institution to which you pay a lot of money and which offers you in return a seat in a room along with thirty others like you in which an instructor talks to you for a few hours a week.

Instead, if you want to learn Haskell programming, you check for learning materials online and go through them at your own pace. When you get stuck, you find online forums where you can ask questions. Also, as you learn, you answer other people's questions on the forums. You are learning at your own pace but you are not isolated.

<comment><USER3> Well, that's how I learned programming, and to this day I haven't managed to collaborate with anyone on anything.

My friends that did group projects in a class, by comparison, are quite good at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For more detail on the background of factory education and the reason for it, and a bit more details on alternatives, check out John Taylor Gatto's works. He's a former NY state educator of the year who came to realize that school as we know it is bad for people.

Transcript of one interview:

<http://www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf>

mp3 of another interview:

[http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19-- JohnGatt...](http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19-- JohnGatto.mp3)

He also has a couple books in particular "Dumbing Us Down" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction".

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like the animations (except for the arm, I wish the words just "appeared" sort of like the music video for "heartless" by the fray). Does anyone know of a tool that can help us make this easier?</comment>


With New Chief, Microsoft's New Mantra Is 'Innovation,' Over and Over - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/the-new-microsoft-is-less-developer-and-more-innovation/

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but doesn't it take more than chanting a mantra to innovate? You have to depart from your current methods and practices, in more than cosmetic ways, don't you?</comment>


Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World - <AUTHOR> https://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-silicon-valley-and-big-tech-dont-innovate-anymore/604969/ <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley is simply maturing from a new emerging market into a more traditional, but no less innovative one. As Schumpeter pointed out many decades ago the idea that 'small is beautiful' is not really true.

The equilibrium for innovative ecosystems is not small-scale but rather monopolistic competition, because complex production processes require scale and knowledge that can only be managed by sufficiently large institutions. In mature industries, the competition happens between monopolistic players who for a while earn surplus profit through the collection of economic rent and are then replaced through creative destruction by another player (think Myspace and Facebook), rather than the bazaar economy that this article seems to advocate in which profits are constantly burned away by competition, it is surplus capital of monopolistic firms that enables innovation.

This also shows in productivity statistics, wages and so on, where large firms simply win out. And as one data point, Apple is worth about as much as all unicorns on the planet combined. People tend to overrate the importance and size of startups for what I think are ideological reasons.

And also, in addition, it should be pointed out that the American government played a significant role in enabling the 'old' silicon valley in the first place. This role (also one which Schumpeter introduced) of the entrepreneurial state seems to be forgotten on occasion. It wasn't just smart kids in garages but also the defence department which contributed to the development of the SV ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree with your take. People forget that Bell Labs and Xerox Parc which were at the forefront of innovation were the result of cash rich monopolies.

<comment><USER4> Xerox evolved out of Haloid, which struggled near bankruptcy for years to build an impossible machine - the photocopier - one of the great disruptive innovations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an antidote, I'd like to recommend Peter F. Drucker's 1985 book, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship":

[https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Peter- F-D...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Peter-F- Drucker/dp/0060851139/)

Drucker was a critic of the idea that small firms are more innovative than large firms. He provides a wealth of innovation about the styles of innovation that large firms produce.

About this:

" _But there's a more troubling possibility. Maybe something has changed about the nature of innovation, at least in software._ "

When was this era? From the 1940s to the early 1980s, software development was mostly done at big firms such as IBM and Hewlett Packard. The rise of the personal computer allowed a wave of software firms, such as Microsoft and Adobe, to get going, but even then, the costs of getting such a startup going was much higher than now. The era of the really cheap software startup was basically the era of the CRUD app moved to the Web, basically 1995 to 2015, give or take a few years on either side. My point is, that era is more the exception than the rule, given the history of the industry.

It seems melodramatic to claim that a specific culture was lost, though it is absolutely true that the industry has matured and therefore the situation has changed. We are unlikely to see any more startups come out of Silicon Valley and become huge like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, before Google, FB, and Apple, there was IBM, HP, and MS.

IMO, what's hampering Silicon Valley innovation right now is the outrageous cost of living. It's hard to take a leap when you have a million dollar mortgage. Startups still happen of course but only with significant capital backing. But I'd wager the pace has slowed significantly.

<comment><USER7> >what's hampering Silicon Valley innovation right now is the outrageous cost of living.

I wish a "remote hub" concept would become popular. Where you work remote but need to be close enough to come in once a week or for big meetings. This would allow people to move a little further away and would possibly allow areas right outside the bay to become an extension of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER8> This would be trivial if we had more effective mass transit

<comment><USER9> That would require far more dense housing.

<comment><USER8> In general I disagree with this, if we spent a fraction of what we do on car transit on mass transit we'd be able to support mass transit basically anywhere, except large cities with ridiculous spread, like Phoenix.

In particular here though I was just talking about better commuter trains and (the existence of) HSR, neither of which is really dependent on density.

<comment><USER9> Who would support mass transit? If everyone has the option of low density housing with the luxury of their own cars, they're going to take that option instead of mass transit. The proof is everywhere.

<comment><USER8> Everyone that lives in the downtown of a city?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The world has always been this way, where it seems like the giants will live forever. And that smaller companies don't stand a chance to dethrone any of these incumbents. But history has always proven that wrong. Just look at the landscape now, it's already so different than just 5 years ago. These so called large companies haven't even been alive for most of our lifetimes.

> That means the only way their investors will get their money out will be via > an acquisition by one of the large companies. Google, Facebook, and their > ilk "have become enormous by swallowing small companies"

This point about acquisitions always held true. Most companies will get their exit through an acquisition. There will have been many acquisition conversations had at any company that has IPO-ed. The media has us well poised to believe that a company must IPO to succeed, when most startup successes are buried in the boring stories of acquisitions. Very occasionally does a company breakthrough and IPO.

And if anything, this shows that small is still incredibly powerful – if they feel the need to acquire you instead of mobilizing their large numbers of employees, then, whether they admit it or not, they definitely believe in the value of small too.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a highly political piece. It suggests that smaller companies are not effective and is wielding that idea to suggest that Facebook should be broken up. Facebook is naturally going to do whatever they can to hold on and given the way their business functions, they need to be large. Microsoft did the same thing in the 90s.

Even if companies should be smaller for greater effect, it's possible that things have shifted due to the natural growth curve of technology, as opposed to there being a deliberate cultural shift. For example, Ford was once a small company, disrupted the world, grew to be its size, and in general (barring companies like Tesla that are also competing with relatively radical new technologies and will grow to be a large size barring enhanced robotics [another emerging technology]) it is necessary for companies to be large to compete. In other words, it seems to me there its always David versus Goliath; David is the old, Goliath is the new. Until there are new technologies, we are looking at Goliaths.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is just a matter of the maturity of the industry. Beginning in the late 1890s there were about 3000 automobile companies in the US. After a few decades there were the big three and a few also rans. The IT industry is undergoing a similar consolidation as it matures.

<comment><USER13> The 'big three' were eaten alive by cars from abroad after a few decades of stagnation and were only saved because we paid for their bailouts. Time and time again.

Break up Facebook and Google, use the government to keep the market efficient by not allowing any market distorting entities from forming.

<comment><USER14> > The 'big three' were eaten alive by cars from abroad

GM wasn't eaten alive by foreign competition, nor was Ford. GM was eaten alive by extraordinarily bad financial decisions by management, not due to a collapse of their business. The bankruptcy put them back to profitability for a reason: they weren't in fact eaten alive. If the business had been destroyed by competition, they would neither exist nor have produced $30 billion in operating income the prior four years. Why did the bankruptcy get them back to sound profitability? Because they were able to crawl out from under layers of bad financial decisions from the past, not due to competition (the competition didn't end with the bankruptcy).

GM + Ford = $300 billion in sales.

That's what eaten alive looks like? Two of the largest automakers on the planet.

<comment><USER13> I'm talking about the 70s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the economic incentives, rather than the culture, is what has changed over the past decade or so. As the article mentions - companies stay private and the probability of IPO is so low these days that working for a non-FAANG company is effectively return-free risk. Combine this with a high-and-rising cost of living and rising college debt and I would guess that fewer people today have the means to strike out on their own. Perhaps this will reverse should ZIRP end someday.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Quantitative research suggests that big companies do different kinds of R&D > than their more modest counterparts. Instead of coming up with new products, > they come up with process improvements. "If the nature of innovation is > distorted toward selling to an incumbent, you're going to get more feature- > driven innovation rather than systemic disruption," ...

I can anecdotally confirm this. I spent the summer in 2018 doing research at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. While there, I attended a presentation by the director of the Future Interfaces Group[0], Chris Harrison. He described some _incredibly_ cool technology his group had developed over many years (for example, ViBand in 2014[1]).

At the end of his presentation I asked: if this technology has existed for years, with accessible implementations available from researchers, why isn't it in consumer products yet? His exasperated response echoed the quote above -- big companies like the safety of the status quo, and don't need to innovate if what they have is working well-enough. In other words, they are extremely risk-averse when it comes to revolutionary technology.

More recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. O'Mara at a presentation about her book. Based on her informative book talk, and a skim of the book, I can highly recommend it.

[0]: [http://www.figlab.com/about-us](http://www.figlab.com/about-us)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0MeASmuY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0MeASmuY)

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently pitched a idea to my boss, and you know what- it was not even considered. The idea was simple. Drones around the outside of a house will be numerous and ubiqitous. Cleaning windows, painting, repairing, cleaning roofs, solarpanels, replacing cameras and sensors.. etc.

These drones, will then discover that infrastructure (rails, anchor points) for these drones is needed- on each house, and that even some overlap for drones exist- aka, one drone, several tools is the most wise approach. These drones need energy, water and internet.

To be the first to define a standard for such a outside maintenance drone, and convince house building companys to roll it out, together with you, seems like a rather conservative bet.

This bet was openly laughed about in my presence in my company. The same laugh, people would have had about the suggestion of a google, a amazon, a anything in my country, ten years ago.

Nobody laughs about that in the valley. They know how quick things can change and scale.

<comment><USER18> Maybe because that's a bad idea.

Unpopular != future Amazon. Sorry.

<comment><USER17> To define a electric standard, before a society is electrified and set the wheels in motion for others to adhere to it - is a bad idea?

It always needs to be a Edison vs Tesla war, before things are settled?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Apple, a start-up at the time, would famously popularize PCs instead.

I have a hard time accepting the conclusions of this article when this one line is so inaccurate. It was IBM, a _very_ old company even in the 1970s, that popularized PCs. Apple was barely a blip.

<comment><USER20> IBM didn't take the personal computer seriously until they saw the succes of Apple and other manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The best part of startup culture is the idea of being able to create something that can grow big while starting as a small player. The rest is just marketing and envy over ceo bonuses.

My town doesn't really have that culture, but we have a decent small business culture at least.</comment>


Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/03/features/messaging-apps <comment><USER3> I think the key thing here is that Durov has the money from selling stock in his previous company (12% w/valuation of 3-4 billion) which means he can afford to pay to support the app in the meantime without any external financial help. I do think there are different ways to monetize messaging outside of pushing advertisements into people's face or selling information and third-party paid apps are a good option.

In that regard I think the title is misleading: Durov plans to make money through the app eventually, just not through selling people's information or push advertising.

<comment><USER4> Nobody sets out to do evil but until he creates an ownership structure which prevents himself from cashing in once he's won everyone's trust this is just an underdog doing whatever it takes to attract customers.

To be succinct, one day he will sell out and the buyers will have every incentive to make money out of their users.

<comment><USER5> What's funny is that he was also promising to not put any ads at VK (russian social network he founded) ever, but pretty soon he acted in an opposite way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No such thing as a free lunch.

Telegram hasn't done a very good job of eliminating the possibility of profit. The secret chat feature is actually a marginal use case. By default messages are readable by the back end. In fact, group chats are also reasable by the back end always, and any conversation which can be accessed from multiple devices. And last I heard, the official windows desktop app does not have secret chats.

All of these messages are the normal use case on telegram. And the text is being indexed by the back end for easy searching capabilities. So essentially telegram has built a search engine for the conversations of tens of millions of people who are slightly more paranoid and want a secure messenger. Not only that, many of the tens of millions have shared their entire address book with names and phone numbers because the official clients required them to.

If they're trying to avoid having valuable information that someone would pay money for, they're not doing a very good job.

</comment><comment><USER7> This read like an ad for Telegram.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but everything's true. Encrypted by default, huge bounty for security researches, fast, great cross platform apps.

<comment><USER9> Encrypted with their home-grown crypto. Telegram is not fully free and open source. Encryption by default? That has to be new, it was not when I recently checked. And of course there is [http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams- crypta...](http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams- cryptanalysis-contest)

Use Signal/Textsecure, folks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since the early 90's, newcomers to the Internet have attempted to monetize the existing phenomenon which the Internet - in all its true free glory - <USER2> allowed.

There have been countless attempts to 'own email', and before that, 'own Gopher' and 'own Archie' and so on. There was, once, Hotmail. Then came GMail, and then .. Facebook.

It's quite possible to maintain your own social network with email alone. You can achieve the same results with a mailing list as you can with the Facebook timeline.

The only difference is that you must educate the people in your network to understand how the technology works, and how to operate it in order to function in as effective a manner as is required to maintain a high standard of communication. The fact that this is nearly impossible in the modern context - that you cannot get a group of 200+ people to operate email in the same, standardized manner, is what Facebook - and other mass-communication media - depend upon in order to gain their market share.

I would abandon Facebook in 5 minutes if I could be guaranteed that the people I care about - the links in my social network - were as competent at handling the solution as would be required in order to maintain the quality of communication that Facebook currently delivers. Alas, this is not possible - and those who are attempting to monetize and profit from this mass stupidity will do little to address the issue - for after all, it matters that people don't know how to write a proper email. This is the only reason Facebook has survived as long as it has.

If you want to truly revolutionize communications in this day and age, do something that allows people to use the existing, free, technologies of communication to increase the quality of communication among the masses. Alas, this is a very difficult problem - and like all social ills, the solution is education. The absolute hardest problem there is to solve, out there, today: teaching someone how to use an existing technology to effectively communicate.

</comment><comment><USER11> Woah. Hardcore encryption? Is that even better than military grade encryption?

<comment><USER12> I don't think any reasonable person would refer to Telegram's horrific chimera as "hardcore encryption."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish there was something like Bitcoin for messaging. Users need a better way to prove their identities (or hide them, depending on the situation) and be able to verify peers. The current hierarchical security system is probably destined to require money, but the free alternatives make me uncomfortable because they tend to need private keys.

What I really want is an open version of Skype where the private key can always be generated by the user's mind, overcomes all the limitations like NAT that make users second class netizens, has no central tracker, and (optionally, but possibly required to work around the limitations) allows a certain amount of traffic to be forwarded like Tor.

I don't see how we can have a conversation about who pays for messaging when the underlying infrastructure for truly secure online communication hasn't yet gone mainstream. I don't really trust Freenet or Tor and can't quite figure out how come, so maybe we could start there and figure out why that is.

And a billion dollars for anything messaging-related completely blows my mind. Most of the world-changing software was developed for a few thousand dollars by a couple of people working in their spare time. To me, paying that much completely misses the point and probably hinders progress by locking capital up in niches that exclude developers who are working towards creating a non- scarcity based economy.

<comment><USER14> [https://tox.im](https://tox.im) ?

<comment><USER13> That's really cool, I like how you just give the other user a Tox id token and it sets up the secure channel. I wonder if that's a general approach for secure communication, because as long as it's sent through another secure channel (that may use the traditional SSL certificates from an authority) it could be used to avoid a MITM attack.

Maybe a way to do this in the future with an insecure channel is to give the peer your contact token using only context that both of you know. So the above token could get converted to a human-readable string like "that place we met that first time and what you said to me with 12345abcdef on the end" and the other party would have to know you to figure out how to find you.

Proving who you are beyond that point would probably involve some back and forth questioning like in spy movies or a video call (which could be faked in 5-10 years with computer rendering) so shared history will be key.

It already sounds like it can run over Tor, but it would be nice if it had a standard socket wrapper that could be run over UDP NAT tunneling to look like an SSH VPN. Maybe WebRTC could be integrated with it somehow. I just mean that I'd like the negotiation phase to be separate so that if it works, you're just presented with a secure socket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just the opposite. The free software movement has led to apps and programs where the users are the product, not the customer, and companies bend over backwards for advertisers. The companies have no incentive to care about your privacy, just your data.

Paid messaging apps, however (at least until they get acquired by advertising companies like Facebook), give companies incentives to service their customers first, and the users are actually the customers. That's why Slack and WhatsApp and HipChat and Basecamp have taken off--because they offer the security and paid customer/company relationship.

This article's title is woefully non-conclusive. Sure it would be wonderful if ALL messaging apps could by built and funded by Russian billionaires such they were private and free for the end user, but the fact is that to support the infrastructure of a billion+ user messaging app, you need to make money. And if you can't make money from the users to whom you are promising security and privacy (and thus to whom you owe allegiance), you have to make money elsewhere. And the alternative is arguably what has caused so many security and privacy problems in the first place.

<comment><USER16> It seems you missed this chunk of the article:

<quote>Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the _Telegram_ platform."</quote>

<comment><USER11> How do you collect rent on an open platform?

<comment><USER17> "How do you make money off search?" \-- question by a lot of smart people around 2000.

<comment><USER18> The commenter above, bmmayer1, noted advertisers would be how that would be done. I believe a similar method was used with search engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Messaging services (with say >100k users) should fall under general laws for telecommunications. For instance, this would solve the problem that messaging services don't interface with eachother (lock-in), and it would solve the problem of the provider peeking into any of the messages for whatever reason.

<comment><USER20> Couldn't disagree more. Regulation has not solved any of these concerns, in fact quite the opposite. Regulation of telecommunication has resulted in some of the biggest and well-seated monopolies on the planet. Please, god, no. Messaging services should fall under exactly one law of the land, and that's the First Amendment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have been using Telegram for work for a few months now instead of (or in addition to) IRC - it's been very good, the mobile and desktop clients are great.

Tested Tox last year but it was super buggy. TextSecure looked good but doesn't seem to have as many users. I think Telegram will keep growing.

I just watched Durov's talk with Jimmy Wales from a couple of years back and he comes across like he genuinely cares about ideas that benefit all internet users more so than money. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM)

Still, doesn't seem like a sustainable path to have the messaging infrastructure be a responsibility of one company, both for security and financial reasons. Surely some kind of tox style p2p infrastructure would be better?

<comment><USER22> Interestingly in the talk he showed that VK had 33 million visitors monthly and Telegram apparently already has 35 million.

His new project is even more successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "We're trying to create a new type of IT company, one that never focuses on > maximising profits, but instead provides value to society,"

This is dreadful. The Free software movement has existed for decades and Telegram brings nothing new to the table that Google hadn't already a decade ago (open yet crippled protocol, proprietary servers). There is nothing new here, besides the fact that Telegram basically makes no money. Which is also nothing new, since Google Talk and Voice never made money either!

I don't mind it, because we know the protocol and can reengineer the clients easily in the event they betray their users trust. It is much better than WhatsApp or Skype being a whole-pipe black box. But at the end of the day, XMPP has existed, has improved, and today provides all the features of all these other messaging transports and more, the problem is there is no money to be had in providing an easy signup XMPP service, so nobody advertises them. Which makes Telegram perplexing, because their only valuable resource is their userbase, and they are not directly monetizing it at all. Contrast that with Duckduckgo having an XMPP server @dukgo.com that basically got a blog post and hasn't been talked about much since, that I use all the time on all my devices.

But fundamentally none of this absolves how stupid all these companies re- implement a wheel poorly (XMPP) because the old wheel is so well known and understood that you can't lock people in or profit off the users using it.

<comment><USER24> XMPP have troubles with synchronizing chats between clients, with push notifications, with user-friendly mobile clients. I like XMPP, I did set up my own server, but I finally abandoned it. It's usable only with one client, preferably on desktop.

<comment><USER25> >synchronizing chats between clients,

The Carbons XEP[0] is now fairly widely supported and does exactly this.

>user-friendly mobile clients.

Conversations[1] is excellent and is free software.

>push notifications

The centralized system of push notifactions on Android and iOS is not yet supported, it's true, but XMPP with its extensions has pretty good support for battery-constrained devices with intermittent network connections.

I use XMPP across multiple devices with my own server to communicate to other people running their own server and it works great. Setting up your own server is extremely easy ("apt-get install prosody" works out of the box on Debian; stay away from ejabberd which is a pain) and I highly recommend it.

[0] [http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html)

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations)

<comment><USER26> Not to diminish the good sides, but multi-device XMPP experience is a quite complicated matter even today. For example, you'll have to give up on OTR, and you'll have to choose the software carefully.

<comment><USER27> You don't really have to give up on OTR, but OTR has to get a lot more user- friendly for that use case. Right now it breaks all over the place, and with some really obvious bad UX, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This raises the obvious question, then who is going to pay for them?

<comment><USER29> Who pays for e-mail?

<comment><USER30> Google and every other company that invests the immense time and money required to keep it clear of spam. Email without a large spam filtering infrastructure is unusable.

<comment><USER31> I used email before there were infrastructure-based spam filters. It was very usable with client-based spam filters. You can't do encrypted email without either a whitelisting system or client-based spam filters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is it open source and open protocol?

If so, that's what we need. Email was once a bunch of proprietary systems - MCIMail, CompuServ, AOL, etc. It was inconvenient that they didn't interoperate. All those proprietary systems were wiped out by an open one.

</comment><comment><USER33> Either users will pay with their money or pay with their data (getting ads), else the model is not sustainable. Since, messaging using Internet is being considered here as basic necessity, one could argue that Messaging apps turns to be non-profit organizations or government supported organizations (but anonymous).

<comment><USER34> Costs are very low. If the owners don't want to maximize profit, the service can very well run like this for a very long time.

<comment><USER33> You are only considering the cost of infrastructure. What about the basic salary for the people working on the application and monitoring infrastructure, who will pay for that, if not users and not ads and not government?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The team is amazingly technical. Nikolai Durov is a triple IMO gold medallists (and from Russia where selection is much more competitive than most other countries)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov)

</comment><comment><USER35> It's either app, or users are the product. When I was in Hong Kong recently, listening to talks about WhatsApp & Facebook, each person using these services was worth +- $48. Sub. fee? Anything like that.

</comment><comment><USER36> Telegram is a great messaging apps. Private, desktop and web support, fast, better UI compared to WhatsApp. The problem is my friend don't know it so I have to be stuck with WhatsApp for now.

<comment><USER37> The fast follower problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782)

</comment><comment><USER38> > _Secure messaging should be free for everyone. Displaying ads alongside your > private communication seems out of place, even immoral_

I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this service to work without someone footing the bill?

<comment><USER39> It wasn't left out. You must have missed it.

 _Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."_</comment></comment>


Man abuses CCTV camera before walking into lamp post - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2012/nov/29/man-abuses-cctv-camera-lamp-post-video

<comment><USER2> Ha ha ha! Very funny.

Why did the West Midlands Police release this particular video, and not the video that shows someone making rude gestures at the cameras for a very long time indeed, and then hailing a cab and riding away?

My point is that this particular video is very funny, and the rude person in question does get his/her comeuppance. But the fact that it exists at all is questionable. How many sequences of large chested women sauntering down the street exist on West Midlands Police PC's? How many sequences of knee- tremblers after pub closings get captured and "reviewed" many, many time? Clearly, the West Midlands police are reviewing the video in person, and can save and retain and post videos on the general internet.

This video just presages a release of many videos that abuse the privacy of, and demonstrate contempt for the West Midlands general populace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. This is a result of me clicking and laughing, and not thinking and judging. Who knows what other (less publicly appreciable) clips are being passed about West Mids police.</comment></comment>


Understanding the Network Interface Card - <AUTHOR> https://loomcom.com/blog/0118_understanding_the_ni_card.html <comment><USER2> I've been following this project for roughly the whole time he's been working on it.

He's made some pretty incredible progress - from scratch, he's done the following:

* A complete WE32k processor emulator

* A complete 3B2/400 Emulator

* A complete BLIT (5620) Terminal Emulator

The fact that I can have a complete SysVR3 system now, which is important for unix history, is very very cool.</comment>