Conversation

I saw a few people talking shit about Linux users.

I'm a Linux user! I'm also a Windows user and a Mac user. I try to make sure my software works on multiple platforms.

What I'm told is that I only use software that is blatantly broken in five ways, and I respond to bug reports by saying "fix it yourself."

This is surprising to me because my experience is that when I use proprietary software, it's full of bugs that go unfixed for years. The experience is often unfixably broken for disabled people, who aren't in the target market. But even for people who don't need accessibility features, I'm not sure the experience is any less broken.

I can understand feeling disempowered when someone asks you to write code or file a bug report. But I feel even more disempowered when literally no one in the world can help me. In many cases like Windows itself, the software is designed to hurt me, with irremovable ads and push notifications.

The actual business model is "no one can help you."

I think the reason that Linux software is perceived as buggy is because when you complain about bugs in Linux software, there is a significant chance they will be fixed. It is typically completely useless to complain about proprietary software and if you do so, you are probably doing so in a one-on-one, private medium. So no one will actually see your problem.

For that matter, it's not clear to me that Linux actually is harder to use than Windows. I think that when someone's bad at Linux, we say "Linux is hard," and when someone's bad at Windows, we say they're "bad at computers," which holds Linux to a double standard.

If you actually watch a new computer user learn Windows, you won't think it's easy.

It's also way harder for experienced users to do power user tasks on Windows because the environment will respond to basic operations like "launch Python" by trying to sell you on the desirability of the Windows store.

It might be tempting to say "novice users will not need to do that" but this is a major frustration in trying to support Windows users who have broken their system, often by using it as designed. And there's an even more fundamental problem in that nobody actually knows what Windows is supposed to do. There are relatively few tools designed to restore Windows to a known good state and Microsoft's preferred process for this will delete your data.

Even if it was easier to get started on Windows, I'm not sure it would be a good thing. Low tech literacy can be expensive: concretely, malware and scams rely on you not having the ability to distinguish them from legitimate content.

And Windows and iOS abet that. They actively train you not to understand:

- the distinction between privileged/non-privileged contexts
- the true source of messages you see from the computer
- the inherent danger of saying "yes" to things

I suspect the design of Windows itself is a primary reason for the success of ransomware.

(A footnote on accessibility: It's really common for me to see people reply to accessibility talk with comments that amount to "fuck the blind." To that I'll say: visual impairment has about a 2% prevalence rate. If you live to 50, you have about a 10% chance of visual disability, and at 75 that rises to 25%. So it's about as common as autism and rapidly becomes more common with age.)