I hope that the EU becomes a real innovation center of decentralized tech initiatives. There are all these tech movements like local-first apps, atproto/activitypub, and self-hosting that could be absolutely supercharged by both the user and developer base of Europe flat out rejecting big tech cloud platforming.
I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft.
IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creative work is the most common form of output. An Adobe CC Linux option would enable that set of "power users". And regardless of their actual percentage of desktop users, just about ever YouTuber or streamer talking about technology is by definition a content creator so opening Linux up to them would have a big effect on adoption.
And yes I've tried most of the Linux alternatives, like GIMP, Inkscape, DaVinci, RawTherapee, etc. They're mostly /fine/ but it's one of the weaker software categories in FOSS-alternatives IMO. It also adds an unnecessary learning curve. Gamers would laugh if they were told that Linux gaming was great, they just have to learn and play an entirely different set of games.
Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.
Like any opposition party, the anti big tech crowd is actually a loose coalition of different goals and interests. I've noticed that as these platforms get through the earlier stages of "will it even work" the differences in values are becoming more pronounced and controversial. The primary two groups seem to be those who value federation and see centralized control and algorithms as the threat and those who value encryption and see surveillance as the threat. Obviously these two things aren't mutually exclusive and we all want to see new platforms that can solve for both. But there's a quite distinct difference in the primary priority and consequent technical decisions.
I hope maybe if we can be aware that this is a broad set of technologies being driven by a broad set of goals then we can be a bit more gracious when a project isn't perfectly aligning with our personal values and find the common ground and values.
Thanks for this comment, you've said exactly what I've been thinking.
I'm definitely in the sect of people who have "detach from big centralised tech, be self hostable & interoperable" as the main priority, with E2EE being a nice extra. So it's always interesting when I read articles from the other side who see privacy, maximal E2EE & zero metadata as their #1 priority. They entirely dismiss protocols as junk for reasons I would never think or care about. But these things do matter to them, and they are just as important as me.
It strikes me as a near impossible balancing act for a project like Matrix to please everyone. They are clearly trying.
I will also note that there's a volume difference in the messaging being sent out. The privacy/security people are often very loud & critical, with good reason from their perspective. For example this article. That makes the discourse seem more negative than the overall sentiment probably is.
I'd go a few layers even broader than this article and say that the modern tech industry has an abysmal track record when building tools for non-software technical fields. Tech builds either their own software-oriented workflows or the most dumbed down consumer-oriented workflow they can. Law is an excellent example of a field with a very high degree of fidelity, philosophy, and process yet it can only ever have partial crossover with software development methodologies. Tech often treats someone like a lawyer as either a substandard developer or an advanced consumer without making a real effort to understand the context and needs of highly complicated yet non-software professions.
Another reason to have a second compiler is for safety-critical applications. In the assessment of safety-critical tools if something like a compiler can have a second redundant version then each one of them can be certified to a lower criticality level since they'll crosscheck each other. When a tool is single-sourced the level of qualification goes up quite significantly.
Yeah it is and that's a great effort, I've worked with that team on various things. But the industry is still itching for a second compiler with no crossover (can't just be another LLVM frontend or rustc fork) for those certification reasons. Not that people want to replace rustc! It's just a cert requirement.
IMO Zen Browser fixed a lot of the Firefox UI painpoints while keeping what I like about it. It would be a smart move to make the Zen UI the canonical version of Firefox. Especially since features like vertical tabs, folders, pins, split screen, and new tab previews are more in the power user use case and Chrome has entirely dominated the casual user demographic.
I think you're right but there's also an opportunity to sell picks when everyone is digging for gold. Like AI-driven VS Code forks, you have AI companies releasing their own browsers left and right. I wonder if Mozilla could offer a sort of white-labeling and contracting service where they offer the engine and some customization services to whatever AI companies want their own in-house browsers. But continue to offer Firefox itself as the "dumb" (from an AI perspective) reference version. I'm not sure exactly what they could offer over just forking Chromium/Firefox without support but it would be a great way to have their cake and eat it too.
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.
The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names.
At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire.
During my first month I was exhausted. I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.
The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.
In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from.
But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.
The article's complaint (as I read it) is more about incidental load: names that force you to context-switch just to figure out what category of thing you're dealing with
I worked for a company that had 8-12 different employee passwords across various systems. There was no SSO, they each password had different requirements, and required changes at different intervals ranging from 30-90 days. Consequently every employee had a post-it note directly on the laptop with most or all of their passwords. The outdated IT policy security was so strict that real world security was abysmal.
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