> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.
This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.
Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.
I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.
There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...
It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.
It suddenly starts making sense when you realize that most people are stupid. My strategy here is that I just adjust my schedule to have tasks take literally 10x time than they should and enjoy my free time while managers argue about shit.
People are not as much stupid as selfish. Nobody is going to threaten their own revenue stream just because their job is bullshit, in fact most double down and see themselves above others.
And another layer I've seen frequently - people somehow need to make their work meaningful to make it part of their core identity, even if its literally moving one pile of dirt to next pile and then reverse, or just adding friction to progress. Strong ego game.
The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.
Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.
The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.
Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.
Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate
The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.
>Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever.
Right, this explains the history of why Europeans (and others) don't use SMS any more and use chat apps, namely WhatsApp. But still, that was many years ago, and there are many other (and better) chat apps out there now. The EU has been agitating a lot against US tech dominance, but they seem stuck on WhatsApp from Meta; they should have been moving to something else a long time ago.
I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).
The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)
In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.
Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.
And i want to use hibernation, as I don't mind putting my disk encryption passphrase once a day as the price of not risking having my laptop with a completely drained battery on Monday morning due to 1% battery drain/h of s2idle in my 64GB RAM configuration.
You can use suspend+hibernate to accomplish that and it works well. Unless the gods of kernel lockdown decide you cannot for your own good (and it doesn't matter if your disk is fully encrypted, you're not worthy anyway) of course. It's their kernel running on your laptop after all.
I worked in finance on the other side of the pond - developers wanted to constantly bring in and use new services but also didn't want any of the responsibility or the work needed to make compliance happy (or even in that particular company shoulder the costs). When me and other folks where brought in it to fix the "cloud strategy" it was a complete shitshow and heads actually rolled when we wrote a tool to assign costs to applications. But we had to start almost from scratch and limit usable services as we developed strategies and blueprints for each...
The complete, unapologetic desire of devs and security teams (but also many infra teams) to not have any kind of ownership was horrifying to me.
In the end there's not a single solution or strategy, it really goes back to the organization and where your weaknesses and strength are as an org. If you have a gazillion consultants following the "best practice" of the day and exceptions on top of exceptions you are dead, devops or otherwise. You will still make billions if you are the right company though regardless of your software practices, so...
They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.
The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.
> They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.
I agree in theory but it's impractical to achieve due to the coordination effort involved, hence using taxes as a proxy.
> The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.
For a long time, a lot of foundational development was funded by the government. Of course it can scale - the problem is most people don't believe in capable government any more after 30-40 years of neoliberal tax cuts and utter incompetence (California HSR comes to my mind). We used to be able to do great things funded purely by the government, usually via military funding: laser, radar, microwaves and generally a lot of RF technology, even the Internet itself originated out of the military ARPANET. Or the federal highways. And that was just what the Americans did.
Exactly how openssl was (is?) when heartbleed happened. It's nothing new sadly, there are memes about the "unknown oss passion project" holding up the entire stack all over the internet.
Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC.
Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately.
But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.
Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT.
Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!
I have plenty of hard disagreements on the "user experience improvements" in Linux. "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard (GNOME is sort of successful at an extreme cost and plenty of limitations, KDE is still an incoherent mess with plenty of bad defaults starting from the base CDDM skin). It's full of things like the missing icon view in the GNOME/GTK file chooser [1] and while it's true that Windows11 is atrocious, all those little things add up.
I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...
I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)
I've been reading about the "year of linux" for years now, it's a meme for a reason. People that are not "prosumer" will keep using the preinstalled OS even if it's garbage - assuming they buy a laptop or desktop at all - and the prosumer will probably keep an OSX or a Windows machine close by anyway. Linux is usable as a browser kiosk sure but there is still plenty of friction on everything else. Enshittification will continue, and possibly infect also linux.
> "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard
I don't mean to imply this is easy. But I also do know that these efforts have been in the works for quite some time. They can get more dedication if that's the direction we need to go.
Quick Google
- 3 free Linux distros that look and feel like Windows: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2532994/3-free-linux-distros-that-look-and-feel-like-windows.html
- 5 Linux Distributions That are Inspired by the Look and Feel of macOS: https://itsfoss.com/macos-like-linux-distros/
> soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line
IDK how to tell you this, but for 90% of people this is "throw the machine out, buy a new one." I'm really not sure what the critique is here. Even if running with more problems seems unsurprising given what you described. And you're talking about the kernel.
I don't deny that there are problems with Linux, nor that things need to improve to get better mass appeal. But I do think you should look at your own words. They're highly technical. And we should not forget how this would compare when discussing Windows or OSX. That's the choice! It's that these conversations of "Linux sucks" are not just complaints about Linux, they are also suggestions of using Windows or OSX. The context of our conversation is about choosing between these systems, not the existence of problems.
I want to be very clear
Linux is a dumpster fire.
This does not mean Windows isn't!
This does not mean OSX isn't!
The argument I'm making is that this doesn't matter for the general user. Fuck, it generally doesn't matter for the technical user. But there is a good reason why technical/power users have a strong bias towards using Linux. Because at least it is a dumpster fire they can fix. It is absurd to have the framing that we should not encourage people to use Linux in favor of them using systems that are user hostile and destroying all sense of personal privacy!
These arguments become equivalent to: "You don't want to eat that, the chef sneezed in it. Here, eat this cake instead. The chef only took a shit in it."
Idk about you, but give the choice, I'd rather take the sneeze than the shit. I'd (strongly) prefer neither, but frankly that isn't an option now, is it?
And let's be honest, if you want to get more resources to put out more fires, the only way that's going to happen is if there are more users.
This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.
Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.
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