Sooo there’s free software (“Everyone should be able to write open source software!”) and there’s open source software (people programming their own computers for their own communities). Ideally, Neima should be able to program her computer to help her kids do their homework or for their sports club. So there’s open source software that’s written for the developers community, and there’s open source software that’s written for the GNOME community, which is polished and truly a delightful experience for new users: if for example you installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon, you’d connect to the wifi and probably be immediately greeted with a notification telling you that your printer has been added and is ready to go.
I’m not saying that Linux users should learn programming, especially if they don’t know about e.g. GNU Guix, Skribe/Skribilo/Haunt, or SICP (that’s directly referenced by the Haunt info pages – I promise you, starting a blog as an English speaker with a Skribe implementation and reading SICP once you get comfortable enough could get you started in months); but that of course, learning any field on such a platform as Stack Overflow would provide an absolutely stupid experience, whereas the ideal learning medium is books.
It isn’t enough for Google to insert far-right suggestions in YouTube shorts; they’ve deliberately sabotaged features in their search engine to get us to generate more ads, and Google Scholar results are, by the way, the bottom of the barrel too. Compare queries results to “sex work” or “borderline disorder transgender” with those of HAL and wonder why there’s a public distrust in science. More broadly, Google hinders our relationship to information, and we’re both trading it for a far-right agenda.
The same is just as true for LaTeX: it’s a great, intuitive language, provided that you read some good introduction on the topic. As a matter of fact, Maïeul Rouquette’s French-speaking book is available for free on HAL.
I’m more and more fed up as I write that and I’m pretty sure it shows. You may totally use open source software, meant for the non-technical community of a graphical library, desktop environment, Linux distribution, and so forth. But if you really wanted to “learn Linux”, please install any distro you’re comfortable with and read some good book on whatever topic you want to work on.
Hi, it may depend on the background, but personally I’ve been stuck on problems for months, only to solve them by spending 2 hours reading a book. I’m talking about basic self-taught tools like Git, your first programming language, and so on – Microsoft and Google build and leverage platforms to keep specific demographics stuck for years, and to some extent, to kill them.
I’m not talking about solving problems on a complex stack with tools that you already know, but rather about learning to program the output of a Skribe document as a social media-addict 4chan user. We’re not even talking about Makefiles here, but about hundreds of thousands of people actually giving a hand to free software development, instead of trying to change the world in free form fields.