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, this is an excellent answer.
I didn’t mean to dismiss online resources, but to highlight the continuous entrepreneurship in dismissing foundational knowledge. My post was honestly, rather bad for the reasons mentioned a few minutes ago, but the sentence “Linux is only free if your time has no value” erases the pleasure of reading books and getting new skills. It literally means that free and open source software can’t be more useful than whatever Google and Microsoft are developing, which doesn’t even include passwords managers.
Secondly, the difference you make between free and open source software are very interesting but to my understanding, it may boil down to the freedom 0 : free software is made for everyone, whereas open source software is made for specialized communities. Because most people don’t even write simple software, and I’m not talking about enterprise-level complexity here, most open source software is written for other developers. I’ve observed thousands of anonymous messages which coincidentally blurred the difference between free software and open source software by e.g. promoting the sway window manager that we know and love. On 4chan at least, calling people to hurt themselves has become an acronym (to whomever reads this, please don’t hurt yourself).
I’m not sure my own definition of free vs. open source software is the right one, but I know the actual difference is leveraged to kill people – comrades even.
And finally, I agree about everything else. I didn’t properly develop about GNU software because I was trying to leave my screen.