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.
Decent write-up, but I don’t really see what this has to do with Google?
Hi, because there are messages on 4chan claiming that “Linux is only free if your time has no value.”
Thank you for the nice message, but to be honest, I regret posting it. I should’ve put more care into the style – anyway, there have been daily persistent anti-free software messages on 4chan for more than a decade, leading me to think about Olgina-style contractual workers. Some patterns seem to (1) defend Google, (2) put users back into depression, (3) promote the confusion between libre software and open source software, (4) shatter the EU and US IT work forces over demographic traits, through anti-LGBTQIA+, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic messages.
Some of these pattern seem to match known Kremlin strategies, others defend the interests of Microsoft and Google so well, matching other patterns I’ve observed with Android, YouTube, and Windows/Office 365 development, that I’m starting to collect evidence in Denote. I need to sort out coincidences, to account for the fact that many orgs may actually post anonymously on 4chan (including Nazis and orgs false-flagging as Nazis) but that’s one hell of a lot of coincidences.