> On Sat, Aug 07, 2021 at 10:34:00AM +0200, Sagar Acharya wrote:
>
>> Just 1 thing needs to be done, make easier for a majority to use minimal, secure software and make it harder for majority to use gigantic, malware injected software. And things would become better.
>>
> Sadly not possible, as the whole concept of orthogonality (a requirement for
> simplicity) goes against the fact that the majority of people don't want to
> tailor the computer to their needs, they want it to "just werk".
>
This is where I diverge from suckless, suckless goes for hardcore minimalistic software at cost of user experience. Addicted to almost all software out there like WhatsApp, Facebook, and many more things, most are never gonna use stuff like dwm. And things like Windows would keep them there. I myself use dwm, hyperbola OS, but suggesting it to common people wouldn't be wise. They'll switch back to Windows, and this time maybe forever.
If I want to serve good software to people who want their systems to "just werk" (most out there), today, I'll go for trisquel KDE edition. It's not minimalistic but much better than Windows.
Not saying KDE is optimal but in future another minimal DE with the right UX things like fonts, sizes, minimal animations, wallpapers, notification daemons, etc. can be made which the noob user would feel good about and be more secure than today.
> To illustrate this with programming, the majority of "programmers" aren't
> hackers, they're barely programmers. They want a language with an ecosystem
> that gives them packages to do something as simple as padding a string, or a
> builtin HTTP server in the standard library
>
This is where one can create a good default state. If there's a PC with decent enough hardware with a thing people can work on, change in the right direction can be brought.
> What they don't want is languages like C that tries to give the bare minimum
> (although lacking real genericity, which _Generic isn't) while being easy to
> compile or like Forth/Lisp/Tcl that gives them IMMEDIATE/defmacro/uplevel and
> tell that this is what real power looks like and to get to work if they want to
> wield it.
>
>
> By the way, this sidenote by Paul Graham (to be honest, the whole article:
> http://paulgraham.com/avg.html) should be given to read to CS students:
>
>> [3] All languages are equally powerful in the sense of being Turing
>> equivalent, but that's not the sense of the word programmers care about. (No
>> one wants to program a Turing machine.) The kind of power programmers care
>> about may not be formally definable, but one way to explain it would be to
>> say that it refers to features you could only get in the less powerful
>> language by writing an interpreter for the more powerful language in it. If
>> language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B
>> doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you can probably
>> write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B
>> doesn't, that's not likely to be something you can fix by writing library
>> functions
>>
Very interesting.
Thanking you
Sagar Acharya
https://designman.org
Received on Sat Aug 07 2021 - 14:54:18 CEST