We misunderstand the strengths of the commons of tools and not knowing how we play to our strengths.
Free software today is usually promoted through big brands like libreoffice, gimp or firefox. These are successful in terms of branding, but is not playing to the strengths of the commons. In the commons, we move away from the walled and towards the interconnected.
The strenghts doesn’t lie in bloated and branded tools, but rather in the small tools that anyone can make if they have some spare time. We need to reframe away from the bloatedness to the caresome. Where the tools are easily made, available by birth and easily tinkerable.
And we need towards the descriptive instead of the branded. Towards letting words dictate tools instead of tools dictating words.
Today operating systems revolves around the branded, bloated and wasteful. The lokening is to move towards operating systems that inbosoms the caresome and descriptive.
I’m not trying to be mean here, but if I’m reading the meaning of this post correctly, it feels like you really haven’t dived that far into open source. There are thousands of FOSS projects that do exactly as you say, and yes, some get branded and bloated.
But like… that doesn’t mean that what is out there needs to strip away anything. It just means that you have to keep looking and possibly contributing even if its just reporting bugs.
For example, Firefox. Have you even checked around? Falkon, Qutebrowser, Ladybird (still in alpha), Nyxt; there’s a handful of QTWebEngine browsers already doing just fine. Not to mention the plethora of stripped down Firefox forks for both desktop and Android like Fennec, Ironfox, Floorp, Firedragon, and Zen. There’s also a stripped down base Chromium browser, which I believe is de-Googled.
I’m just not quite sure what you want to achieve here.
I don’t get it
The true strength is in the open interfaces and common protocols that enable competition and choice, followed by the free-to-use libraries that establish a foundation upon which we can build and iterate. This helps us to stay in control of our hardware, our data, and our destiny.
Practically speaking, there is often more value in releasing something as free software than there is to commercialising it or otherwise tightly controlling the source code… and for these smaller tools and libraries it is especially the case.
Many bigger projects (eg. linux kernel, firefox, kubernetes, apache*) help set the direction of entire industries, building new opportunities as they go, thanks to the standardization that comes from their popularity.
It’s also a reason why many companies release software as open source too, especially in the early days, establishing themselves as THE leader…for a while at least (eg. Docker Inc, Hashicorp).
More than enabling competition the strength of FOSS is that it enables cooperation.
One guy in his bedroom can’t build a huge enterprise level app, but a hundred people working on what they have expertise at? They absolutely can
It typically takes a small core team to build the framework/architecture that enables many others to contribute meaningfully.
Most OSS projects get bugger all contributions from outside the initial core team, having limited ability to onboard people. The biggest and most active (out of necessity or by design) have a contribution friendly software architecture and process, and often deliberately organized communities (eg. K8S & CNCF) or major corporate sponsors filling the role.
Free Software and resulting ecosystems seem to have a better chance of contributing to the common good over the long term. This is simply because most companies are beholden to their shareholders, and at some point the urge to squeeze every last cent out of an opportunity comes to the forefront, and many initially well intentioned efforts get poisoned.
Free Software licenses like the GPL help to protect our freedom and to set open standards, and are essential for the core technology stack.
When someone can get annoyed with some shitty software or its license-terms and reimplement the core functionality in a few days/weeks/months … eventually someone will get annoyed and create some decent free software that will kill off the shitty alternatives, or even just a better commercial alternative. This only works because of the open platforms & protocols.
One of the major challenges for consumers is finding good software today in the grey goo of projects and appstores. This harks back to OP’s point about curated collections of software. It’s also where the various foundations add value (CNCF, Linux Foundation, Apache) … along with “awesome X” gitlab repos, which are far better than random youtube videos or ad-riddled blogs or magazine articles.
It’s kinda funny as how it’s first like: Windows, Apple and Linux are your choices for home. If you choose the right one, you realize it was not a destination, merely a gateway to a plethora of systems, many fine-tuned for the nichest of needs.
My new hobby is complaining about my trials on Linux to those winfriends who I think will switch in the foreseeable future. My rational is that sharing my happiness comes off as gloating and as soon as they show an inkling of willingness, I’ll just point to what I said and tell them that’s the type of shit you deal with and can maybe find listening ears for the benefits at that point.
Because I am in a safe space: FOSS is the closest thing I find to actual love that I can get from a non-living interaction. Contrasted in the harsh light of freemium every keystroke for the commons is sacred.
Can you give some examples of your point?
learning to use a workshop has nothing to do with how the tools are constructed. open source means very little to people who are not familiar with software tools, and is not likely to get someone started.
as soon as you are even starting on an intermediate level you need to care a lot, because you start building your own tools. but before that point, open source just means the big players. good luck explaining the benefits of
awkbefore they know the difference between office and openoffice.As another poor maladjusted soul who still often calla LibreOffice “OpenOffice”, you have my complete sympathy.
Libre is just a god awful word to say out loud. For a philosophy it’s fine, but for branding it’s terrible.
I know its super in-fashion to shit on the concept of “vibe coding” but I really do wish there was a more boilerplate way to remove having to worry about designing the UI/UX so I could focus on getting the MVP functionality down and having it relatively neatly display, more akin to designing a form or Apple Shortcut.
I have tons of forms I’ve designed that are basically de facto programs that I can whip up super easily and just pick the data “type” for each “line” of the form which essentialky equates to a line or block of code in a code program. Decent looking enough, interactive, can easily high-level edit and tweak shit and test it to make sure it mostly fool-proof produces the outputs that are needed.
Whenever I think of all the graphical and UI and UX stuff that has to go into making a viable app I get so discouraged, I hate having to think about all that stuff and the geeking around to make it functional let alone aesthetic
a more boilerplate way to remove having to worry about designing the UI/UX so I could focus on [blank]
Yes.
In a way, it is super funny ironic / funny to me that we have basically no actual GUI standard. There is Qt, there is stuff with html/css/js, and the rest just lack tons of features.
No idea how it works on windows tbh.
Making a cli app? Sure, easy peasy, done in 5 mintues. Making a small GUI app? Strap in for 2 weeks of basics how this framework chose to solve certain issues.
I realize it’s just another framework. But I think the next time I’m building something useful beyond a basic CLI I will try textualize. https://github.com/Textualize/textual?tab=readme-ov-file
I don’t care much about aesthetic and a similar interface for terminal/web seems like it would be useful.
That said, I fully agree that it’s daunting to have to deal with any existing ui. It’s really tiresome to jump through multiple hoops just to get/show info - even before trying to make it pretty.
There used to be WYSIWYG GUI designers for both GTK and KDE. There was even one that generated XUL, which Firefox used for a while, IIRC.
Did all those disappear?
I just too everything in TUIs; since I program in Go, that means tview for me. It’s really low-effort to get into. But if you want a GUI, surely there’s still a UI builder for KDE.
Not perfect but still worth checking out: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
There are probably bindings for your favorite language
I wish there were proper bindings for python, but dearpygui is ugly as fuck to use.
I believe some guy on youtube attempted implementing better ones
I haven’t tried it myself, but isn’t GTK supposed to be good at that?
Maybe put more thought into this because misspelling in the title and throughout your handful of sentences doesn’t help your weak point.
Of course, most FOSS is small. One of the original goals of FOSS software was to be small and do one job well. Open the gnome software store and it’s all descriptive.
It’s easy to make a claim if you don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe go explore more examples beyond the three you discount lol
