My experience is that in person and remote favors different sorts of tasks. For me I have both so I think hybrid is the most ‘productive’, though I’m much happier with the ‘remote’.
So on pure productivity, I could see some roles favor in-person.
But if you want to more cheaply recruit and retain, favoring remote is certainly going to help.
I really want a new normal of shorter hours, though that might be a trickier discussion so long as we have very highly utilized labor pool.
I couldn’t imagine taking on the task of repackaging the Teams web client and signing up to fight Microsoft’s continual futzing around with things…
Though it doesn’t work fully, and as it works it’s spewing windows on my screen, because so much of the windows ecosystem doesn’t believe in headless operation.
And this happens too. I get a little tray icon saying ‘do updates’ and I tap that and all my applications whether fwupd (firmware), flatpak or rpm updates are there and I click ‘go’, including the most recent nvidia drivers. In my case, KDE ‘discover’ does this for me. I’m so lazy as to not want to bother running the three terminal commands (dnf, fwupdmgr, and flatpak).
Meanwhile, under windows, I do that, but then it doesn’t do my firmware, so my hardware vendor has their own updater (which also suggests driver updates that Microsoft does not suggest), but if I use those then I still miss out on decent nvidia drivers, I need to go to nvidia to get those updates. And pretty much every application is then independently telling me time to update something or another in a never ending parade of ‘update me now’ icons in the tray.
Meanwhile it can be greatly mitigated in Windows by opening up a terminal and doing a winget update. Except it keeps offering up this one Office update that hangs with a blank terminal in my screen, and it still misses half the stuff…
I’d say that complete lack of a single consistent way to manage updates.
I really don’t feel having to micromanage each piece of software.
Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff. You may be bothered by the fact that the things are still happening, but there are also plenty of horrific things happening in that time period you went to, you just won’t be keeping track of them.
I didn’t claim they didn’t want access to military grade weaponry of the time, I said that at the time military grade weaponry was nearly useless without a lot of people. Yes you could have artillery, good luck trying to unilaterally do anything with that without a crew and guard (artillery were very vulnerable without a force backing them up). Good luck with the muzzle loaders when you need to reload without other people to cover
The concept of a lone actor being able to inflict mass casualty just wasn’t in the equation back then.
To the extent that we should honor their work (as opposed to it being subject for tailoring to our times) could be debated, but for sake of argument I’ll go with extrapolating their intent to the modern era.
For freedom of the press, they wanted the people to be able to communicate. It being even easier doesn’t seem to run counter to their goals, nor does it seem to complicate matters in their view.
For the religion, they did have among their ranks self-proclaimed “heretics”, so no, it wasn’t strictly about Judeo-Christian religions even from the onset.
For the right to bear arms, this one hits differently. What was their goal? It says quite plainly that states should be able to field well regulated militias, and so to do that, they need a good chunk of citizens with weapons ready to go. Those pea shooters were nigh useless except for hunting and as part of a larger force. The idea of a whole town of people self-organizing a militia might have been consistent with their goals, but the concept of a single actor able to pop off dozens of accurate lethal shots at a distance in a couple of minutes is a very distinct consideration that is wholly different than those goals and wasn’t in the equation at all.
As an American, I largely agree, but had a story that’s related.
We had someone in town for work from another country. He asks us if we carry our guns with us or keep them in our cars, because he really wanted to take a look and maybe go out shooting since his home country would never let him anywhere near a gun and that was like the one top “American” thing he wanted to try while he was here. None of us in the group actually had guns on us, in our car, or at home. This sincerely seemed to baffle him. We gave him an explanation much like yours, that the prevalence of guns might be a bit exagerated in the media, but guns rarely make an appearance, and when they do we generally also get pretty nervous because it’s so unusual.
Well this discussion was just coming up on lunch and so we go to drive him to somewhere to eat and we get outside and he asks what all those noises were. “Oh, that’s gunfire from the shooting range across the road, we kind of forgot about it and tune it out because we always hear it on days with nice weather”.
Firearms could be devastating when you had a whole bunch of people to keep up a sustained fighting despite most of the people at a given time being busy reloading (and the firearms pretty much ditched if the opponent closed on you anyway). Also the range and accuracy were crap, which was still dangerous enough when you had a volley of a bunch at once fired vaguely toward a bunch of opponents.
In terms of being afraid of what a single person could in isolation do to people, the worst they would have ever faced were blades.
The thing is that the shell provides so little innate functionality and delegates anything more to an ecosystem of random quality, and then subjects those authors to a pretty capricious interface that breaks random extensions every six months generally driving a lot of the authors to throw up their hands and give up.
So the native functionality is solid, though even lower features than Microsoft windows window management, and then have to apply dodgy extensions to get features that other solutions just have as a matter of course.
If I didn’t know any better, I would have assumed that gnome shell was some small demonstrator project to serve as a reference implementation (e.g Weston) rather than intended for serious use. I came over from gnome 2 thinking things went pretty far backwards, but the extensions are going to be stop gaps while they build back up to a balance desktop. But they never seemed to do that.
Ultimately, I landed on Plasma and that’s been pretty good. Have some embedded/kiosk stuff using sway thanks to the very nice scriptable facilities there, but still sticking with kwin as a daily driver for now.
Hup is frequently just “hey, reread your configuration files and keep going”
Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389
And DHowett’s reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.
But this anecdote is a good ‘corp’ versus ‘open source’ anecdote. There’s simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.
Meanwhile, open source someone says “screw it, this is crap, I can fix it”.
I don’t know, I mean I’ve seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it’s best I haven’t seen it as comprehensive as what I’ve seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don’t apply very well anyway, so it’s moot for me and I’m happy with Kate with LSP.
I think this speaks to the potential strengths and weaknesses of open versus commercial.
It boils down to amount of resources and how they are invested.
In terms of amount of resources, open source has a rather organic pool of software developers. So if you have a use case that impacts every software developer in the world, well the open source has a lot of free labor that can produce impressive results that a commercial player would have a hard time out-spending. Conversely, if the use case is relatively more niche and the users are either not programmers or too busy using the software to do other things they couldn’t spend any on software, a commercial player can force the issue by paying some developers to work on it. Now the quality of that work may be reduced by the developers doing it for the pay without necessarily an inherent passion for the task at hand, but it can be pretty compelling and people can tend to get invested in their work even if they don’t care to start with. Incidentally it’s why at my company when they lucked into someone with actual passion for the work comes along I advocate strongly for retention, but those folks tend to be neglected and leave while some passionless sycophant gets the retention and promotion.
Then there’s how that resource is invested. Here we have professional software versus the more prolific general consumer software. In the general consumer case, the commercial interest takes the user as a given, and goes straight into how to gouge that customer relationship as hard as possible without regard for a good user experience. Stuff them with ads. Implement telemetry with rights to sell it off for marketing data. Nag them at every corner to buy some other offering at increased price. Have a confusing set of tiers and actively screw with the bottom tier. Actually making the software fit for purpose is so far below those others. With software for business, well, you still get the ‘must subscribe and confusing portfolio’, but some of the other stuff tones down. The target market is smaller, and the potential for marketing data and advertising revenue isn’t as attractive. The target market is frequently companies that take their confidentiality seriously and will readily get a lawyer to pursue issues, so the telemetry is both less valuable and a bit of a grenade waiting to go off if something screws up. So OSS tends to cover the ‘general consumer’ cases surprisingly well because the commercial interests are so much more invested in making things worse, while business to business can actually have a chance still.
Eh, I prefer KDE. It’s fairly uncluttered unless you actively mess with it and want it, whole Gnome is pretty ruthlessly “our way is the right way”.
Once upon a time they only allowed virtual desktops to be in a column. Someone decided that columns weren’t for everyone so obviously make it only be in a row. Despite ages of most implementations supporting a grid layout.
Window title search. This is fantastic for managing a lot of windows. I wish KDE could get better by using screen reader facilities to let you search window contents as well, but having the facility in show windows view at all is great.
Their window tiling is less capable even than Microsoft windows.
Any attempt to customize means extensions, and they seem to break the interfaces the extensions need constantly, and I had to face the reality that every update had me searching for a replacement extension because they broke one that want maintained anymore.
But either way, the open desktop shells are better than the proprietary ones.
It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.
Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.
All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.
Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.
And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.
Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn’t as good as a lot of other terminals.
One day boss comes in and sees my colleague. Remarks how early he came in. He said he never left the previous day and planned to just keep working (salaried guy). Boss said he needed to take the day off, wouldn’t have him drive, and he drove his car and had me follow to take the boss back to work after dropping colleague and his car at home.
He consistently tried to break that guy’s incessant overworking. Had a lot of respect for him.
Unfortunately he got canned when he kept some stuff from upper management in writing that got upper management in trouble. Not enough trouble to remove their ability to retaliate, but enough to save a few other jobs of folks they were trying to throw under the bus for their mistake.
A dock worker wouldn’t be more productive remote. There’s obviously some responsibilities that cannot be done in person, and a lot of jobs require both.
But let’s say we discard all obviously in-person sorts of work from the “jobs that can move to remote”, the so called “knowledge work”, and we are deep in an area where objective measure of “productivity” has proven elusive. For example, one such study I looked at used “how productive do you feel?” as the basis. Another facet is individual productivity versus group productivity, particularly over time. A pretty middling junior employee spends a lot of time flailing hopelessly because no one knows to get with him and help him become better, both in terms of his job and in terms of communication and confidence (e.g. not trying to hide having difficulty to avoid people thinking he is less competent than he should be, when everyone has those sorts of struggles).
The commute, morale, ability to avoid low value coworker distractions (no, I don’t need the daily reminder that my coworker in fact has a boat…) , and ability to manage the work related distractions better certainly help remote work. However home life distractions and the ability to tune out work related distractions a little too well at the expenese of peer productivity can impact work at home. Different people and situations manipulate this balance and for the best employees, that morale can go a long way to having a good outcome, but I think we have to confess that in-person has some value.