People are driven away from open standards to vendors like Apple because so much open stuff just sucks so goddamn bad. So will Apple one day fuck me over? Perhaps, but in the meantime their shit just works and I am going to use it because I don’t have time to spend hours troubleshooting why manufacturer A doesn’t work with free publisher B when free driver C is loaded.
The general mechanism for free software to be developed is for the individual users to make modifications. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who know how to. Someone sees something wrong, fixes it.
Apple interferes with this. If you don't like an app on your iPhone, even if it's open source, you can't just make a minor change because for that you have to pay $100/year and buy a Mac and all of this friction that discourages people from doing it. And then upstream doesn't get the little change (times a thousand individual users with an itch to scratch), and the one-time contributor doesn't become a repeat contributor either.
Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review. But then you can't get any users who might help you to finish it. So the state of open source software on the iPhone is a shambles, because Apple neutered the primary mechanism for free-as-in-speech software to become any good on their platform.
Compare this to Linux on a PC where simple things are about as likely to "just work" as they are on a Mac, more likely to do so than on Windows, and weird and complicated things work better than on either of them because even though they're not always easy they're very nearly always possible.
Which is the perpetual sham of "it just works". Simple things are simple everywhere because they're common and well-supported. Complicated things are often difficult, but some platforms make them prohibitively difficult or simply disallowed, and people confuse this with "easy" because you don't remember spending time to make something work when you can't. But that's not actually an advantage, because you're not obligated to spend time on something that doesn't immediately work, but the option to choose to is valuable when sometimes it's worth it.
> Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review.
Ahhh so you want the public to do your QA for you and don’t mind interfering with their productivity when the first iterations of your software are a buggy mess? I am ok with Apple trying to keep the pests out of their garden, or providing a lockable gate like TestFlight where I can go into a testing situation with my eyes wide open and risks well understood. Your open source devs are not always great at disclosing the fact that their software is half baked and people install expecting a robust app and finding instead…a load of crap
> Ahhh so you want the public to do your QA for you and don’t mind interfering with their productivity when the first iterations of your software are a buggy mess?
"Open source" means developed by the public. The public isn't just doing the QA, they're doing the entire thing from the first line of code. Which is exactly the problem with Apple's interference -- they want you to have a finished app before you can share it with all the people who might have been willing to help you build it.
> TestFlight
And we're back to intentionally putting up barriers to exactly what open source needs to succeed.
Maybe 1% of users are programmers, and 1% of those might be contributors. But that's fine if you have a million users -- less than 0.1% of the world population -- because you could have a hundred contributors, which is enough to get something done. Which in turn allows you to improve and then get ten million users etc.
Testflight caps the number of users at 10,000. Now you've got 1 contributor instead of 100 and when that's not enough you're sunk. Meanwhile the "beta" is forced to expire after 90 days which creates friction for the users and makes them more likely to abandon you.
> Your open source devs are not always great at disclosing the fact that their software is half baked
People will figure this out pretty quickly when they try to use it. But then that's the point -- you try to use it, it sucks, but you can fix it yourself. The intention is to have this happen and then the app improves for everyone.
> People will figure this out pretty quickly when they try to use it.
Then you find that it’s uninstallable and you now have a fooked computer where you have to wipe your whole goddamned system to be rid of the POS you just installed. Hopefully you imaged your system right before you DL’d and installed the offending app…so you’ll only lose a few hours instead of a full day this time for your effort. However, you can feel good that you helped “develop” an open source software that almost no one will ever use like the good little netizen you are.
Yeah, no thanks. I’ll take my walled garden and it’s vetted and well behaved apps all day long.
Not sure of your reality, but my apple ecosystem just works. I spend nearly zero time fiddling with my rig just to get to a point of productivity but see Linux using peers in a constant state of tweaking trying to achieve and failing of what I have by just opening a box.
A lot of Linux users like fiddling with things, and then purposely choose the things they'll have to fiddle with. This is not actually required. You can buy a device from e.g. System76 and then use the preinstalled OS or something conservative like Debian Stable. It "just works".
The people compiling everything from source and messing with kernel modules are doing it because that's their hobby.
Well that's all fun and games until you start putting off paying Internet bill for two weeks because it turns out that you misconfigured your password app and it actually didn't save your password to the utility service provider and you realize you have no internet one day and you have a school assignment ugh and maybe your credit score gets 0.5% lower and yeah it's all very much your fault. "But you can just be more careful! Handle stuff like this as it arises!" Yeah, sure, just like during Communist times you could easily get more than one pound of coffee per half a year if you're just careful and note when it's available in stores as a drop-in
I believe this whole Apple vs Linux debate is perfectly analogous to the West vs East Germany debate, to the point that almost all intuitions/arguments for the latter are perfectly reusable in the former
> Well that's all fun and games until you start putting off paying Internet bill for two weeks because it turns out that you misconfigured your password app and it actually didn't save your password to the utility service provider
As opposed to the centralized service that will kindly misconfigure it for you, or just discontinue it out from under you, or ban you because of a false positive, or ban you because of a true positive because you unwittingly violated their broad and ambiguous terms but you're still just as screwed.
> I believe this whole Apple vs Linux debate is perfectly analogous to the West vs East Germany debate, to the point that almost all intuitions/arguments for the latter are perfectly reusable in the former
The fallacy of Soviet Communism was the fallacy of central planning. The Party decides what's good for you and The Party is infallible so if you try to resist you'll be punished. Freedom of choice is heresy. Divergence is verboten.
Does that sound to you like the typical Linux user, or like Apple?
Ive watched people who swear that Apple "just works" struggle when it doesnt.
The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.
The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work.
It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away.
Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.
That was a bit part of my move to Mac from Windows back 24 years ago. It was such a pain trying to get all the bits and pieces working together and with the Mac, yes it was more expensive (although honestly, not that much more expensive) but stuff just worked out of the box and I didn’t have regular crashes. I’m sure things have improved in Wintel land since 2000–2001, but my Apple experience has been remarkably stress-free.
More expensive up front but in my experience the hardware lasts longer and is usable for longer. I just recently retired a 15 year old MBP due to a battery swell. I’d still probably have it on my desk and occasionally using it if i wasn’t concerned about it exploding and burning my house down.
