The stroppy, awkward independence of open source
Friday, February 28, 2025
For at least the last 25 years, since I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I’ve flirted with Linux every so often, and it’s so much better now than it was. I think Apple’s pricing and Windows' cruft and AI might be making it time to move.
My latest flirt is with the Linux partition of my Chromebook, partly for sheer tinkering, and also because there’s a specific notes app which is best in Linux, and also ChromeOS’s file management app is execrable and even a lightweight Linux file manager is vital. But as ever, Linux has thrown weirdness at me, and it’s taken a few hours of trawling Reddit to sort out. Wider web searches are pointless even on DuckDuckGo, because useful results have been ratio’d to homeopathic proportions by AI slop.
I simply wanted to have the notes app appear in the Chromebook launcher in a folder called Linux, which is what normally happens with Linux stuff installed via the commandline. But I’d had to use AppImage (another learning point) and it didn’t happen here. With a Chrome app, or even a web app converted to its own container with a couple of clicks in Chrome, it would be a matter of selecting something from a context menu. Linux, more complicated.
But I still will probably move at some point.
Firstly, cost. My computing needs are modest, apart from occasional video editing and I have a lowend Mac Mini which is fine for that. Everything else is basically browsing and writing. I’m fine with whatever 10 year old ThinkPad I can get for a couple of hundred bucks, in terms of hardware.
Secondly, the operating system. Windows sounds more and more of a crufty nightmare, aimed at feeding Redmond’s AI beasts more than doing what users want, and demanding ever higher specs in the process. Macs are lovely but stupidly overpriced. My Chromebook is great but I trust Google less and less.
It’s a big contrast though, between the slickness of ChromeOS, in which I am the product to be sold to marketers, and where my content is used to train AIs, vs the stroppy, awkward independence of open source.
But in the end, the geeky 14 year old who spent his computer science lessons learning what hexadecimal codes to ‘poke’ down the school network to make rude words appear on his mate’s BBC B computer lives on.