Making my peace

Nearly four years ago, in January 2015, I posted On Switching to Linux, in which my computer (in a photo from November 2014) looked like this:

Ubuntu Linux on a MacBook Air

Here’s the same photo from today:

macOS Mojave on a MacBook Pro

So what’s changed? In the intervening four years, I spent some time working with Linux desktop applications made of Qt, and some with browser and server applications made of Javascript. I used a GNU/Linux distribution, Windows 10, a Mac, iOS, and Android. I published two books. I took some time off. I did other things. Here are my relevant conclusions:

• Free Software is important
• Making things that are easy, or even pleasant, to use is important
• Free Software’s Four Freedoms are only academic if usability is a barrier to being capable of using the software for any purpose
• Apple, and the developers on their platform, are the sub-section of the developer world who care most about giving their people usable and pleasant things
• Combining these things leads to the conclusion that bringing Free Software principles to the world of Apple makers and adopters is both important and valuable
• Meanwhile, the people over in the web and server/backend/cloud/serverless land have done a much better job of letting makers iterate quickly and build new things
• Conversely, the people in the Apple land have done a much better job of making it so that the thing you build works without some complicated stack of transpilers, polyfills and tree-shakers.
• Thus there are things that the makers in Apple land should learn from the makers in web/server land before the Apple land merely becomes a window on to the web stuff.

I’m back. Watch this space.