I think the real underlying cause is lack of user control and non-consensual changes by the developers.

This is a problem with proprietary software that will never go away, and why I switched away, first from Windows, and then from Mac.

On a proprietary OS, you are never the owner, you are a tenant at best.

At first, the "polish" of these platforms with millions of currency behind them had appeal, but it was soon overshadowed by changes I never asked for being forced on me.

My computer is my work station. Imagine if you have a woodworking table with all your tools and materials laid out, and you go to bed, come back in the morning, and everything has been rearranged, some of your tools replaced with other tools, some taken away altogether because you "don't need them". It would be a very rude thing of someone to do, and it would be a non-starter.

Yet in the computer world, I guess because it is so new, and people don't know any better, it is accepted all the time.

But I don't accept it anymore. I tried Debian and Ubuntu and switched away when they did the same thing. Then I tried another distro,and another, distro after distro, until I found one which never pulled this type of crap on me, and I'm sticking with it.

It's not perfect, but it stays the way I've adjusted it, and never forces any changes on me. I am finally at peace on my computer.

>On a proprietary OS, you are never the owner, you are a tenant at best.

Well, if you use Gnome, for example, good luck getting the developers stick to your prefered features either...

>I tried Debian and Ubuntu and switched away when they did the same thing. Then I tried another distro,and another, distro after distro, until I found one which never pulled this type of crap on me, and I'm sticking with it.

Well, you can have that, but in exchange for a quite simplified and barebones experience. And then you'll still have the same problems with the apps you use, like browsers...

> Well, if you use Gnome, for example, good luck getting the developers stick to your prefered features either...

Gnome was one of the first environments I quit, with extreme prejudice. Even now, years later, mentioning the word Gnome made me feel a little bit of anger.

> Well, you can have that, but in exchange for a quite simplified and barebones experience.

That's right. I don't need much more than what Windows 95 offers, plus workspaces.

> And then you'll still have the same problems with the apps you use, like browsers...

My IDE started doing this, but luckily I could just go back to an older version.

For my browsers, I have indeed been frustrated, so I switched to a browser which doesn't pull that kind of shit.

> My computer is my work station. Imagine if you have a woodworking table with all your tools and materials laid out, and you go to bed, come back in the morning, and everything has been rearranged, some of your tools replaced with other tools, some taken away altogether because you "don't need them". It would be a very rude thing of someone to do, and it would be a non-starter.

This is pretty much exactly why I don’t agree with your root cause analysis. Imagine if some open source standard or some set of them deliberate on a breaking change, and everyone who uses their thing has to manually move all of their tools to do any work. Imagine if that change didn’t reach consensus and every user has to manually move their tools into both conforming places corresponding to multiple tools’ expectations.

The vast majority of people using computers just won’t update anything and… then we’ll have the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the security implications of that. Or even just platform capability implications of that.

I don't understand which security implications you're talking about.

I'm on a well-secured network, behind a NAT, only browsing trusted websites. Where are the security issues coming from?

For you? Just the security risk of the vast majority of people who don’t want to manually retool for every opinion and forego updates, and whatever that implies for anything that can impact you. For… that vast majority of people, you don’t have to use much imagination, it’s some non-small portion of every exploit you’ve heard about, unpatched.

> Then I tried another distro,and another, distro after distro, until I found one which never pulled this type of crap on me, and I'm sticking with it.

Which is? Gentoo?

Debian is basically beholden to what upstream projects do, so almost all UI rearrangements are direct from upstream and not caused by Debian. Ubuntu do some of their own UI changes though, but a lot less than they used to.

It doesn't really matter to me who is "causing" them. If Debian is beholden to upstream, then they are not beholden to maintaining my environment, which means it is not the distro for me.

All distros are beholden to upstreams, this is a fundamental attribute of all of them. Unless the distro develops all of their own interface components and keeps them the same, or forks an existing upstream project wholesale and prevents UI changes. Some of them are starting to do that, but usually they do that so they can change the UI more rather than keeping it the same.

It's true, but not all upstreams are doing this sort of thing, and I can avoid the ones who are.

It's kind of like choosing friends and partners...

I'm sure the upstreams that aren't doing these things are also available in the distros you're avoiding, like Debian :)

You're right, but what good is that when the distro itself cannot be relied on?

The problems you mention upthread seem to be caused by upstreams, not by the distros you were using?

I disagree. Every distro configures the packages it includes in its own way. Some favor stability and consistency, while others do not.

Every distro's Gnome config is a little different, for example. Some have a stable one with consistent keyboard shortcuts, others do not pay as much attention to it.

Same goes for other software which is included.

Which distro and tools did you end up on?

Which distro did you land on?

This is what I think about when people lament MacOS becoming iOS: it isn't going to happen, for exactly the reasons outlined here. Even where things are similar, where the same feature exists, we use these devices in different ways.

It's not just about finger vs mouse. It's about usually-locked vs usually-unlocked, about full-screen vs windows, about large screens vs small ones, about dozens of ways we use these devices differently despite superficial similarity.

>we use these devices in different ways

If only Microsoft had known that with Windows 10.

> listened to feedback and fixed the issues before shipping. That’s an important thing for a product that every Apple customer uses every day on every device. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s a wholly different thing to deny that anything’s wrong.

I can't tell whether this is sarcastic or not.

If not, I guess they haven't had the pleasure of the full Apple experience yet.