This atrocious attitude is absolutely why software is such a hellscape of shitty UI and lack of features.
Normies should be eating our table scraps, not dictating how the software is written.
Normies learned how to drive a car. They can learn how to properly compute. And if they don't like the tech, they don't have to use the tech.
OSS is the last bastion of computing for people who know/like computing, because the armies of "designers" aren't selfless enough to donate their time like programmers are. And frankly it is better off that way, the prevailing trends in design seem to be all about limiting options.
Hard, powerful software over push-button appliances any day.
And, to use the car analogy, BMW gets away with this approach just fine.
"No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H. L. Mencken
I know plenty of people, myself included, who lost money overestimating peoples intelligence.
All these folks trying to "pay their bills" have laid waste to a verdant field of possibility.
Everything nice that they offer eventually gets changed or taken away.
Yes, I'm bitter. We could have a much better world, one that actually empowers anyone willing to step up to the plate, but instead we grab all the low-hanging fruit so we can make them smile and step on workers' rights to deliver them burritos, instead.
If smart people were smarter they’d open their wallets and support the things they like. Instead the reaction is often, why would I pay so much for something that I could build myself.
So the real market is for the very smart people and that’s an even smaller minority.
I built super advanced tech but was intentionally screwed over by my large corporate customers, just because they could, so I quit the industry and that super advanced tech doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately a lot of really cool things will live and die with me. I’ve fought the good fight and failed.
We can lament that people are not smarter but there isn’t anything we can do about it.
I'm not convinced this is about smartness, so much as an ability and willingness for people to learn.
Learning is hard, it makes people uncomfortable, sadly. Which means that the easy road is to stoop to their level, which is what we're seeing.
It sucks that you got screwed by large corporations, and I don't know the story, but that sounds more like standard business fuckery than "software for smart people"?
I used to think exactly that. That those who were incapable of learning were simply just lazy. I eventually saw enough evidence to be convinced that raw intelligence is basically almost entirely genetic.
Certainly the businesses were not as smart as they thought they were, which is a common problem. But they indeed have very hard valuable problems and basically everyone involved was much smarter than the average person. Just not smart enough to know their own limitations and accept outside help.
Driving a car is far, far easier than administrating a Linux system (beyond a stock distro install that is working properly). The latter requires a ton of deep complex knowledge. It's more like rebuilding an engine than driving.
Normies should be eating our table scraps, not dictating how the software is written.
Normies learned how to drive a car. They can learn how to properly compute. And if they don't like the tech, they don't have to use the tech.
OSS is the last bastion of computing for people who know/like computing, because the armies of "designers" aren't selfless enough to donate their time like programmers are. And frankly it is better off that way, the prevailing trends in design seem to be all about limiting options.
Hard, powerful software over push-button appliances any day.
And, to use the car analogy, BMW gets away with this approach just fine.