On 22 February 2018 at 21:57, Tomasz Rola <rto...@ceti.pl> wrote: > Liam, I wanted to say this few months ago already (back in Nov, the > "Editor" thread - BTW, thanks for the links to editors wiki and other > interesting pointers).
Glad it was appreciated. > So, what I wanted to say is, this posture is > going to backfire, I am afraid. The new crowd is coming, who newer had > any chance to use anything resembling a terminal (including > terminal-like experience as wobbly as given by MS Windows). I used to think this myself, but of late, I've had 2 jobs with FOSS companies (Red Hat and SUSE) and they're both full of 20-somethings who use and love Vim & other shell-only tools. People working in tiling or ultra-minimal window managers, with a bunch of terminals and nothing else. Unix isn't just an OS. It's a whole culture now, and newcomers earn credit by embracing the tools and the old ways and demonstrate their worthiness by their skill with (to them) ancient languages, editors and so on. Alas, now, it's _the_ culture. Everything else is ancient history, mostly unknown. Today, there are 2 OSes, broadly: Windows, and its fans see no interest in anything else; and Unix, which increasingly means macOS and Linux. [Aside: Greybeards are into "ancient" platforms from the 1980s like Amiga OS, Atari TOS/GEM, Acorn RISC OS, and a few into BeOS/Haiku. The stuff from before that is mostly forgotten about now. MS-DOS and the most popular 8-bit home micros are now solely the domain of retro gamers. ] But they're still millennials, so email is a slightly clunky old tool for notifications and account verification, stuff like that. They use chat systems more -- IRC, and an increasing presence of things like Slack, RocketChat, Telegram, Signal and the like. There are work-only web-based social networks where they can interact in broadly familiar ways, such as Yammer or Red Hat's Mojo. So at RH, for instance, there were people who primarily used Mojo and others who primarily used the internal mailing lists. > They > (crowd) too will be saying things like GTFO - for now, they just top > post awfully long replies (perhaps because their phone/web-based MUAs > cannot offer them easy way to cut the crap?) and refuse to see any > wrong in it. They also happen to break threads like they were paid to > do it and since I am subscribed to way too many lists where this > occurs, I have already gave up manual linking of threads with mutt - > righting wrongs of the crowd is a job for a program, not for single > human. I only have to devise it during free time, when I have some. Yes, true. There's a ton of received wisdom on how to use email effectively, but it's not disseminated. This means key providers of email tools -- notably Microsoft -- didn't incorporate these. So now there are 2 cultures of email: the old-style, text-only, 4-line sig, bottom-posting way, and "business style": rich formatting, top posting, epic sigs with graphics, legal notices etc. Given a tool focused on that, it's hard to even do the other way at all. We allowed it to fragment and in the long term that might be its downfall. > Given that they are soon (if not already) going to be a "dictatoring" > majority, I am not so sure the "GTFO" is the right kind of message to > send out. Even though I have no idea what a constructive message could > look like. Good question. An idea I threw out on a panel discussion a few years ago is that we might end up with 2 "internets". One will be the old-fashioned one, standards-based, old-fashioned practices and tools, wild and unregulated and chaotic, with a layer of disconnected web-based islands on top. Part of this will extend into the "darknet", the encrypted, tunnelled, anonymised quarter for semi-illicit stuff. And another layer, a corporate-run tool, with signing, verified IDs, some degree of crypto so that its users feel they are safe, but it's all backdoored and snooped and logged. That's the layer you'll be forced to use if you want to do public trade, where there will be federated reputation tracking and so on. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
