Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

Posted Dec 12, 2023 21:40 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image by wittenberg
Parent article: Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

> Most of the people I know who do not make their living playing with computers want a computer to act like an appliance: You buy it, pull it out of the box, and it works. Period. They don't want to update the system, they don't want it to change, they just want it to work.

This is just not the case. I think you may be considering an ever-shrinking (and aging) population in your worldview. Or maybe you're over-weighting corporate users.

Yes, of course everyone wants their technology to work. But that doesn't mean they don't want it to change.

I don't know a single person anywhere, no matter how technologically disinclined, that has not downloaded a new app to their smartphone and still only uses just the applications that came with it when they took it out of the box. Ditto for Chromebooks or iPads. And ditto for laptops running Windows or MacOS (or Linux).

Everyone wants to play new games, use the latest music apps, the latest social media apps, the latest video or sound editing apps, or at least some non-empty subset of those things. And the younger you are the more effortlessly you can navigate these things and the more "new stuff" you want.

Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

Posted Dec 13, 2023 10:44 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I don't know a single person anywhere, no matter how technologically disinclined, that has not downloaded a new app to their smartphone and still only uses just the applications that came with it when they took it out of the box. Ditto for Chromebooks or iPads. And ditto for laptops running Windows or MacOS (or Linux).

I come close!!!

My wife's laptop effectively runs two apps that didn't come built in - MS Office, and Picasa. And 99% of the built-in stuff is never used.

My phone is similar. I can't wait to delete that damn Ipsos market research app I signed up to, and I have Kindle (which I rarely use). Again, pretty much all the built-in stuff is unused - I've even stopped using Google Maps because Google have broken it so badly ...

Cheers,
Wol

Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

Posted Dec 13, 2023 16:02 UTC (Wed) by wittenberg (guest, #4473) [Link]

I think we all suffer from the assumption that the people around us are "normal" or at least representative of the population as a whole. The probelm is that that is rarely true.

--David

Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

Posted Dec 13, 2023 19:11 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

But that's what is great about the silverblue model - the argument is that people want new apps and tools. We don't usually care much about changing the operating system as such. So you keep the OS minimally modifiable and then use flatpak to get your applications.

The other great thing is that for developers you now are you using a containerized developer flow. For my work as a community manager, I use fedora as my main system but then do a lot of work in a containerized Ubuntu 20.04 container to build software. I have another container to update my hugo blog and so on. So you don't install everything into your main OS, but modify all you like in containers.

Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image

Posted Dec 13, 2023 22:14 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Everyone wants to play new games, use the latest music apps, the latest social media apps, the latest video or sound editing apps, or at least some non-empty subset of those things. And the younger you are the more effortlessly you can navigate these things and the more "new stuff" you want.

Well, I'm clearly NOT "everyone". For me "the latest music app" is Clementine, which doesn't work on my system because I haven't got round to fixing the sound since I built the system and installed gentoo a couple of years back. Social media I was on - what was it called? - Google+? - which I hardly used and didn't notice it passing ... "the latest video or sound editors" - well if sound doesn't work, why on earth would I want those? So yes - I most definitely am EXTREMELY happy with the empty subset of those categories.

(Oh - and I don't play computer games. I may still be hooked on Age of Empires - the original one - and Solitaire - but that's about IT!)

And yes I am an older person and that's why I "can't effortlessly navigate these things". My wife is disabled and it's almost impossible for her to navigate these at all!, let alone effortlessly!

Cheers,
Wol