RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
I met RMS at a lunch in his honor at an Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant with very high ranking scholars/academics present, after an invited talk of his. Everyone was talking, eating, drinking and having a good time, whereas he was sitting at the head of the table doing email on his ThinkPad (yes, in text mode).
So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said.
I totally get it. If I were famous I probably would do that all the time (fortunately I am not). I don't hate people, I just don't need to always talk to them. Sometimes I just don't want to talk to people, especially ones I don't know. I'd rather... well, do anything else, but by myself. Sometimes I am OK to talk to other people, but it's my choice, not one of a random person. Email is much better because you can choose when you send the mail, when you read the mail, and you don't have to perform on demand (for an introvert, social interaction is hard work).
When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section.
Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software.
He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine.
If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience.
He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction.
I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change.
I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead.
> I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I'd argue that while he may be nice, it's also generally considered impolite to be someone who "only talks to him about the things he wants to talk about". It's meant to be a two-way street, generally. Someone who only wants to talk about what -they- are interested in, not what their conversation partner is interested in is not being nice or polite.
You don't owe random strangers your time, and it's so strange to me that people feel so entitled to other peoples time. Can also be argued that it's rude to engage a person on a topic they're not interested in.
I do, to an extent, agree. But I also think it's impolite to have relationships where "we're going to talk about what I want to talk about, but when we go to talk about what you want to talk about I'm just going to pick up my laptop and ignore you or tell you I don't want to".
You could argue, in your description, the same about RMS - he might feel entitled to someone's time to talk about free software.
There is no relationship if you're never going to see these people again. My time is my most precious resource, and I'm not obligated to give it away because someone thinks their initiation of a conversation needs to be reciprocated.
RMS set boundaries and that's perfectly reasonable.
I have met few famous devs and eventually it seems most turn like that.
One explained me that they are bombarded non-stop by people for years and years and at the end they'd rather be mean than "waste" their time on the rare chance of having a meaningful interaction.
The overwhelming majority of their interaction ends up with people asking them for opinions about their projects, collaborations, etc, and it gets so tiring that they statistically prefer to lose the chance of having a nice meaningful interaction rather than take the chance of yet another waste of time.
I know it's mean, but I get it.
Not saying they are all like that, just saying it's quite common among famous developers, they are bombarded non stop by people wanting to chat.
For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing.
He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.
Could also be a different psychological path in person and through text. I know I behave much more anxiously irl and I might act colder than my personality can be.
Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else.
But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”.
If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.
I'm going to be rude now, but I don't mean it to be taken that way.
"I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able".
I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases.
But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged.
Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude.
It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly.
Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue.
> I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
I'm going to say that your definition of "severely autistic" is actually mild to moderate at worst.
The definition of "severely autistic" I know of and have seen in personal experience (family) and in my career has nothing to do with "masking" and such.
It's being a late teenager who is effectively non-verbal, who wore diapers until age 12, who has an "anchoring dog", a 150lb Newfoundland that was trained from birth with audio recordings of him screaming or tantrums, that acts both as an emotional support, but as a literal anchor - tethered to him so that when, as many severely autistic people do, he starts to wander based on internal stimuli - the dog can just sit down and tense up and say "Not unless you plan on dragging a very large dog with you that is trained to stay still when it notices you walking away from your family".
Things along those lines.
> they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
This is demonstrably not RMS. He is quite aware of this, and quite openly states he has no intention of apologizing for it, let alone "fixing it".
The “severe” autism that I used to experience, at least the most severe that I experienced was non-verbal, sometimes with violent outbursts.
But of course there’s a whole range.
What concerns me though is that when I’m on the internet, people talk about autism like it’s a quirky character flaw that can be overridden with moderate effort.
Hasn’t the definition of autism in the DSM changed to the point of requiring only a single characteristic to be “technically” on the spectrum, whereas it used to require many more criteria? I think it’s literally “not what it used to be”.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or
Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
> nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.
I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.
I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.
There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
I am not diagnosed as autistic and also have trouble understanding why people can call my interactions rude as I just tend to try to be honest and precise.
It just happens that I don't like hypocrisy.
I am not an antisocial and consider myself a very polite person and will often say hello and wish a good day to strangers when I am riding my bicycle in the trails or walking in a village / small town.
Calling a spade a spade is already considered rude in some cultures/contexts, so I think the most you could say is "this isn't even rude from my perspective".
I know somebody who smoked a lived to be 90 years old, therefore all that they speak about harms of smoking are lies.
You realize people are different, and your knowledge of tiny number of data points tells you very little about people who aren't those people you know?
To some people, like myself, it has only in later years become apparent that RMS is autistic. In the late 90s, early 2000s is when I became aware of Stallman and his work on GNU and FSF. All that was pretty much always in form of writing and articles. Only semi-direct interaction was when a friend of mine invited him to talk at the local LUG, which he refused, if it wasn't change to GNU/Linux User Group, he was told "NO" and that was it. He always came across as difficult, but only in later years have many of us become aware that he might actually have a diagnoses of some form, until then he was just labeled at "difficult".
This is a really important perspective to remember in all our daily lives but also when motivated politicians say things like "autism epidemic". I guess there might be an equivalent decline in people labeled as difficult?
If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.
He's gotta have a weird thing with his feet. My old boss saw him at a talking event here in Orlando, and he said he was picking skin off his toes or something weird the entire time he was talking. He's the hero we needed but probably deserve (as punishment for being bad humans).
I don't think he's a communist, and even if he was, I doubt a political ideology you may share ideas with has anything to do with how you interact with people.
I strongly disagree.
I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please.
And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least.
And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well.
Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
1. Stallman has never, ever argued that fruits of labor should be free. He's always and only focused on knowledge: software, manuals, books for school, etc.
In particular he's been against closed software of appliances and hardware you buy. If you buy a printer you should also own it fully and be able to modify it the way you please, which requires access to its software. He's never talked about services or physical goods being free.
2. There are psychological traits that can influence on a statistical level (very high numbers) political views. But this is just tendencies, it's not determinism.
Openness to new experiences correlates often with openness to change and experimentation on social matters. Neuroticism often correlates with sensitivity on safety matters. Agreeableness with tendencies towards egalitarian views. And all of that still matters way less than cultural background and many other things.
But extraversion or social skills, like in Stallman's case have 0 relationship with political views. In fact, by your logic and his traits, he should fall on the other end of the political spectrum.
Software, manuals, books, and knowledge in general are fruits of labor. It is not physical labor but labor nonetheless. Otherwise how would you reconcile software developers getting paid (as well as pretty much any intellectual profession)?
The argument against appliances isn't any good. You are not entitled to getting access to the schematic and inner workings of things you buy. By this logic, everything should come with the full blueprint and documentation on the production process.
You are free to choose to buy things that are more open, and it is indeed a desirable quality for the consumer, but definitely not a right. Without closed-source software, ubiquitous computing would not exist.
When you buy a printer, it is working as is, as described with the limitations that are laid out. You are free to keep using it as long as it is functional with the computer/OS it was designed for. You are free to make your own printer or select a brand that offers full firmware access if this is important to you.
As for the psych thing, I never said it was full determinism, and I really don't want to argue about it with you.
The point I am making has nothing to do with social skills.
In the story of the OP, Stallman gave zero shits about him unless he wanted to buy some of his manuals. This is both hilarious and hypocritical for a dude who spends all day arguing about making “free” software. It maps perfectly to the experience of anyone who has to deal with people who are communist in spirit. They'll argue about sharing everything to never contribute anything or the minimum they can get away with. It is not a subtle effect, and the more communist they are, the worse it is.
In fact, the thing I get out of this is that my first statement was perfectly accurate. Predictably, you got worked up about it because Stallman is an idol, and you are some sort of Marxist-derived ideologue, and your feelings got hurt. It seems very likely that you are also yourself an asshole. Not that I wouldn't buy you a beer to listen to your comrade fantasies (they're very entertaining, like fantasy novels), I don't strongly discriminate against assholery, but if it walks like a duck, I call it a duck.
In French the word I would use is “enfoiré", the literal translation is indeed “asshole” or “bastard,” but the meaning I'm trying to convey is "personne malfaisante, déloyale" which roughly translates to "deleterious and dishonest person."
And this is a perfect description for Stallman's behavior as well as the vast majority of communists. It's not like there wasn't extensive literature/proofs on the subject…
> and you are some sort of Marxist-derived ideologue
1. Stallman is not my idol, I don't like the guy at all and I find him disgusting from many points of view, but I see his point of why access to information and software is important to humanity. I am surrounded by appliances I don't really own and control, from printers to TVs and it's disgusting, I absolutely understand his points. I should be able to modify and repair stuff I buy with my money, it's mine. This has been normal for 99.99% of human history by the way.
2. I don't really like left vs right labels, I find them asinine. Politics are complex, there's countless topics on which one could be leaning in one or another end. Moreover I don't like anything that ends with "ism" it's never brought anything good to the world. I'm more right-leaning if you care to know. Yet I know people and have family members that have the most diverse view, and I respect those. I judge people for how they behave and act to others and the ideals they fight for.
3. Since you keep judging me (wrongly, you miss on everything, like you did on Stallman), I'll judge you. You sound like a loser mixup between a 4chan incel on those boards like /pol/ and a 60 years old bigot on facebook.
4. Psychological and social studies demonstrate that the qualities you find in Stallman are more common among the people on the other end of the political spectrum.
I am the least likely guy to defend communists, but come on. It's not even clear he is a communist, and if you need to dunk on communists, you could find much, much better targets. His personality has nothing to do with his political views, and there are a lot of smooth talking and suave communists. It's just a cheap shot, which doesn't do good to anyone.
I don't have much time to expand, but this is not at all a cheap shot.
It's how I see him now that I am more cognizant about the world. Since I first learned about him when I got interested in Linux back in the late 90s, the only thing he has done is complain about others needing to share their work for free.
This is basically the whole communist shtick.
It is a well-informed opinion, drawing from personal experience, economics courses, readings on psychology, as well as historical research.
Here is a paste of a previous reply.
I strongly disagree.
I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please.
And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least.
And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well.
Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
I don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact.
Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.
However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The primary Stallman’s output is neither technical nor legal but moral. He condemns any entity that doesn’t grant its users four “freedoms.” And the primary disease that GPL spreads is not arbitrary legal restrictions but the moral code (altruism) that sanctions it. The fact that it’s not meant to be forced upon developers is irrelevant: it preserves the philosophy that could be weaponized in the future, possibly in an altered form.
But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?
Well, they tout altruism, but they don't actually practice it.
It's all fake; if they were true altruists, they wouldn't need to argue all day about people needing to share their stuff.
In altruism, there is the concept of not personally benefiting or not requiring reciprocity.
But the demagogues endlessly promoting communist ideologies definitely benefit from it by appearing morally superior and getting resources for no valuable work in exchange.
The GPL, shows that, actually, they are not really ok with the no reciprocity part.
There are very few truly altruistic individuals, and their defining characteristic is that they just do the good stuff instead of endlessly talking about it for brownie points.
Basically the complete reverse of communists (and everyone far left in general).
Potato, potahto.
I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective.
The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).
There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs.
Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals).
On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.
As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.
Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level.
Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.
What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.
I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives.
I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
I assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
I get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
It is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby
script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So
I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a
screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully
understood why python or ruby are useful.
He was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise:
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
Those still only work for text. What I'm trying to say is that it's possible Stallman was considering that "screenshot" means "dumping a graphics buffer to disk". In the case of text mode without the framebuffer, there is no graphics buffer to dump (at least, not one that's accessible on the computer), therefore the best you can do is dumping a text buffer instead.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
Heavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so.
Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).
What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.
Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.
¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.
The point is precisely that there are plenty of stories, there’s no need to single out any of them. Look for his treatment of women or while being a house guest. Heck, you can even read about disappointing (if minor) interactions in this very submission. I won’t link to them specifically because I remember more than one woman mentioning how they were harassed by Stallman fans after telling their stories. I have no desire to contribute further to that, I’m sure you’re capable of coming up with the searches yourself, it’s not remotely hard.
Disagree with you about crypto, it allows me to purchase high quality drugs online.
Also disagree with you about "IoT", I use zigbee devices that I can control remotely.
What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.
Most likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later.
By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
You could be right but I would like to put forward another possible reason. They could be telling the truth. I studied computer science late 90s and to this day I cannot use MS Excel beyond summing a column of numbers. To make matters worse I work in data engineering space. So people often assume I do not want to help them when I tell them I cannot help them with their fancy spreadsheets. I have never owned a Mac book and sometimes I get asked for help and I haven't a clue how to help. The answer is how come but you have been working with computers for all these years.
Ditto here. Word, Excel and clones, mostly at Wordpad level and a bit more in sheets. For the rest, I know awk/perl/tcl and Gnuplot. And md2Groff-> PDF does magic. PowerPoint? Magicpoint or sent(1).
IMHO, speaking from a data engineer perspective. Excel is used excessively by industry specialists who aren't in IT or but IT people who are being constrained by environment. As in they don't have a better tool to work in. It is a great tool to quickly mock up a report.
Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
Due to these sorts of quotes from them, I often say semi-seriously that programmers don't know how to use computers. Another thing in this vein I often recall is Notch saying he finds both vim and emacs too confusing/difficult (while many non-programmers can use them both without issue). It may be an over-specialization. With modern labels you could say they put everything into "Dev" and only the bare minimum into "Ops".
Thanks for asking, I had to search the quote since I recalled it from memory. I couldn't find it, but here's the closest I got [1]. The disdain and arrogance of this person is just incredible.
Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius".
That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with.
On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
Aqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time.
It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.
TBH with everchaning ifconfig/ip/systemd under GNU/Linux you almost forget that over years when your focused on Lisp or similar.
Under OpenBSD as the settngs are pretty much the same over releases, you can use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.if almost forever. That's it, upgrade and forget.
They are just old school. When you learn coding before GUIs were mainstream, you don't care that much about exciting UIs.
Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that
The more 'h4ck3r' screenshot you have with useless toys at /r/unixporn in Reddit, the less you actually know about computers.
Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between
tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.
Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.
Hard disagree. The fact that they have customized their system to such a degree shows they do know how to use computers. I think you're trying to conflate that with other things like programming ability, which are orthogonal.
Wrong. Knowing to customize a theme != knowing to use a computer != knowing how computers work.
I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.
It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
This. Nowadays I just use Zukitre for GTK/Qt and the Tango icon theme, it suits
TWM/CWM and any other minimal WM without tons of effort. A dull gray theme combines with everything, even with my Cyan titlebars for TWM (they make a great contrast with red borders and wheat yellow icons/menus). You know, I want to use my computers and the titlebars stand out like crazy. And, actually, I've just borrowed an old color config used from a university.
The background?
xsetroot -solid gray20
I never understood the trend on dark/bright modes; the gray themes from my childhood/early teens with W98SE (and used by Mac OS 7/8 too) are just neutral and barely 'sit there'.
I love nature pictures, so I collected a few from all seasons, and now all my customization is every 3 months to change which season’s wallpapers to rotate from.
Coincidence? No, these are people for whom the computer is a tool. My smartest and most productive colleague run stock KDE and a more or less unconfigured Vim. He truly does not give a shit.
You might be onto something, because interestingly I don't think there's any software at all I know inside out or have ever mastered.
I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.
I'm not like that on the abstract level.
I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.
It's not just IT-related.
I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...
But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.
Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
I lived a year in a great hostel run by a German girl in Mexico.
She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.
But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.
But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.
We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
> We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.
> But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!
Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.
I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is very well put. I appreciate him because I can't or rather I won't be like him. We need people like him and I will be the first to say "not it".
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.
I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
This couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient and has them customized just the way he wants it. (I even recall some blog post where the author watched one of these talks and was amazed by just wizardly he was navigating between programs or Emacs buffers or whatever.)
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
FVWM setups can be really complex. Ditto with (c)twm. Once you are free to choose your windows geometry and keybindings, everything it's just either bloat or severely restricted.
It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.
He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
Indeed. In fact, only recently the Fedora KDE version was elevated to "Edition" status and is now on the same tier as the Gnome version.
Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
No worries. I started using Fedora around the 4-5 timeframe and am still using it 40 editions later -- time flies. To my memory, it's always been GNOME-first.
Which is weird, I've compiled and ran custom kernels and modules on debian before fedora 1.0 iso was announced on freenode/#fedora and it wasn't even good.
It still is an utter pain if you ever need to get close to the rpm system.
Probably what he means is that a make install (or whatever the incantation, it’s been a while since I compiled a kernel) just works on Fedora and never has to deal with the rpm nonsense (I use Fedora too, but packaging is even more dreadful than deb, if you can believe it)
I remember the first gentoo. On the framebuffer it had a beautiful blue/gray background with the logo and provided you with choices. You could build everything from scratch or install a bootstrapped version. I tried both, failed and gave up (my poor AMD k5 couldn't handle the heat). But the point here is: it was always easy to build a kernel within your debian installation from deb-src. You could even build it as a deb, install it and reboot into it. If my job was to manage a linux kernel, I'd have a script which took the latest sources, set kernel parameters, packaged it as deb-src and then it is just two steps to build and reboot. Then I could switch between them easily.
LTT is my most watched channel according to YouTube rewind, but this one was one of my favourite of all time.. I was excited for this to drop as soon as Fake Linus started to hint at it.
This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond.
All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
It does seem like yesterday. Perception of time changes as one ages. We were settig up the Christmas decorations last weekend and I had an overwhelming feeling of "we just did this like a month ago" but it has already been another year.
My desktop progression has been
1989: twm
1995: ctwm
2000: kde
2022: lxde
I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch
Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with
Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university
I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
About 15 years ago I tried xmonad, a tiling window manager, and I was hooked. I moved to awesome a few years later and that has been my desktop ever since. I still pretty much use only emacs, terminals, and a web browser in my daily work, and that goes back even further than my use of tiling window managers.
Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
I remember those days, Fvwm2[1] was brilliant with its multiple screens and controlling the mouse using arrow keys - good times. Amazingly difficult to config even if you could get Xconfig to support your setup (external refresh rates and supported screen sizes and drivers for video cards).
But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between.
Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development.
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.
Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.
Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.
It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.
But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal.
Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
Terminal editors generally do support the mouse, and there are occasions where even a fairly skilled user of a good terminal editor will find it easier to click to set an insertion point than use commands to reach it. But having those key-command options greatly enhances the experience. You need to watch the screen while a skilled user edits text to get it. It's like magic.
I haven't picked up nearly as much as I'd like, but even basics (requiring zero config) are way beyond what I could easily do in any GUI editor I ever experienced. For example, in vim, if you are on a bracket or parenthesis (open or close) in edit mode, it is three keystrokes to delete the entire bracketed portion, precisely, regardless of size (even if the matching bracket is off screen). Finding the matching bracket with the mouse is often hell.
And it's not as hard to learn as you may expect, because those keystrokes are not magic codes; they're part of a consistent, thoughtfully designed command language. You choose a mode for selecting text (character based, with lowercase v), use "motions" to select the text in that mode (in this case, a single "go to the matching bracket" motion, which is the percent sign), and take an action with that selection (delete it, with d).
I wonder if there's a worthwhile time-saving in aggregate? To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit, not the actual edition. So I'm not convinced shaving a couple seconds here and there outweighs the benefit of a modern IDE or offsets the time spent ricing such a setup.
Seems like the opposite to me. IDE fashion changes like the wind. "Normal developers" are constantly starting over with new tools and new paradigms every time they start work on a new project. Gotta have the right vscode extensions to flash your firmware, IT only supports IntelliJ on the new job, ad infinitum. It's been this way for decades.
My .emacs file gets updated regularly, sure, but it's thirty years old, and my basic flow hasn't changed.
It's not mainly about speed (although the ceiling is much higher), but about ergonomics, and, plainly, enjoyability. The other benefit of making your own environment is mastery and control; only you can decide when and how the environment changes.
> To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit
I feel the same way. But small advantages compound to at least some extent (see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/); and I find that noticing that it takes more time than I'd like to write/edit something, risks breaking my flow.
Take about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands.
Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
For me its how easy it is to extend. Kakoune makes it so easy to integrate with the rest of my system. I can often create any kind of integration I need with just 1-10 lines of code. In vscode I need to just hope that someone else built the integration I need as a plugin, because writing plugins is really painful.
I've came across Mitchell Hashimoto (founder and main programmer behind Hashi Corp and now Ghostty) saying that he uses bare VIM and it took him long time to even use auto formatter with it.
He also said that the way for him to explore APIs is to read the docs first :)
One thing I'm reflecting on here is just how boring these screen grabs are.
Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience.
Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling.
Tongue in cheek here, but no wonder you produce little with so many distractions. Two shells full of text, music and IRC open - how is one supposed to concentrate?
I still produce little, but I have come to realize only pure, unadulterated silence free from any sort or distraction, however minimal, is worth anything. When I used IRC, not much was accomplished apart from chatting on IRC.
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?
Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.
Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."
From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa>
Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM
Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher
in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all
CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...).
Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't
win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon
last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man
at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types
discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident
came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something
about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were
also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat
about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates
are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them
off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort
of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong
people with this move!
Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole
be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention
to such people.
Milo
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit
he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed
WM. Or is that OSX?
I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such
as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are
too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that
only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it
is one less thing I can use anyway.)
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
I met RMS at a lunch in his honor at an Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant with very high ranking scholars/academics present, after an invited talk of his. Everyone was talking, eating, drinking and having a good time, whereas he was sitting at the head of the table doing email on his ThinkPad (yes, in text mode).
So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said.
(He is much more constructive by email.)
I totally get it. If I were famous I probably would do that all the time (fortunately I am not). I don't hate people, I just don't need to always talk to them. Sometimes I just don't want to talk to people, especially ones I don't know. I'd rather... well, do anything else, but by myself. Sometimes I am OK to talk to other people, but it's my choice, not one of a random person. Email is much better because you can choose when you send the mail, when you read the mail, and you don't have to perform on demand (for an introvert, social interaction is hard work).
I put him up for the night on my sofa once.
When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section.
Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software.
He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine.
If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience.
He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction.
I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change.
I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead.
[0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...
> I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I'd argue that while he may be nice, it's also generally considered impolite to be someone who "only talks to him about the things he wants to talk about". It's meant to be a two-way street, generally. Someone who only wants to talk about what -they- are interested in, not what their conversation partner is interested in is not being nice or polite.
You don't owe random strangers your time, and it's so strange to me that people feel so entitled to other peoples time. Can also be argued that it's rude to engage a person on a topic they're not interested in.
I do, to an extent, agree. But I also think it's impolite to have relationships where "we're going to talk about what I want to talk about, but when we go to talk about what you want to talk about I'm just going to pick up my laptop and ignore you or tell you I don't want to".
You could argue, in your description, the same about RMS - he might feel entitled to someone's time to talk about free software.
There is no relationship if you're never going to see these people again. My time is my most precious resource, and I'm not obligated to give it away because someone thinks their initiation of a conversation needs to be reciprocated.
RMS set boundaries and that's perfectly reasonable.
…
> think free software needs a new figurehead.
It's not like politician's post, where random people can just decide to run for it. We don't really have many people that do what he does.
Ha I finally got it once I realized it's not about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
I am pretty sure his choice of words was a conscious decision to do the pun.
I have met few famous devs and eventually it seems most turn like that.
One explained me that they are bombarded non-stop by people for years and years and at the end they'd rather be mean than "waste" their time on the rare chance of having a meaningful interaction.
The overwhelming majority of their interaction ends up with people asking them for opinions about their projects, collaborations, etc, and it gets so tiring that they statistically prefer to lose the chance of having a nice meaningful interaction rather than take the chance of yet another waste of time.
I know it's mean, but I get it.
Not saying they are all like that, just saying it's quite common among famous developers, they are bombarded non stop by people wanting to chat.
Sounds like you stumped him ;)
> without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk".
Duh, obviously, he only lisps. /s
For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing.
He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.
Could also be a different psychological path in person and through text. I know I behave much more anxiously irl and I might act colder than my personality can be.
Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else.
But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.
I'm going to be rude now, but I don't mean it to be taken that way.
"I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able".
I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases.
But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged.
Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude.
It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly.
Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200502
> I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
I'm going to say that your definition of "severely autistic" is actually mild to moderate at worst.
The definition of "severely autistic" I know of and have seen in personal experience (family) and in my career has nothing to do with "masking" and such.
It's being a late teenager who is effectively non-verbal, who wore diapers until age 12, who has an "anchoring dog", a 150lb Newfoundland that was trained from birth with audio recordings of him screaming or tantrums, that acts both as an emotional support, but as a literal anchor - tethered to him so that when, as many severely autistic people do, he starts to wander based on internal stimuli - the dog can just sit down and tense up and say "Not unless you plan on dragging a very large dog with you that is trained to stay still when it notices you walking away from your family".
Things along those lines.
> they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
This is demonstrably not RMS. He is quite aware of this, and quite openly states he has no intention of apologizing for it, let alone "fixing it".
The “severe” autism that I used to experience, at least the most severe that I experienced was non-verbal, sometimes with violent outbursts.
But of course there’s a whole range.
What concerns me though is that when I’m on the internet, people talk about autism like it’s a quirky character flaw that can be overridden with moderate effort.
Which feels criminally ignorant.
Hasn’t the definition of autism in the DSM changed to the point of requiring only a single characteristic to be “technically” on the spectrum, whereas it used to require many more criteria? I think it’s literally “not what it used to be”.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
> nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.
I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.
I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.
There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
I am not diagnosed as autistic and also have trouble understanding why people can call my interactions rude as I just tend to try to be honest and precise.
It just happens that I don't like hypocrisy.
I am not an antisocial and consider myself a very polite person and will often say hello and wish a good day to strangers when I am riding my bicycle in the trails or walking in a village / small town.
This isn't even rude.
Calling a spade a spade is already considered rude in some cultures/contexts, so I think the most you could say is "this isn't even rude from my perspective".
Feels like most of the time most folk are mostly speaking from their perspective. Do we need that reminder every time?
Please consider that your nephews are growing up on a world with a lot more awareness and empathy towards autism.
I know somebody who smoked a lived to be 90 years old, therefore all that they speak about harms of smoking are lies.
You realize people are different, and your knowledge of tiny number of data points tells you very little about people who aren't those people you know?
YMMV I guess, he was cool with signing my laptop at FOSDEM in 2013 and even exchanged a couple of jokes. Humans be humans.
Some people don’t want to be your hero. Until you meet them, you can pretend they do want to be.
You sucked up to an autist, what did you think was going to happen? That's like trying to use Disney Dollars at Universal.
To some people, like myself, it has only in later years become apparent that RMS is autistic. In the late 90s, early 2000s is when I became aware of Stallman and his work on GNU and FSF. All that was pretty much always in form of writing and articles. Only semi-direct interaction was when a friend of mine invited him to talk at the local LUG, which he refused, if it wasn't change to GNU/Linux User Group, he was told "NO" and that was it. He always came across as difficult, but only in later years have many of us become aware that he might actually have a diagnoses of some form, until then he was just labeled at "difficult".
This is a really important perspective to remember in all our daily lives but also when motivated politicians say things like "autism epidemic". I guess there might be an equivalent decline in people labeled as difficult?
If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
Dang, until I read your story I thought he was a totally normal guy!
Did he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;->
Why? Nroff/troff is literally designed to be printed with CUPS or Postscript etc etc etc
You can also literally cat > /dev/printer
Don’t forget the firmware
If there's a printer with OSS firmware, Stallman likely owns it.
I feel like rms just doesn't like human interaction generally. I've noticed that a lot of visionaries are that way.
I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.
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I guess if you are popular and an introvert who likes to be left alone, then being nice and personable is not an option :)
That’s clearly not only introversion, but (probably little masked) autism.
He's gotta have a weird thing with his feet. My old boss saw him at a talking event here in Orlando, and he said he was picking skin off his toes or something weird the entire time he was talking. He's the hero we needed but probably deserve (as punishment for being bad humans).
Better than the televised interview panel he did where not only was he doing that, he then appeared to eat the skin flakes on multiple occasions...
Weirdly paralelling heroin dependency... (mostly in the picking, but still)
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I don't think he's a communist, and even if he was, I doubt a political ideology you may share ideas with has anything to do with how you interact with people.
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please. And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
1. Stallman has never, ever argued that fruits of labor should be free. He's always and only focused on knowledge: software, manuals, books for school, etc. In particular he's been against closed software of appliances and hardware you buy. If you buy a printer you should also own it fully and be able to modify it the way you please, which requires access to its software. He's never talked about services or physical goods being free.
2. There are psychological traits that can influence on a statistical level (very high numbers) political views. But this is just tendencies, it's not determinism.
Openness to new experiences correlates often with openness to change and experimentation on social matters. Neuroticism often correlates with sensitivity on safety matters. Agreeableness with tendencies towards egalitarian views. And all of that still matters way less than cultural background and many other things.
But extraversion or social skills, like in Stallman's case have 0 relationship with political views. In fact, by your logic and his traits, he should fall on the other end of the political spectrum.
Software, manuals, books, and knowledge in general are fruits of labor. It is not physical labor but labor nonetheless. Otherwise how would you reconcile software developers getting paid (as well as pretty much any intellectual profession)?
The argument against appliances isn't any good. You are not entitled to getting access to the schematic and inner workings of things you buy. By this logic, everything should come with the full blueprint and documentation on the production process. You are free to choose to buy things that are more open, and it is indeed a desirable quality for the consumer, but definitely not a right. Without closed-source software, ubiquitous computing would not exist. When you buy a printer, it is working as is, as described with the limitations that are laid out. You are free to keep using it as long as it is functional with the computer/OS it was designed for. You are free to make your own printer or select a brand that offers full firmware access if this is important to you.
As for the psych thing, I never said it was full determinism, and I really don't want to argue about it with you. The point I am making has nothing to do with social skills. In the story of the OP, Stallman gave zero shits about him unless he wanted to buy some of his manuals. This is both hilarious and hypocritical for a dude who spends all day arguing about making “free” software. It maps perfectly to the experience of anyone who has to deal with people who are communist in spirit. They'll argue about sharing everything to never contribute anything or the minimum they can get away with. It is not a subtle effect, and the more communist they are, the worse it is.
In fact, the thing I get out of this is that my first statement was perfectly accurate. Predictably, you got worked up about it because Stallman is an idol, and you are some sort of Marxist-derived ideologue, and your feelings got hurt. It seems very likely that you are also yourself an asshole. Not that I wouldn't buy you a beer to listen to your comrade fantasies (they're very entertaining, like fantasy novels), I don't strongly discriminate against assholery, but if it walks like a duck, I call it a duck. In French the word I would use is “enfoiré", the literal translation is indeed “asshole” or “bastard,” but the meaning I'm trying to convey is "personne malfaisante, déloyale" which roughly translates to "deleterious and dishonest person." And this is a perfect description for Stallman's behavior as well as the vast majority of communists. It's not like there wasn't extensive literature/proofs on the subject…
> and you are some sort of Marxist-derived ideologue
1. Stallman is not my idol, I don't like the guy at all and I find him disgusting from many points of view, but I see his point of why access to information and software is important to humanity. I am surrounded by appliances I don't really own and control, from printers to TVs and it's disgusting, I absolutely understand his points. I should be able to modify and repair stuff I buy with my money, it's mine. This has been normal for 99.99% of human history by the way.
2. I don't really like left vs right labels, I find them asinine. Politics are complex, there's countless topics on which one could be leaning in one or another end. Moreover I don't like anything that ends with "ism" it's never brought anything good to the world. I'm more right-leaning if you care to know. Yet I know people and have family members that have the most diverse view, and I respect those. I judge people for how they behave and act to others and the ideals they fight for.
3. Since you keep judging me (wrongly, you miss on everything, like you did on Stallman), I'll judge you. You sound like a loser mixup between a 4chan incel on those boards like /pol/ and a 60 years old bigot on facebook.
4. Psychological and social studies demonstrate that the qualities you find in Stallman are more common among the people on the other end of the political spectrum.
I am the least likely guy to defend communists, but come on. It's not even clear he is a communist, and if you need to dunk on communists, you could find much, much better targets. His personality has nothing to do with his political views, and there are a lot of smooth talking and suave communists. It's just a cheap shot, which doesn't do good to anyone.
I don't have much time to expand, but this is not at all a cheap shot. It's how I see him now that I am more cognizant about the world. Since I first learned about him when I got interested in Linux back in the late 90s, the only thing he has done is complain about others needing to share their work for free. This is basically the whole communist shtick. It is a well-informed opinion, drawing from personal experience, economics courses, readings on psychology, as well as historical research.
Here is a paste of a previous reply.
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please. And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
I don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact.
Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.
However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The primary Stallman’s output is neither technical nor legal but moral. He condemns any entity that doesn’t grant its users four “freedoms.” And the primary disease that GPL spreads is not arbitrary legal restrictions but the moral code (altruism) that sanctions it. The fact that it’s not meant to be forced upon developers is irrelevant: it preserves the philosophy that could be weaponized in the future, possibly in an altered form.
But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?
Well, they tout altruism, but they don't actually practice it. It's all fake; if they were true altruists, they wouldn't need to argue all day about people needing to share their stuff. In altruism, there is the concept of not personally benefiting or not requiring reciprocity.
But the demagogues endlessly promoting communist ideologies definitely benefit from it by appearing morally superior and getting resources for no valuable work in exchange.
The GPL, shows that, actually, they are not really ok with the no reciprocity part.
There are very few truly altruistic individuals, and their defining characteristic is that they just do the good stuff instead of endlessly talking about it for brownie points. Basically the complete reverse of communists (and everyone far left in general).
Potato, potahto. I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective.
The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).
There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.
As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.
Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.
What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.
I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
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"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
I assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
I don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.
If you can send and receive email, why can't you run wget yourself?
My guess would be that he prefers having stuff in an inbox he can process one by one.
Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
I get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
Ye I agree. I was not sarcastic other than that I must aknowledge that I probably wouldn't go to that length becouse of weakness in my heart ;)
It is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully understood why python or ruby are useful.
He was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise:
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
Either script(1) or ttyrec(1). But you have to run these before.
Also, I'm pretty sure tty dumping tools (as root) do exist, this is Unix after all.
Those still only work for text. What I'm trying to say is that it's possible Stallman was considering that "screenshot" means "dumping a graphics buffer to disk". In the case of text mode without the framebuffer, there is no graphics buffer to dump (at least, not one that's accessible on the computer), therefore the best you can do is dumping a text buffer instead.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
He would absolutely have known about script(1).
He's just a contrarian wanker. Of course he knows how to take a screenshot. He just absolutely has to tell you that he uses text mode.
Heavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so.
Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).
What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.
Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.
¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.
> please do a cursory web search
Each person reading this might come up with some different in their search. Do you have a specific example to point to?
The point is precisely that there are plenty of stories, there’s no need to single out any of them. Look for his treatment of women or while being a house guest. Heck, you can even read about disappointing (if minor) interactions in this very submission. I won’t link to them specifically because I remember more than one woman mentioning how they were harassed by Stallman fans after telling their stories. I have no desire to contribute further to that, I’m sure you’re capable of coming up with the searches yourself, it’s not remotely hard.
No, they don't. I'm sure you're capable of finding one that suits the context here and reading it yourself.
Industrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole.
Wireless light switches are pretty cool. Digitally,wirelessly controlled light bulbs are neat. That's about it.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Wearables are amazing as well.
And the BT-accessible aqueducts.
Disagree with you about crypto, it allows me to purchase high quality drugs online. Also disagree with you about "IoT", I use zigbee devices that I can control remotely.
What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.
Then he should hit the Print Screen key and print the screen. Assuming he still has a printer that works acceptably.
I bet he knows how to make a Lisp Machine screenshot.
I bet he knows how but still won't
Emacs is a (virtual) Lisp Machine
At least a Lisp Image.
Most likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later.
By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
Maybe not... Digital cameras were well-established in 1998.
I bought one around that time (Olympus I think, sub-1MP), and used a script on Linux to extract the images. I was not a terribly early adopter.
On the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!
The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
"I don't know how to make a screenshot"
Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
You could be right but I would like to put forward another possible reason. They could be telling the truth. I studied computer science late 90s and to this day I cannot use MS Excel beyond summing a column of numbers. To make matters worse I work in data engineering space. So people often assume I do not want to help them when I tell them I cannot help them with their fancy spreadsheets. I have never owned a Mac book and sometimes I get asked for help and I haven't a clue how to help. The answer is how come but you have been working with computers for all these years.
Ditto here. Word, Excel and clones, mostly at Wordpad level and a bit more in sheets. For the rest, I know awk/perl/tcl and Gnuplot. And md2Groff-> PDF does magic. PowerPoint? Magicpoint or sent(1).
I thought Excel is the bread and butter in your space. How is this possible?
IMHO, speaking from a data engineer perspective. Excel is used excessively by industry specialists who aren't in IT or but IT people who are being constrained by environment. As in they don't have a better tool to work in. It is a great tool to quickly mock up a report.
Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
Due to these sorts of quotes from them, I often say semi-seriously that programmers don't know how to use computers. Another thing in this vein I often recall is Notch saying he finds both vim and emacs too confusing/difficult (while many non-programmers can use them both without issue). It may be an over-specialization. With modern labels you could say they put everything into "Dev" and only the bare minimum into "Ops".
When did Linus say he doesn't know how to install a distro? My understanding is he's only said he prefers to use simple to install distros.
Thanks for asking, I had to search the quote since I recalled it from memory. I couldn't find it, but here's the closest I got [1]. The disdain and arrogance of this person is just incredible.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHGTs1NSB1s
> I wager that it's a status thing.
Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius".
That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
It’s disdain.
Nah, I think he's right, it's signaling.
I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with.
On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
He’s…something.
The few photos he has on his own website have been taken by others. I doubt he even owns a camera.
I don't think the second answer even qualify as a screenshot nor why he should do that upon random request by strangers.
fbgrab it's a thing. Then convert the resulting image to png.
Not everyone likes or use framebuffer. It's actually kinda 'new', as most classical linux text mode was done without it.
I also have no idea how to make screenshots of text terminal (as f1-f12 with no fb)
You can use conspy -d from another tty to take a textdump of a console session.
It is included as one of the utilities in busybox.
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
Aqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time.
It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.
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Same for me, until I got to Bram.
Man that hits hard
I've never owned an Apple computer, and I still miss the Aqua-era OS X UI.
There was something magical about it.
You might want to check the site again, as the Aqua screenshot is from 2002.
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.
TBH with everchaning ifconfig/ip/systemd under GNU/Linux you almost forget that over years when your focused on Lisp or similar.
Under OpenBSD as the settngs are pretty much the same over releases, you can use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.if almost forever. That's it, upgrade and forget.
Most screenshots for these well known guys are quite boring. Coincidence? I think if you want to be good at something you need focus.
They are just old school. When you learn coding before GUIs were mainstream, you don't care that much about exciting UIs.
Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that
The more 'h4ck3r' screenshot you have with useless toys at /r/unixporn in Reddit, the less you actually know about computers.
Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.
Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.
Hard disagree. The fact that they have customized their system to such a degree shows they do know how to use computers. I think you're trying to conflate that with other things like programming ability, which are orthogonal.
Wrong. Knowing to customize a theme != knowing to use a computer != knowing how computers work.
I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.
It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
This. Nowadays I just use Zukitre for GTK/Qt and the Tango icon theme, it suits TWM/CWM and any other minimal WM without tons of effort. A dull gray theme combines with everything, even with my Cyan titlebars for TWM (they make a great contrast with red borders and wheat yellow icons/menus). You know, I want to use my computers and the titlebars stand out like crazy. And, actually, I've just borrowed an old color config used from a university.
The background?
I never understood the trend on dark/bright modes; the gray themes from my childhood/early teens with W98SE (and used by Mac OS 7/8 too) are just neutral and barely 'sit there'.I love nature pictures, so I collected a few from all seasons, and now all my customization is every 3 months to change which season’s wallpapers to rotate from.
I can adjust my car's interior temperature to +/-1F and play music from my phone, but if you think that makes me some sort of auto mechanic genius...
Coincidence? No, these are people for whom the computer is a tool. My smartest and most productive colleague run stock KDE and a more or less unconfigured Vim. He truly does not give a shit.
So you're telling me my juiced-up i3 with the anime girl and equalizer in the background doesn't make me the hacker wizard I thought I was?
Everything is OK. I love looking at desktops, but I became old to put the effort. I think you are a bard more than a wizard.
Stock ubuntu LTS is the biggest flex.
Maybe what we need is a screenshot of their brain thinking
Boring is good.
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An engineer at my work literally designed the processor architecture that lives in our products but he is more or less computer illiterate.
I write software and use computers from ages, but put me in front of any app I haven't authored and I have no clue how to do things.
Often I find that apps have features only because I see others using the application.
Make me do anything on applications banking/government/delivery-related and I have to ask family members.
haven’t authored or just don’t use? I would assume that tools that you use you know inside and out (e.g. Code or IntelliJ)
You might be onto something, because interestingly I don't think there's any software at all I know inside out or have ever mastered.
I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.
I'm not like that on the abstract level.
I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.
It's not just IT-related.
I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
fascinating!
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...
But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.
Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
I lived a year in a great hostel run by a German girl in Mexico.
She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.
But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.
But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.
We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
> We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.
> But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!
Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.
I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
where in mexico? sounds really cool
This is very well put. I appreciate him because I can't or rather I won't be like him. We need people like him and I will be the first to say "not it".
"All fanatics are irritating, Pellinore. And I am a fanatic. And I don't enjoy it any more than you do."
- Sir Lancelot du Lac, "Camelot"
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.
I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
> He said some decent things about software freedom
Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.
Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.
do people in general realize that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum?
People who know who he is? Probably.
Others? Maybe. Maybe not.
See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.
This couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient and has them customized just the way he wants it. (I even recall some blog post where the author watched one of these talks and was amazed by just wizardly he was navigating between programs or Emacs buffers or whatever.)
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
FVWM setups can be really complex. Ditto with (c)twm. Once you are free to choose your windows geometry and keybindings, everything it's just either bloat or severely restricted.
Linus Torvalds currently uses Fedora with GNOME, which was fun to learn because that's also been my personal choice for a while now.
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )
It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.
He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
He explained that in the linked video - Fedora makes it easy for him to test custom kernel builds.
Oh I didn't know Gnome was the official flavour now, last time I paid attention it was still KDE
I don't think it's ever been KDE.
Indeed. In fact, only recently the Fedora KDE version was elevated to "Edition" status and is now on the same tier as the Gnome version.
Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
I've been very pleased with KDE on Fedora for the past ~five years.
It seems you're right, and now I'm wondering how I ever thought otherwise...
Indeed it is strange. Red Hat is more or less considered the corporate steward/benefactor of modern Gnome.
No worries. I started using Fedora around the 4-5 timeframe and am still using it 40 editions later -- time flies. To my memory, it's always been GNOME-first.
It's been a long, long time. I think Red Hat 8/9 (from 2002-2003) had a default KDE build. Even in Fedora Core 1 Gnome was default.
Now, there's a separate build to download for KDE. It's likely because Gnome is default install for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation.
He must not use any gnome extensions.
He said also because fedora seemed the most amenable to running custom kernels which is basically what he does all day.
Which is weird, I've compiled and ran custom kernels and modules on debian before fedora 1.0 iso was announced on freenode/#fedora and it wasn't even good.
Ok have you considered things may have changed in the 40+ releases since then?
Yes, but I've been considering both operating systems to have changed for the better, not just fedora for some weird reason.
It still is an utter pain if you ever need to get close to the rpm system.
Probably what he means is that a make install (or whatever the incantation, it’s been a while since I compiled a kernel) just works on Fedora and never has to deal with the rpm nonsense (I use Fedora too, but packaging is even more dreadful than deb, if you can believe it)
For Gentoo, it was/is? part of the standard installation to configure and build a custom kernel.
I remember the first gentoo. On the framebuffer it had a beautiful blue/gray background with the logo and provided you with choices. You could build everything from scratch or install a bootstrapped version. I tried both, failed and gave up (my poor AMD k5 couldn't handle the heat). But the point here is: it was always easy to build a kernel within your debian installation from deb-src. You could even build it as a deb, install it and reboot into it. If my job was to manage a linux kernel, I'd have a script which took the latest sources, set kernel parameters, packaged it as deb-src and then it is just two steps to build and reboot. Then I could switch between them easily.
Yeah mine too (but using Silverblue).
After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.
LTT is my most watched channel according to YouTube rewind, but this one was one of my favourite of all time.. I was excited for this to drop as soon as Fake Linus started to hint at it.
He seems to switch every half-decade or so. Waiting for his next KDE era :-)
This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond.
All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
>All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done".
Well they are hardly going to send in screenshots showing them surfing porn sites or doomscrolling Facebook.
Wild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025
To me, they all look like they just increased their monitor size ;-)
Or do you expect IRC users to switch to Discord?
Shocking to see 2002 is considered as ancient. I still have a vivid memory of those days as if it was yesterday.
I was born then. I just graduated from university recently. I'd say it's been a little while.
Time seems longer when you’re young.
It does seem like yesterday. Perception of time changes as one ages. We were settig up the Christmas decorations last weekend and I had an overwhelming feeling of "we just did this like a month ago" but it has already been another year.
This is my desktop 2025: http://ett.host.radiomesh.org/film/HL2%20on%203588%20uConsol... (controls are impossible at first on 3588 uConsole, this was me playing without the usual bindings just to prove the performance so don't judge the gameplay)
3588 (10W) plays HL2 at 300 FPS and streams it at 60 FPS to twitch.
Turns out 2025 was the year of the ARM linux desktop after all!
TWM + emacs + irssi + mpv(ytdl)
I echo this. My desktop has stayed virtually unchanged for decades, and in retrospect, it explains why I use the Sway tiling window manager today.
Hah, If you ask my partner, I've been looking at the same screen for years and years
My desktop progression has been 1989: twm 1995: ctwm 2000: kde 2022: lxde
I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch
Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with
Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university
I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
About 15 years ago I tried xmonad, a tiling window manager, and I was hooked. I moved to awesome a few years later and that has been my desktop ever since. I still pretty much use only emacs, terminals, and a web browser in my daily work, and that goes back even further than my use of tiling window managers.
Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
What are you echoing?
Mostly tiling WMs and terminals
I remember those days, Fvwm2[1] was brilliant with its multiple screens and controlling the mouse using arrow keys - good times. Amazingly difficult to config even if you could get Xconfig to support your setup (external refresh rates and supported screen sizes and drivers for video cards).
But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between.
Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development.
[1]: https://www.fvwm.org/
Never sway, always Sway.
Old macOS has got so much soul. I missed all those years since I started working with it back when Sierra was around, clearly not the same.
If you want a macOS/OS X release with soul, check out Snow Leopard.
common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.
Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.
Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.
It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.
But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal.
Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
Terminal editors generally do support the mouse, and there are occasions where even a fairly skilled user of a good terminal editor will find it easier to click to set an insertion point than use commands to reach it. But having those key-command options greatly enhances the experience. You need to watch the screen while a skilled user edits text to get it. It's like magic.
I haven't picked up nearly as much as I'd like, but even basics (requiring zero config) are way beyond what I could easily do in any GUI editor I ever experienced. For example, in vim, if you are on a bracket or parenthesis (open or close) in edit mode, it is three keystrokes to delete the entire bracketed portion, precisely, regardless of size (even if the matching bracket is off screen). Finding the matching bracket with the mouse is often hell.
And it's not as hard to learn as you may expect, because those keystrokes are not magic codes; they're part of a consistent, thoughtfully designed command language. You choose a mode for selecting text (character based, with lowercase v), use "motions" to select the text in that mode (in this case, a single "go to the matching bracket" motion, which is the percent sign), and take an action with that selection (delete it, with d).
I wonder if there's a worthwhile time-saving in aggregate? To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit, not the actual edition. So I'm not convinced shaving a couple seconds here and there outweighs the benefit of a modern IDE or offsets the time spent ricing such a setup.
Seems like the opposite to me. IDE fashion changes like the wind. "Normal developers" are constantly starting over with new tools and new paradigms every time they start work on a new project. Gotta have the right vscode extensions to flash your firmware, IT only supports IntelliJ on the new job, ad infinitum. It's been this way for decades.
My .emacs file gets updated regularly, sure, but it's thirty years old, and my basic flow hasn't changed.
It's not mainly about speed (although the ceiling is much higher), but about ergonomics, and, plainly, enjoyability. The other benefit of making your own environment is mastery and control; only you can decide when and how the environment changes.
> To me it seems like overall the bottleneck is always thinking what code to write/edit
I feel the same way. But small advantages compound to at least some extent (see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/); and I find that noticing that it takes more time than I'd like to write/edit something, risks breaking my flow.
Take about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands.
Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
It’s funny. I thought the same thing before taking the time to become familiar with VIM keybindings and now I find VS Code tedious and painfully slow.
For me its how easy it is to extend. Kakoune makes it so easy to integrate with the rest of my system. I can often create any kind of integration I need with just 1-10 lines of code. In vscode I need to just hope that someone else built the integration I need as a plugin, because writing plugins is really painful.
I guess once one gets used to it or anything it’s going to be more productive than the rest of the tools.
what's difficult about it?
I have auto complete, LSP, format on save for may languages, fuzzy finding. my neovim config file is 355 lines, with comments and line breaks.
Normal, good editors are great already with 0 line config. That's the whole point.
I've came across Mitchell Hashimoto (founder and main programmer behind Hashi Corp and now Ghostty) saying that he uses bare VIM and it took him long time to even use auto formatter with it. He also said that the way for him to explore APIs is to read the docs first :)
Dennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002.
https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...
I think you mean 2002, not 2022.
Thanks, typo; updated.
One thing I'm reflecting on here is just how boring these screen grabs are.
Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience.
Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling.
This is how my laptop looked in 2015 (it's a screenshot from 2017, but the configs were the same): https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.p...
Tongue in cheek here, but no wonder you produce little with so many distractions. Two shells full of text, music and IRC open - how is one supposed to concentrate?
I still produce little, but I have come to realize only pure, unadulterated silence free from any sort or distraction, however minimal, is worth anything. When I used IRC, not much was accomplished apart from chatting on IRC.
valid.
In general I find it best to close down my IM app of choice these days totally.
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?
Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]
[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif
[2] https://www.fvwm.org/
[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg
The one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.
So I can't just use it by itself. E.g. I use i3wm, would those work together? Sorry if it's a stupid question.
No. It's FVWM-specific.
This brought back memories. It’s wild how much tooling changed in a decade. The contrast really shows how much developer experience has improved.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722536
I'd give anything to see their 2025 desktops.
Can someone identify what font Bram Moolenaar was using in 2015 screen shot?
Looks like Liberation Mono or Cousine or similar.
It looks like Liberation Mono. Cousine has a specific "r" and it does not match.
Haha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!
Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.
Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138
Hah, thanks for that bit of fitting lore. HONK!
The old Mozilla icon on a screenshot (2002) caught my attention.
I searched for it and confirmed it was inspired by communist aesthetic https://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/2002/
Previously:
<https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814590>
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed WM. Or is that OSX?
I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)
Out of curiosity, why's xorg a blocker for you?
the last one with XMonad is the only one that looks even remotely good to me in compared to what we have today
Now I would really like to know what these guys think of Omarchy :-D
Now do 2025…
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It still looked ugly in 2015. I wonder what 2025 computers would look like because I think they look cool now.