I hope I’m rocking that hard at 84.

My next non-alcohol bubbly drink will be in your honor, Larry.

Great summary bot, as ever. But missed this absolute gem from the comments:

“Thanks for helping me wardrive and steal the WiFi from that dentist, Larry.”

“No border, no nation, no gods, no masters, never gonna…” got me good. As bad as other things are, this is a delightful moment in the Fediverse, and you’re all a delight to share it with.

You’re delusional.

We have established that. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Show me evidence that “the Windows kernel” is going away.

That’s what my other examples are evidence for. I’m extrapolating a trend I’ve seen many times before. I could easily be wrong.

I’m not stressing over it though, because I’m happy being a delusional old person.

My dude have you not seen marketshare for Chrome and Safari?

Yes. And it supports my point. Here’s the source code to Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/chromium

Here’s the license: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/main/LICENSE

And here’s the source code to Safari: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

There’s an advertising campaign by the current big players that everyone may as well accept their bullremoved, because everyone else does.

I’m telling you, from experience, that putting up with that (current) bullremoved is temporary.

They’ll innovative new bullremoved, of course. That’s how the pattern goes.

When open standards win, it’s usually because the platform was built on them, like email or podcasts.

That’s the perception I’m trying to counter with the web technology examples I gave above.

I was there building the web, on proprietary products, and I believed that, myself.

I’m delighted to report that I was wrong.

It took decades, but the far less visible corner of the web running on open technologies is now the only portion we currently still have.

With a big delightful exception for Shockwave Flash, and the folks valiantly keeping it alive to preserve it’s part in gaming history.

Did XMPP win?

That remains to be seen. I’ll gladly accept XMPP as a point in the “against” column, as it has a long way to go, if it succeeds.

Google succeeded handily at their last round of embrace, extend, extinguish, against XMPP, by dropping support from Google Chat.

It’s worth noting that the question isn’t really whether XMPP replaces WhatsApp, it’s whether it can unseat SMS.

SMS is seriously entrenched. I don’t know it’s state of openess. My understanding is it’s mostly run/owned by a few large proprietary players.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

Again, I’m happy to concede that XMPP looks doomed today, like RSS did a couple decades ago.

Did RSS win?

RSS certainly hasn’t won, yet. But RSS is doing fine, behind the scenes. Most of the RSS the average person interacts with doesn’t look, to them, like RSS. There’s a lot of RSS still in wide use, today. Competing solutions are currently enremovedifying (Google Search, Reddit, Facebook, Xitter), while RSS is still free and still just works.

That’s not an automatic win for RSS, until you consider that RSS has already outlived WebCrawler, Digg, MySpace and GeoCities, among others.

I’m calling it early in favor of RSS.

We’ve agreed that I am prone to do so, though.

Did Linux win?

Yes. Linux won. The vast majority of computation today runs on Linux.

Windows used to hold a serious percentage of web hosting. My best guess is it was around half. The current percentage is unknown, but generous estimates put it at 3%, at most. For some context, the Azure cloud (Microsoft’s web hosting that Office 365 runs on) is known to mostly run on Linux.

But to address the other part of your question:

Is Windows desktop going away?

Something mostly proprietary that costs money and is called Windows with be with us for a long time.

But the Windows kernel is counting it’s final days now, while most people haven’t noticed.

The Windows kernel is cool, but it’s a pure cost center and no longer offers anything that Linux doesn’t.

Game developers noticed, this year. I personally, held onto Windows desktop for decades, solely for gaming. I suspect the shift this year will turn out to be a key moment in the spin down of the Windows kernel.

A desktop OS has a ton of moving pieces. We’re currently seeing the natural trend for those pieces to take advantage of existing open solutions.

I predict that we will see more and more of that, until the switching cost reaches the current low cost of switching web browsers.

The farther niche it goes, the less open it has to be, on principle of utility.

That’s a great point! I kind of skipped over, that. Good add, thanks.

who? are you talking to?

Sorry. Movie quote. The Big Labowski. Check it out. It’s fun. For context, the guy that says that line is a blowhard, not to be taken too seriously. (Like me!)

I don’t know what any of these things are but I’m pretty sure they’re not popular social media platforms. If you don’t understand why that matters then you have a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation as it stands.

I understand network effects. All of my examples had large network effects supporting them, in their time.

Seriously. Open standards win. It takes flipping forever sometimes. But they do. Check into the screwdriver thing. It’s a cool read. Or for something more recent, the histories of open and closed web browsers. I think you’ll find it encouraging.

Failed" how? Failed as in people stopped using them? No. Failed as in their profits plummeted? No.

What the actual removed?

I gave several concrete examples whose usage was originally seen as unassailable, and is now easily measured as essentially zero.

Of the examples I listed, only Shockwave still has any publicly recorded examples of actual continued use, because there’s a virtual museum dedicated to preserving it’s memory.

That’s a fine definition of a failed technology.

You’re out of your element, Donny.

Edit: Your other points are essentially that those technologies aren’t at their dominant phase yet. I can agree about that.

If you still need convincing (your clearly do) about open standards, read the history of licensed screwdrivers. Closed standards either die off, or become open ones. There are no exceptions.

Windows and iOS are both notable because, in my expert opinion, both have already missed their window of time when they could have become successful open standards.

Their respective owners actually realize that, as well. IBM Mainframe also missed that window, and there’s history available to read. We are now seeing the same business patterns (as IBM Mainframe) with Windows and iOS.

Incidentally, IBM Mainframe actually doesn’t qualify for my failed technology list, because it’s still holding on. Windows probably has similar staying power to IBM Mainframe (hanging on in zombie death for decades). iOS isn’t lucky enough to live on huge expensive machines that are hard to move, though. It’s not going to be as lucky.

Yep. It often takes quite awhile. And I honestly don’t mind supporting innovators who want to sell something closed but really good.

But as I get older, and watch the pattern over and over, I’m starting to appreciate skipping the cycle by directly adopting the open thing as early as I can.

Yeah, but we’ve been on this stressful ride before, and we know where it ends.

There were lots of attempts at a closed source proprietary Internet protocol. They have all resoundly failed, after looking unbeatable. Some folks still fondly remember the closed Internet protocols like OLE COM, ActiveX, Flash, Cold Fusion, and SilverLight, but few of us miss them. Okay, I do miss Flash games.

Good touchscreen phone operating systems were a “will this ever be matched?” trade secret at Blackberry and Apple. Now the vast majority of phones run open source Android.

Much earlier, most good-enough C compilers were expensive proprietary closed source products. Now I see very little being compiled on anything other than the free and open source GCC. Even most other programming languages and tools are now FOSS, as well. I can’t think of much for development that cracks the top 20 that isn’t FOSS. JetBrains IDEs stand out as a lone closed source hold-out.

Open standards always win, in the end.

The desktop computing default is honestly way overdue to switch to FOSS. That’s why it’s the year of the Linux desktop.

The Fediverse is here to stay, and is all that’ll be left in a couple decades. But in the meantime, it’s cozy!

with debian you are asked to choose the environment: xfce, mate… how troublesome is to change those after installation?

I just install whichever ones look interesting, and pick the one I want to use, today, from the drop down, on the login screen.

Yeah. I finally switched and learned that what I loved about Ubuntu exists in Debian, without the extra nonsense.

My reaction to this delightful update:

Roger, Roger!

Surely, you’re joking?

As much as I appreciate homebrew, I feel better about flatpaks.

I could not defend this position with any articulation, I’ve just had really good experiences setting up flatpaks wherever they’re available.

Hell yeah. Well said.

At the first sign that I’m interacting with someone who avoids people they consider woke, I signal my wokeness in any honest way I can.

I have a lot of room for different people in my social circle, but if my willingness to state my pronouns without blinking bothers someone, they’re too fragile for me to waste time around.

I got through some of it then life got busy. It was a good and interesting experiences. I didn’t finish with a fully functional hand crafted artisinal home desktop, though.