https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends

(Yes, what came after was so much better. But it still would've been cool to hang around that era for a bit)

I did encounter an upside-down one yesterday. That was... counterproductive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.

The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.

- The OSS Faithful, who mostly ignored it and didn't count it toward "The Year of the Linux Desktop" - The normal folks, who use it without knowing anything about the underlying Linux baseline

This distinction is baked into the design of the OSS movement. The goal is to build usable computing that doesn't depend on a corporation (though alliances may be made at times when incentives align), and any corporate encroachment is fairly seen as antagonistic to those goals.

All that being said, none of this really serves Microsoft. They have a fantastic OS kernel and hardware support already (even if they throw crappy UX on top of it), and their chief differentiator is their long tradition of backwards compatibility. This locks enterprises and users into their ecosystem, and pushing a Linux distro would only give customers an opening to look elsewhere.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535664

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

There's already a precedent for massive backlash whenever Canonical or Red Hat build something proprietary or upstream a change that favors their business goals instead of the larger community. Given Microsoft's well-documented "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" approach to open competition, no one would trust them.

It's another incomplete clone of the Tiger-era macOS user interface.

I miss that generation of user interfaces too. But it's nearly a trope that every desktop environment project claiming to be "elegant" is really just copying peak Apple (including the cursive "hello" with various translations).