And the GNU/linuxers respond: "Then go FOSS yourself and fork it."
It already is allowing Rust...
As far as the commenter, the GNU bit is still relevant. But you should normally call the distribution its name. SteamOS is not quite as much GNU as Debian.
The demographics of programming languages choosen/picked up by new generations of foss developers.
With GNU/linuxer i meant the stereotypical stubborn people resisting change not a specific distro.
I guess there will be non-technical frictions between rust and C in the linux project for as long as the GNU/linuxers exist. And like the OP, it can be seen as a matter of accessibility.
Internalizing the plight of someone with different needs and life circumstances (and this is not just about different abilities, such as sight) is how you actually support, work on, and provide more freedom to others. Took me a while to check my own privilege, but I believe I'm a better person for it.
The blogger wants to outsource living his life to other people, the commenter is getting hung up on pedantry too much to communicate what he actually wants to.
If requirements for being in such lucrative markets loosen up, I'm willing to bet accessibility in Apple/Microsoft offerings will get defunded and rot away.
Of course you can question Red Hat and Canonical for not doing enough in the space, but truth be told, the grassroot open source efforts to make everything in open source more accessible amount to afterthoughts at best. How many GUI toolkit have appeared recently? How many of them are accessible? How many terminal applications gain TrueColor support and draw fancy stuff in the terminal? How many of them are of any use to someone who can't see your efforts in repurposing Unicode symbols to draw pictures in the console?
It’s probably the nicest thing about the company, and it stands out even more in the last ten or twenty years as the company becomes more and more scummy and despicable. It’s deep down and was established back when it was run by humans with deep empathy.
So much accessibility that:
You need to use gestures to access critical functions.
Half of screen readers cannot be connected to their hardware.
You cannot easily get someone to write a driver for exotic input hardware.
There's no zoom feature in the OS.
Recently many UIs just break with big scale factors.
Keyboard support is lacking altogether in some bits of the UI.
Information is hidden and alpears at random.
Not to say Windows or Linux is free of it or better. The platforms are bad in different ways.
macOS absolutely has a zoom feature. I use it regularly, it's bound to ctrl + mouse scroll for me.
More: https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mchl779716b8/...
I feel like we should be able to strive for things to be better while also appreciating what has been done so far.
Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.
I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.
joshka•2h ago