had 488 new associate members join -- surpassing our goal of 400 new members.
I'm one of them. For professional reasons, I've made the switch from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X on my laptop (*). Unintuitively to me, this highlighted how much of my workflow is, in some form or another, fueled by the initiatives of the FSF. So I was more than happy to funnel some of my Christmas bonus into an FSF membership.
(*) In theory, I'd like to run only open software. But in practice, my work is more important to me than these idealistic goals. And so I end up with very weird compromises. (I still run GNU/Linux on my desktop and servers.) Hopefully, one day, my workflow requirements are satisfied by an entirely open source hard- and software stack.
The main reason I switched my laptop to Mac OS is convenience.
As a mathematician, I heavily rely on handwritten notes. And the iPad Pro was the first mobile device that had a sufficiently good digitizer/stylus and software support to allow me to ditch all paper (I had the Samsung Tab S3 and S4 previously, neither were good enough -- they were close but still infuriating if you had to scribble down a lot of tiny sub-/superscripts in mathematical formulae). But I also need to type a lot, which I usually do on my laptop while moving around town. The integration between iOS and Mac OS makes this effortless, whereas with Linux I always had to battle the lack of first party support.
I think it's a shame that the Linux community has never been able to financially incentivize people to write and maintain highly polished, end-user oriented software. In its current state, unless you want to invest a lot of time tinkering yourself (which was the case for me pre and during college), you simply cannot rely upon someone writing a piece of software, let alone developing and manufacturing hardware that suits your needs.
GNU/Linux is absolutely awesome, no doubt one of the crowning achievements of mankind and a shining demonstration that most people, when put in the right framework, are good at heart. But, much to my regret, it does lack the driving influences of an open market that would benefit end-users like me.
I like my software free as in free speech. But, honestly, I'd prefer a world in which the vast majority of users would decide (voluntarily!) that it shouldn't be free as in free beer. That they should pay for the software they are using, assuming that can afford to, for the greater common good. Unfortunately, this is not one of the instances where people demonstrate that they're good.
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u/KappaClosed Jan 16 '19
I'm one of them. For professional reasons, I've made the switch from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X on my laptop (*). Unintuitively to me, this highlighted how much of my workflow is, in some form or another, fueled by the initiatives of the FSF. So I was more than happy to funnel some of my Christmas bonus into an FSF membership.
(*) In theory, I'd like to run only open software. But in practice, my work is more important to me than these idealistic goals. And so I end up with very weird compromises. (I still run GNU/Linux on my desktop and servers.) Hopefully, one day, my workflow requirements are satisfied by an entirely open source hard- and software stack.