Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds… Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.
But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.
Arguably Torvalds’ strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.
I’ve said this before here, but techy people vastly overestimate both the ability and the patience of the typical user, and it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.
Products from big tech aimed at private individuals are designed to be as simple to use as possible, which is why they’re so popular.
Big tech designing their products to be overly simple is one of the driving forces behind the average user having poor patience and aptitude for tech.
Barf. Or maybe, just maybe, we have other shit to do rather than spend hours trying to figure out how to do one thing in Gimp. It’s great that YOU’RE passionate about tech. Some of us have other hobbies. Imagine that holy shit
You should not expect to use a tool (edit: competently) without spending time learning how to use it. Photoshop has a learning curve too, even if it’s an easier one.
But, also, who thinks Photoshop is easier‽
As someone who’d learned Photoshop and, eventually, learned GIMP (just because it was easier to run after eventually switching to Linux), trying to argue that Photoshop has an industry stranglehold because it – apparently – is just so much more intuitive than GIMP is absolutely wild. No one I knew learning Photoshop was finding that the UI or layout just magically clicked (or even swiftly got less impenetrable, as time went on).
