On the other hand I’m very conveniently enjoying my experience, I don’t have to waste time screwing with stuff I have no interest in screwing with - like the OP’s examples, and if I want to run Linux I’ll just install it and do what I want or rent out some compute time somewhere.
Besides, you can buy a Mac and do whatever you want and go buy a bunch of off the shelf components to do whatever hobby stuff you want to do too.
Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
> Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
Nothing wrong with applying limitations to oneself. That's discipline, principles. It's important stuff.
The real problem is accepting the completely made up limitations that others apply on you. Corporation wakes up one day and just decides people can't run more than two virtual machines? That's stupid. Actually defending this with "but convenience" arguments as if convenience was supposed to override freedom? No.
Freedom isn't something you actively work towards. It's something you start with. It's the status quo. Others take it away from you. You can either accept it passively and enjoy the "convenience", or you can resist and go down the harder path. It's very disappointing to see people on Hacker News choose the former path.
You’re just living under the illusion of freedom. You are completely dependent on the decisions of others and their good graces for all of your computing needs, from the silicon to the Linux distro you use. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line a little further to feel like you’re in control, but you’re not.
Silicon? Sure. Billion dollar fabs are huge single points of failure. It's turning into a problem too due to the war on general purpose computing. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it. Linux distro? Not really. It's only a matter of how much effort I want to put into things. I can make my own distro, I can't make my own trillion dollar fab.
Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so it doesn't matter? Don't even bother trying? Just give up? Just accept your lot in life as a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom? I'm pessimistic about the future but even I haven't completely succumbed to such total nihilism yet.
You're trying to assert this big claim about freedom because some users can't I guess run more than 2 VMs on their MacBook Pro. Since we don't care we're not trying, we just gave up, we're serfs even. Well you're still a serf too your bounds of serfdom are just long enough to trick you into believing otherwise.
Who cares? I don't. I can't do anything with open source software either - like I'm going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours figuring our how any given software package works and that's going to somehow make me more free? C'mon. I can't tell Apple no anymore than I can tell someone maintaining a Linux distribution no.
The VM limitation is only for macOS guests, otherwise I can spin up as many VMs as I like, which is no different to doing so in Linux (since it cannot run macOS VMs).
Living as a taxpaying member of society is something that is imposed on us. If we refuse, violent men with guns show up at our doors to arrest us and seize our property. At least we get to try and vote out idiots imposing stupid quotas on the population.
The issue of computer freedom does not even come close to this. None of this is imposed on us. We have the power to choose differently at any time. We can choose not to accept the monopolistic corporation's terms.
