Ever driven the same car or used the same camera or power drill for 8-10 years and thought: "I wish all these buttons and levers were suddenly in different places and did different things"?

🐟🐠🐡🐙🦑ptoothfish🦑🐙🐡🐠🐟

Yeah. Me neither.

This is a toot about operating systems.

D2

@ptoothfish - if we did cars like tech does software, folks would have given ‘em up and gone back to walking.

BenjaminKlein

@ptoothfish that is exactly what happened to modern cars...

Stephanie 🎀

@ptoothfish *looks at my pickup truck* I want an AI program to drive this thing into oncoming traffic and stop in an intersection, all while locking me inside and preparing to blow it up! *side eyes Waymo and Tesla*

Soozcat

@ptoothfish THIS. It's a colossal waste of time and productivity to have to relearn everything you had gotten so comfortable with, it was down to muscle memory. But no, some code weenies have to justify their jobs by making everything new and different.

Colin

@ptoothfish @vertigo this reminds me of people who are on 1-3yr auto leases, and phone upgrades every 6-24mo.

There are folks who live in utter chaos at all times with everything changing all the time like it's just normal and ... (yeah I can't fathom it).

Simon 🐮

@ptoothfish @bastardsheep The only constant is change, otherwise people won't buy our stuff!
Sigh

David Croyle

@ptoothfish ^^^ THIS!

Nazo

@ptoothfish I'd say it's a toot about tech in general...

There's making improvements, and then there's just straight up fixing what isn't broken...

💙🩷💜Ⓑⓡⓔⓣⓣ🐡🍉🐧

@ptoothfish@mastodon.nz its not a toot about openbsd or alpine linux tho

Dirty Anarcho-Communist

@cascheranno @ptoothfish I mean, look at what happened when tech bros started making cars... Everything suddenly became a touch screen — and everyone hated it.

rainynight65

@ptoothfish It was bad enough when I had a rental car recently and the indicator was on the other side of the steering wheel, where decades of muscle memory expect the window wipers to be.

Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@ptoothfish My linux setup is still about as close to the 2006 version as you can get, plus an early Mac style dock. If it works...

Tanquist

@ptoothfish
How timely. After weeks of tearing my hair out trying to deal with confusing and non-functonal aspects of the new Outlook, my supervisor asked me why I don't just use Outlook (classic). I replaced my shortcuts today and it's going much better. Windows 11 still sucks, though.

D2

@DirtyAnCom @ptoothfish absolutely! And not just hated; turns out a blind reach for a knob (or, forgive my human-factors fanboying masquerading as nostalgia, a row of 6 fat station buttons) is *safer* than looking away from the road at a touch screen.

Steven Heywood

@ptoothfish
But if they didn't periodically resize the keyboard buttons on touchscreens and round off the corners to minimise the chances of your hitting the letters cleanly there'd be no opportunity for the mandatory AI autofill to tell your doctor you want a repeat prescription for a Palaeozoic armoured fish.

SlightlyCyberpunk

@cascheranno @ptoothfish I mean this is pretty much what I *have* done because have you seen cars these days??? My 2009 Pontiac slowly rots on the street while I walk and bike because I am *not* buying one of these rolling enshittifications.

Benjamin D. Hutchins

@ptoothfish I have in fact thought that about a car, but in that case I started so thinking within a few days of acquiring the car and spent the entire 8 to 10 years continuing to think it.

60sRefugee

@ptoothfish I've imagined a "Twilight Zone"-esque short about a man who every day wakes up in an alternate timeline where everything's almost the same except that all devices have completely different (often absurd) controls which he has to relearn every day. He ends up living in the Canadian wilderness in a log cabin he built himself.

j

@cascheranno @DirtyAnCom @ptoothfish

In principle I like putting big screens in cars. Then one can have a nice large map, and show other relevant information. And also do the "big" settings one usually does once or rarely - while not driving.

But for everything which has to be controlled either regularly while driving or is time critical there has to be an other appropriate (easy, takes practically no attention) way for doing the command.

Wandering Adventure Party

Ever driven the same car or used the same camera or power drill for 8-10 years and thought: "I wish all these buttons and levers were suddenly in different places and did different things"?