Emily

Also, while the applications I use can be installed on other platforms, they’re only supported on Ubuntu.

I’m pretty happy using Ubuntu. Its got a decent UI and works well enough with little fuss. As much as I enjoy tinkering, I use my Ubuntu machines for work and I really only need something simple that works out of the box.

One job I was fired from and rehired within the day, after they quickly realised that I was their only Android developer and they couldn’t build an app with just hopes and wishes. They fired me again later, which they quickly regretted since I was the only one with the signing key (meaning they couldn’t update the app).

Companies are always going to make shitty changes, but that doesn’t change the reality that industry leaders are usually in that position for a reason. You simply cannot replace After Effects without kneecapping yourself. GIMP is nowhere near as capable as Photoshop. It is impossible to develop iOS apps without Xcode, and difficult/unsupported to develop Android without Android Studio.

You can piss off your high horse as much as you want, but it is fantastical to claim that professions should hamstring their work and sacrifice reality and practicality for the sake of some ideology belief. Companies aren’t choosing these standards because they love giving away money, they’re doing it because they recognise that rejecting a $300 annual expense for $10,000 worth of greater productivity is financially irresponsible.

Ah, the James Damore archetype of an engineer. I bet they get wet dreams imagining themselves as the Howard Roark of programming (and just as delusional).

It’s worth noting that Australian and American interpretations of liberalism differ quite significantly. The modern Liberal party and its predecessors formed in direct opposition to the Labor party, in direct opposition to the labor movement. They formed as a party against radical social change, against socialism, and for free-market policies and laissez faire capitalism, describing themselves as “classical liberals”. On the other hand, “liberalism” in the US more refers to social liberalism, but it’s actually the exception in that regard.

All that is to say that, when Australians refer to someone as a liberal, we mean a different interpretation of the word closer to classical liberalism.