Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.
Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.
But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.
Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.
But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.
But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.
We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
Under OpenBSD as the settngs are pretty much the same over releases, you can use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.if almost forever. That's it, upgrade and forget.
Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.
Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that
My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!
Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.
I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.
It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
Often I find that apps have features only because I see others using the application.
Make me do anything on applications banking/government/delivery-related and I have to ask family members.
I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.
I'm not like that on the abstract level.
I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.
It's not just IT-related.
I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
The background?
xsetroot -solid gray20
I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.