RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
I get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
It is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby
script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So
I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a
screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully
understood why python or ruby are useful.
Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond.
All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...
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 that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.
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.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘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.'
Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
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.
It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.
He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
Indeed. In fact, only recently the Fedora KDE version was elevated to "Edition" status and is now on the same tier as the Gnome version.
Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
No worries. I started using Fedora around the 4-5 timeframe and am still using it 40 editions later -- time flies. To my memory, it's always been GNOME-first.
Which is weird, I've compiled and ran custom kernels and modules on debian before fedora 1.0 iso was announced on freenode/#fedora and it wasn't even good.
Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.
Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.
Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.
It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.
But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal.
Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
Take about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands.
Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.
Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."
From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa>
Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM
Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher
in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all
CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...).
Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't
win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon
last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man
at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types
discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident
came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something
about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were
also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat
about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates
are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them
off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort
of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong
people with this move!
Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole
be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention
to such people.
Milo
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit
he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed
WM. Or is that OSX?
I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such
as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are
too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that
only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it
is one less thing I can use anyway.)
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
I don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.
Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
I get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
It is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully understood why python or ruby are useful.
He's just a contrarian wanker. Of course he knows how to take a screenshot. He just absolutely has to tell you that he uses text mode.
I bet he knows how to make a Lisp Machine screenshot.
I bet he knows how but still won't
On the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!
"I don't know how to make a screenshot"
Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
He’s…something.
The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond.
All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
Wild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
Same for me, until I got to Bram.
Man that hits hard
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
Most screenshots for these well known guys are quite boring. Coincidence? I think if you want to be good at something you need focus.
I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...
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.
> He said some decent things about software freedom
Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.
Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.
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.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘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.'
See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.
[delayed]
Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc
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.
Linus Torvalds currently uses Fedora with GNOME, which was fun to learn because that's also been my personal choice for a while now.
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )
It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.
He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
He explained that in the linked video - Fedora makes it easy for him to test custom kernel builds.
Oh I didn't know Gnome was the official flavour now, last time I paid attention it was still KDE
It's been a long, long time. I think Red Hat 8/9 (from 2002-2003) had a default KDE build. Even in Fedora Core 1 Gnome was default.
Now, there's a separate build to download for KDE. It's likely because Gnome is default install for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation.
I don't think it's ever been KDE.
Indeed. In fact, only recently the Fedora KDE version was elevated to "Edition" status and is now on the same tier as the Gnome version.
Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
I've been very pleased with KDE on Fedora for the past ~five years.
It seems you're right, and now I'm wondering how I ever thought otherwise...
No worries. I started using Fedora around the 4-5 timeframe and am still using it 40 editions later -- time flies. To my memory, it's always been GNOME-first.
He seems to switch every half-decade or so. Waiting for his next KDE era :-)
He said also because fedora seemed the most amenable to running custom kernels which is basically what he does all day.
Which is weird, I've compiled and ran custom kernels and modules on debian before fedora 1.0 iso was announced on freenode/#fedora and it wasn't even good.
Ok have you considered things may have changed in the 40+ releases since then?
Yeah mine too (but using Silverblue).
After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.
I echo this. My desktop has stayed virtually unchanged for decades, and in retrospect, it explains why I use the Sway tiling window manager today.
Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
Hah, If you ask my partner, I've been looking at the same screen for years and years
What are you echoing?
Mostly tiling WMs and terminals
Old macOS has got so much soul. I missed all those years since I started working with it back when Sierra was around, clearly not the same.
If you want a macOS/OS X release with soul, check out Snow Leopard.
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?
Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]
[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif
[2] https://www.fvwm.org/
[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg
The one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.
So I can't just use it by itself. E.g. I use i3wm, would those work together? Sorry if it's a stupid question.
No. It's FVWM-specific.
common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.
Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.
Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.
It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.
But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal.
Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
Take about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands.
Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
It’s funny. I thought the same thing before taking the time to become familiar with VIM keybindings and now I find VS Code tedious and painfully slow.
I guess once one gets used to it or anything it’s going to be more productive than the rest of the tools.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722536
the last one with XMonad is the only one that looks even remotely good to me in compared to what we have today
Haha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!
Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.
Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed WM. Or is that OSX?
I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)
Out of curiosity, why's xorg a blocker for you?
I'd give anything to see their 2025 desktops.