Coming off my previous post, I had a realization: Linux and open source software’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness.
When I first moved to Linux, one of the things I loved was the sheer number of apps and tools available to do almost anything.
And they were free.
It was genuinely fun trying different applications, tweaking them, configuring them to my heart’s content, and finding the tool that worked just right.
That journey introduced me to tools like grep, sed, and tail — tools that eventually became part of my daily life as a software engineer1.
But there’s a downside to having so many options.
We have a lot of software, but sometimes not enough mature software.
You often see the same patterns:
- An application gets started, gains some momentum, and is eventually abandoned before reaching maturity.
- A developer moves on to something else, and instead of an existing application continuing to mature, someone else starts a new application solving the same problem.
And this isn’t a criticism of the developers.
It’s just the nature of open source and libre software. People build things because they’re interested in them. When that interest goes away, they move on.
But I think this creates a real problem.
Some applications don’t need to be reinvented. They need to mature.
Take the GNOME Calendar application.
I’ve never found a calendar app that manages to be mature, feature-rich, performant, and stable at the same time.
They’re usually either:
- Fast and simple, but missing important features.
- Feature-rich, but bloated.
- Powerful, but quirky or unstable.
Sometimes, I don’t want the next big thing.
I just want the same application I’ve been using for five years to get a little better every year. This is where Apple shines, slow intentful, incremental features rolled out over planned releases.
Add the features people actually need. Fix the bugs. Improve performance. Refine the UX.
No reinvention. No rewrite. No shiny new project.
Just maturity.
Sometimes boring is enough.
Boring is good.
Which are also pretty much the main tools that cursor users if you peeked closer.↩︎