Proprietary, closed user experiences are like microwave home dinners. There’s every reason to hope they can be good, it is very common for them to be crap, and while its possible to hack your own microwave meals you will be doing so in a sub optimal environment with limited options.

An open, modular, diverse UX is like having a stocked kitchen of staples, pans, tools, fresh produce, and a stove. You add a toaster oven, smoker, water bath, grow a kitchen garden of your own, find local butchers and fishmongers. Over time you build up a small collection of both your own and others’ recipes and books and articles on food theory and trends. You can also have a microwave of course, but you’ll use it in many different ways than before.

It’s harder work but so is walking instead of driving or reading instead of watching TV. It can seem irritatingly virtuous to some that you put this extra effort into your daily life but they’ll be swayed when they see you serve up a ZFS snapshot to temporarily test an edit over 20GB of data, or pop up a new niri workspace to track and purchase concert tickets, or dive into editing your journal in a custom distraction free mode you put together showing only your editor and this week’s GPS logs.

You aren’t making everything from scratch, but you do make a few ingredients yourself — pickles and bread in the kitchen and scripts and local web hacks on your computer — and you certainly have complete control over the finished product in a way that simply isn’t possible with a microwave and a boxed lasagna, or a copy of Windows 11.

You don’t even have to cook! You can have pre-made microwave meals with a Linux desktop. They still taste better because they were made with love by a global network of friends and family instead of by Nestlé, Kraft, and Heinz.