@jwcph @joe_vinegar Yeah, most people in my circumstances would have simply gotten a new Windows or Mac computer and I'd argue that's actually the reasonable thing for them to do. Many people *have* to have a Windows or Mac computer for work--I use a Windows computer myself for brief but critical work tasks even though I stay in my Linux setup as much as possible.

And this effective duopoly of commercial OSes gets serious because without effective competition/consumer oversight this overbearing market position becomes a means to exploit consumers, like Windows increasingly becoming becoming a wrapper for Copilot or both platforms leveraging their dominance to pressure users into buying cloud services. And this is just on desktop, I'm not even getting into the smartphone or other devices situation because ugh headache.

These practices are not going to get better unless more robust regulatory checks are made, because there's no money in someone buying a Windows or Mac computer and then using it for the next 10, 15 years. Users "have" to be turned into paying subscribers or milked for data for more profits. Linux is the biggest OS that doesn't do that, and as things currently stand is effectively unavailable to most users. Much as with the fediverse, some of the most privileged and savviest users can get excellent service and privacy but the bulk of users are left to fend for themselves and that's not acceptable to me.

Individual solutions that rely on individual privilege can't be systematic solutions that benefit everyone, hence the tl; dr: The solution is regulation of the commercial OSes and possibly hardware manufacturers, not just people switching to Linux. I wouldn't say no to better public support & funding of Linux, either.

@joe_vinegar @jwcph the question of how well I was supported by Apple is answerable by the fact that my Macbook Air is now an Archbook Air circa 2020 and Catalina, iirc, the Mac OS updates got too heavy for my 2015 Air so I said "fuck it" and made the move to Linux rather than buy a new computer. I even got a DisplayLink external monitor supported, and made a contribution to the Arch Wiki when I started having issues with monitor support and discovered a driver issue by digging around. It's really an amazing community and effort and I was happy to contribute my time & effort. I've donated to Arch development, too, though nowhere nearly as much as they deserve.

@jwcph my sympathies! A lot of things on Linux either "just work" like magic or turn out to be a tangle of intractable issues (generally not on its end, but that doesn't matter on the user end) that take outsize effort to debug with little hope of the effort being rewarded. That can actually be a feature for people with the time, inclination, and skills to go chasing down rabbit holes in search of a solution, but for the rest of us who just want things to work and don't have a bunch of spare computers to experiment and cobble with, just the one machine we have to earn a living on, it's a non-starter.

(For anyone inclined to rebut, I say this as someone who happily runs a 2015 model Macbook Air on Linux, Arch btw, as my daily driver. I love the experience and desktop usability for Linux has come a long way, but it's definitely not for everyone.)