I find this attitude a bit misguided. There's never been as much availability in open computing as there is today. These are good times. A Raspberry pi running linux is miles and planets above what I could have imagined when I was a kid. And people somehow still pick an appliance explicitly designed to be closed (for a good reason) as an example of something. I don't get it.
There is a universe of difference between "availability" and "acceptability," and to presume that you can just pick open over closed for day-to-day tasks is oversimplifying things greatly.
To perhaps put it somewhat dramatically, the world outside of geekdom increasingly does not consider open computing to be acceptable; It is growing downright hostile.
I use Linux as my main operating system and it consistently gets harder to do over time as I interact with others in work and life; and there is no good technical reason (e.g. proprietary superiority) for this to be the case.
Surprised to see this feeling about Linux? For me it's never been easier to be a Linux user. More hardware works without configuration. I remember spending hours if not days tinkering in in Xorg.conf just to get a video card and monitor working together. A working camera and microphone used to be a pipe dream. There's more software than ever and it works better than ever. We have at least two major web browsers that are well supported. OK LibreOffice still isn't the equal of Word and Excel but it's better than ever, and now there's Google Docs, or other cloud alternatives that all work.
Not at at all what I meant; I 100% agree that for most "solo" activities, Linux is just fine; I'd argue better than the alternatives.
But (except for gaming, thanks Proton!) a lot of the "strongly interconnected" stuff is indifferent or hostile to Linux, especially the more air-quotes "professional" (perhaps I should say "corporate?") it is. I'm in academia, so I'm thinking about a lot of these LMS type tools (many of which are terrible anyway, but sometimes we have to use them.) Also stuff like Adobe, etc.
But there is more Linux support there than ever before too.
When I first started using Linux it wasn't uncommon for websites to demand you use ActiveX for example!
The only place where we're losing ground is in mobiles. There we really see the downside of proprietary monopolies like WhatsApp, etc. being able to decide where and how you can access the service.
We're in agreement here for sure -- my only issue is that the "proprietary monopoly" problem is far far greater than suggesting it's "merely mobiles" (which itself would be enough of an issue) Even if you don't see them now, they spring up FAST.
If you get to work inside your own silo, that's great, I try my damnedest to do the same thing;e.g. I've deliberately not learned Windows 10 precisely so I can really "walk the walk" in terms of showing people around me how bad I think it is.
But e.g. Covid challenges that way of doing things HARD. I work in higher-ed and also have young kids doing remote learning, and I can't just stand my ground when this tool or that tool pops up, either because of my career or because while I don't mind being a slight jerk to people around me about my tech choices, I won't/can't do so to these teachers who are trying their hardest.
That's a really optimistic view. Try to plug in a new nVidia card when you're running Wayland and see what happens. Also, benchmark an AMD GPU and wonder where the performance you're paying for went.
LibreOffice is a big monolithic disaster eating about 10x more RAM and CPU than the Microsoft alternative it's been designed to replace. Seems like nobody likes to compete with a free office to create something better.
If you buy Windows/Mac there is not even a question if the camera and microphone work. Also, games work often without tweaking and you won't be fiddling with settings when plugging in an external screen everytime.
100% agreed. I had a Palm OS PDA back when I was young, and while there was a healthy community of app developers, most of that was shareware, and the OS was pretty closed down. The IDE to develop for it was prohibitively expensive for me as a high school student.
Today, I can run full Linux distributions on both iOS and Android, interface with USB and Bluetooth devices via open APIs on Android, get a Raspberry Pi for less than the price of a full-price video game...
I'm certain that there are high school students out there doing just that and much more that I'm not even aware is possible. Many of them are sharing their progress on YouTube.
There's many things I worry about – the accessibility of computing and hacking is definitely not one of them.
The Raspberry Pi is a terrible example of "open computing". As well as the usual Broadcom close-source binary blob drivers, you also have a proprietary operating system running underneath Linux (ThreadX, now owned by Microsoft).
An interesting development/build environment going forward might be some sort of small form factor computer (i.e. Intel NUC, RPi4) running Ubuntu (possibly even Ubuntu Server on a multicore NUC). And then use a locked down, proprietary, ultra light Mac M1/Windows/Chromebook laptop to connect to the dev machine via SSH over local networking/USB networking - basically simulating the cloud development experience, just locally. It probably has the side benefit of making the transition from local development to production deployment look a lot more similar.
