[bachmeier]

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.

[mjr00]

> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.

I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.

To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.

[Aurornis]

> and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet

Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.

[wilsonnb3]

To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.

[raincole]

> he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.

It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.

[AyyEye]

> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before

100% of the people I have spoken with, from uber drivers to grandparents, have all noticed, hated, and are sympathetic to the fight against the rental/subscription economy. In 2025 I don't think I've had a single person defend the status quo because they all know what's coming.

[freeopinion]

I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.

This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.

Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".

[Aurornis]

> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering

Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.

Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.

The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.

[mrstackdump]

I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...

[pluralmonad]

You are right. Most will never care. I think of it like, lets try to keep the lights on for the folks that inevitably get burned and need an escape hatch. Many will not, but always some will. At least that's my way of not being a techno-nihilist.

[graemep]

The same with multiple people I know. Its not perfect, but neither is Windows.

> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.

[buran77]

> They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.

The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.

Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.

[mrstackdump]

> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.

Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.

[Terretta]

>> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

Define "our".

Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances.

So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers.

Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen.

Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing.

Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so.