But if OSes are being locked down and software has trouble distributing security updates through official repositories for Windows... that's a good reason to finally make the switch. Same as why my family is on Android: I can install f-droid, disable the google store, and don't have to worry about them installing malware / spyware / adware
There's different degrees of openness. Android till 2026 was an acceptable compromise (let's see how it goed forwards). Windows is also on the decline with their account policy, not sure about this certificate revocation thing (thankfully haven't had to deal with it yet; I'm not a user myself) but it sounds like they're moving to a walled garden also
When the degree changes and gets even less open, yeah you can say "well of course, they were never truly open, they're commercial" but it's still a change and might lead people to alter their choices
One day for sure though. They're slowly all getting old and asking more of me. Maybe when the current hardware generation needs replacing I'll give it a stab. Indeed, they need very little beyond a browser, Thunderbird (just because they're used to a local email client), a PDF reader (Evince/PdfJS have way fewer buttons and clutter and pop-ups than the Adobe crap), and some WYSIWYG editor compatible with the old doc(x) format (like Libreoffice). The time where local stores shipped photo-album-designer software are probably long gone, though I should double check beforehand
Like none. Literally the best office you MIGHT KIND OF be able to run in 2016, but probably more like 2013.
Valve focused on games, that is awesome and really helpful…
But there are 10,000 distros and instead of putting real resources to put even rickety bridges over MS’s moat, no sorry, this team is making duplication-of-effort distro 10,001 which is now identical to thousands of others but the taskbar is in the middle of screen.
The people working on Linux are consistently uninterested in then things people would need to drop windows.
Why the hell would you want that? Office365 is a buggy piece of nightmare.
Hold your nose and work on WINE if you need to think that way. But MS has moats, and office is one of the widest.
LibreOffice also has bad UI choices and glitches.
It’s not like we’re talking VLC vs OS Media Player here.
You can stomp your feet, but the world uses Exchange and Office and not for no reasons at all.
Age Verification is the thin end of a much bigger wedge in "open" OS's
I really believe most "open source" big projects have been compromised long ago. We have saw all those "Foundations" taking them over with all their governance, bureaucracy and goal which do not make any sense at the first look.
One example is Fedora, which is part of "The Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0], "a multi-stakeholder initiative that accelerates the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods."
The Digital Public Goods Alliance has about every governments as member plus all the usual suspects: Gate Foundation and co.
All the leaderships have usually no background or experience in open source or even computers but are just magically placed there. But you can't say anything because they are mostly women.
You read the goals and roadmaps of those foundations and find out it has nothing to do with software or open source. It is basically there to control those projects and then have them implement all the age verification, digital id, etc.
So yes this is not a surprise all those projects are now all in absurd features such as age verification.
I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong on this, but experience tells me that is not likely to happen.
Right now, if a handful of tech companies crater they'll take the whole world's financial systems out with them, so the government could easily be made complicit in any scheme they can conceive of to bolster their finances.
This is a little like the joke: "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 million dollars?", to which she replies "I would". "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 dollar?", to which she replies, "Sir, what sort of woman do you think I am?" To which he replies "We have already established what sort of woman you are, now we are just trying to establish your price!"
By agreeing to this initial Age Verification, companies are establishing that they are willing to implement checks on age for their users, now we will see just how much more they are willing to do - all to protect the children of course.
If you, as a parent, make yourself open to this attack, you will find that you are making us less free of a society by expecting others to parent for you.
If you oppose the law to force liquor stores to deny service to minors, but people are still upset about minors getting alcohol, you have no right to be surprised when the next proposal is to ban alcohol for everyone, and you have no right to be surprised if it passes.