I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

Unfortunately there isn’t one easy source that I’ve found. This is based on reading the stuff you linked to, as well as discourse/matrix discussions linked to from those sources. I compare it mentally to Guido van Rossum as BDFL of Python (though not any longer). He did a much better job of communicating expectations, like here

It made some people unhappy that there was no Python 2.8, but everybody knew what was happening. The core Python team also wasn’t surprised by that announcement, unlike with stuff like Anduril or flakes for the nix devs.

There was also a failure to communicate with stuff like the PR that would switch to Meson. The PR author should have known if Eelco broadly agreed with it before opening it. If there was a process that the PR author just ignored, the PR should have been closed with “Follow this process and try again”. That process can be as simple as “See if Eelco likes it”, since he was BDFL, but the process needs to be very clear to everyone.

Exactly, thanks. “politicking” != US political issues

My take on it is that the creator of Nix was very good technically but was not a good BDFL, and that was the root of the problem. He didn’t do a good job of politicking, stepped down, and now Nix is going through a bit of interregnum. I don’t think it’s likely to fail overall though, nixpkgs is too valuable of a resource to just get abandoned. I expect the board seats will be filled by people that know how to politick, and things will continue on after that.

Lessons learned is being a BDFL is hard. IMO Eelco Dolstra failed because he had opinions about things like Anduril sponsorship and flakes, and didn’t just declare “This is the way things are going to be, take it or leave it”. People got really pissed off because there wasn’t a clear message or transparency, which resulted in lots of guessing.

They won’t open source snaps because they want to control the snap ecosystem to make money off of it for an IPO

That’s an interesting comment from a guy that used to work for Canonical, and then went anti-snap pretty hard, to the point that he made this:

https://github.com/popey/unsnap

Thanks for the list. It’d be interesting to see something like the Are We X Yet sites for Mozilla/Rust projects that tracks this sort of thing

Not sure if this my app or a Lemmy setting, but I only see it once, because it’s properly cross-posted

That’s not really the same thing. It’s also bad, but the producers aren’t shipping that themselves, the NSA modifies it the devices after shipment. That’s in some ways worse, since installing Linux yourself won’t help against adversarial firmware/hardware.

What do you mean by NSA spyware? Anything that I can think of along those lines isn’t really the same thing as what Lenovo did.

You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.

This seems really short-sighted. Why would I go to How Stuff Works when I can just ask the LLM myself?

Maybe there’s just no possible business model for them anymore with the advent of LLMs, but at least if they focused on the “actually written by humans!” angle there’d be some hook to draw people in.