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by anirudh24seven 3583 days ago
Personally, I think there are only 2 advantages (over something more polished like OS X):

i. Doomsday scenario: Competing platforms do something awful like direct spying on users, making it unaffordable/inaccessible or generally taking terrible, permanent decisions. Then, a free/open source OS will become The only feasible option. The counter point to this is, competition ensures very few companies will take that route.

ii. Learning & contributing: As a developer, I can understand and improve any part of the stack. Counter point: This doesn't address non-developers, who are a majority in today's world.
1 comments
JupiterMoon 3583 days ago
Regarding point 1 didn't MS take that route already with Windows 10?
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anirudh24seven 3583 days ago
I think yes. But I'm not sure if non-technical people understand the implications. They'll probably take it more seriously if Windows-collecting-data has a direct impact on their lives. For example, if their browsing history gets posted on their social networks, or something like that.
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Sylos 3583 days ago
There's one point where it already affects non-technical users: HIPAA-compliance or any form of legal agreement to not disclose information.

It's currently not clear whether it's legal to even run Windows 10 Home/Pro, if you have such obligations, as even the best privacy that Microsoft allows, is still sending something to Microsoft and no one knows what it's sending.

This becomes even more fun when you consider that in order to be HIPAA-compliant, you have to always keep your software up-to-date. That means you have to upgrade from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 and therefore can't just stick to a previous version to be legally safe.

For bigger health-care institutes, Windows 10 Enterprise might be an option here in order to not risk a lawsuit, but for a simple doctor who'd only need one or two licenses, that's not a viable option either. Maybe we'll see an organization of doctors for buying Windows 10 Enterprise License Volumes together and then sharing the licenses, but if not, they would all have to migrate to OSX or Linux.

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