I've seen (and also not understood) the use of Slack/Gitter/etc. but the "not running Linux" part is a surprise to me, personally.
I've used Linux or BSD on all of my personal machines for a long time, and assumed, wrongly I guess, that most other people were in the same boat. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it's interesting.
Agreed, I've been using desktop Linux on my home laptop for more than a decade now. Every piece of software I want, wireless printers, videogames (many AAA!), everything just works.
I'm puzzled. I think it was just the unfortunate rise of mobile.
In my experience, using Linux until even recently had some rough edges, which I personally was ready to deal with. I suppose some don't want to do it. But I've always seen not doing it as not modeling our values, same way the article suggests, so it was an obvious choice for me, despite the learning curve.
That's partly because Linux is so hard to run. I bought an xps 13 because it is supposed to have official Ubuntu support and I still get weird errors on start-up, and crashes sometimes when I plug 2 external monitors in.
That doesn't fit reality. For example, Apple are avoiding and even banning GPL, preferring BSD. And they are one of the worst anti-FOSS values examples (due to extreme lock-in, patent aggression and so on).
GPL is about user freedom. You're talking about someone else's freedom; not user freedom. GPL doesn't say 'you can't make money on this software' or even 'you can't do evil things with this software'. It just says you can't take away other people's freedom to use the software under the same terms.
So Apple are pretty much anti-freedom, since they for example don't like competing browsers (which are FOSS) and they don't allow them in their store. They also don't like people installing something they don't control, so they try to forbid it with DRM and other junk. The whole idea of lock-in is anti-freedom, since it reduces choice.
Preventing others from reducing choice is the epitome of anti-freedom. With freedom, you have to take the bad with the good, and trust in humanity that the good will outweigh the bad.
> Preventing others from reducing choice is the epitome of anti-freedom.
That's a fallacy of the same sort as party slogans from Nineteen Eighty-Four, just reversed. There they said "Freedom is slavery". What you are saying is "Tyranny is freedom" (since tyrants should be free to oppress). That's simply bunk. Tyranny is not freedom.
I've used Linux or BSD on all of my personal machines for a long time, and assumed, wrongly I guess, that most other people were in the same boat. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it's interesting.