[deaux]

"Technical" isn't really what I meant in the first place. It's about convenience/UX. Lots of OSS has been technically great but very lacking in that part, understandably.

The prime recent example of this is gamers. I've seen many people say a version of this: "I tried Linux before but it was too complicated/didn't run most games/when I ran into something I had no idea how to solve it, so I just went straight back to Windows. Now I installed Bazzite cause I was fed up with Win11 and I'm super happy with it. If I do run into a problem I just ask AI and it solves it".

I've genuinely seen dozens of comments similar to this. The fact is that there needs to be a very convenient and user-friendly alternative ready to go for the moment that some people do start to care. You need both just as much as each other. And until very recently, those alternatives didn't exist, not at the level of convenience required.

[buran77]

For me "technical" meant relating to the technology (tool, product, interface, ecosystem, etc.) rather than the person.

[deaux]

Fair enough. Then as I said, the technical part has been a huge barrier because it has prevented the majority of those who do care from migrating. That changing is really nice, and I'm convinced it's partially behind the acceleration of Google and friends taking over the internet with attestation and such as this post is about.

Just doing a casual search will show you so many people migrating off of managed SaaS to self-hosted solutions and from closed source platforms to OSS ones over the last 12 month, the acceleration is massive and it's due to the combination of LLM themselves and the quality of these things going up. Just 3 years ago it was still very niche, common on HN but near unheard of outside of it. A lot of people who always wanted to do it but just didn't have the time. The SaaS stocks getting crushed isn't just all vibes, there's a real move behind it.