[dasil003]

I was very careful in the way I worded my argument to avoid this strawman rebuttal (see the part about computing elites).

Of course you are right that we should rise to the challenge of shipping excellent free software, but experience tells me that it doesn't matter how good we get at this, we will still be undone by the transient nature of software stacks. Patches will be necessary unless people never upgrade, which of course they will because sooner or later they will desire new features or it's necessitated by security. At best we can asymptotically approach the amortized cost of having someone else manage your software for you, and even that is dreamland until free OSes finds a way to approach the UX provided by Apple/Microsoft/Google.

You're welcome to devote your life to proving me wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.