Re: windows 7 EOL opportunity for linux?
Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2018 7:51 pm
I'm not really sure why I'm about to post this response. I think it has as much to do with trying to get my mind off of personal matters vexing my thoughts today as it has to do with the topic at hand. Nevertheless, I'll try to shepherd together some coherent thoughts for you to contemplate.
Because of how society raises people, which I hope folks here take to mean people are raised to be incurious, ethically and intellectually compromised, and above all to use ideology to process the events of their lives and the events surrounding their lives, it should come as no surprise that people generally are not tech enthusiasts (certainly in the classical sense as people such as myself have always been) and most people don't want to have to stop and think about things. They just want stuff to work, and they don't really care what goes on behind the scenes. Whether it's political machinations, or incompetence in software design giving rise to exploit hunter/exploiters, or sweatshop labor making the clothes that they wear or phone that they talk on, it's all different sides of the same coin.
People are raised — whether deliberately and with malice of forethought, through incompetence of sloppy thinking, or some combination of both — to just accept the world around them at face value and not rock the boat. If you grab the average person on the street and ask them why they accept Microsoft's incompetence and the exploitation-based malware, constant breaking of system stability, or whatever else, that average person will just shrug their shoulders and indicate, through some sort of mindset and corresponding choice of words, that "that's just how it is" and "yes, it's awful, but what can anybody really do about it?" and as I've said above, if you're up against that kind of mindset, you've already lost the debate, and whatever educational opportunity/teachable moment you might have had has now evaporated.
I don't see IBM, Google, or anybody else giving a d**n what desktop OS their customers use. I don't see them as having a vested interest, in that sense, in GNU+Linux. Besides, they're too busy trying to not lose customers to each other, or to a sea of other competitors, to try and moralize in the marketplace about the virtues of libre licensed, peer reviewable and community contributable open source code-based operating systems and programs. Besides, any such moralizing is effectively meaningless or, even worse, entirely hypocritical, if they didn't take a high ground and say their stuff will only work in GNU+Linux. Even in the food business, on the whole, restaurants would never try and tell customers you may only eat "healthy" food from them because they know they'd lose their customers, by and large, to any competitor which continued to sell less healthy (or even completely unhealthy) food which everyone was familiar with.
Incidentally, this is often the reason that government regulation and only government regulation can be a viable option, because then it forces everyone to play by the same rules, and gives them all the excuse that "Hey, it's not our choice."
What has to happen here if we, the GNU+Linux-using community, actually want to change the world and bring everyone around to our way of thinking, is to have a full, drop-in replacement platform ecosystem which is worth marketing, and a marketing campaign to push it. Oh, yeah, and we're going to need to have hardware vendors actually sell distro-equipped hardware. Again, people think of computers as appliances. Either the appliance ships with GNU+Linux, or it doesn't. Either the thing does what they want it to do and runs the software they want to run or are told they need to run, or it doesn't.
Because of how society raises people, which I hope folks here take to mean people are raised to be incurious, ethically and intellectually compromised, and above all to use ideology to process the events of their lives and the events surrounding their lives, it should come as no surprise that people generally are not tech enthusiasts (certainly in the classical sense as people such as myself have always been) and most people don't want to have to stop and think about things. They just want stuff to work, and they don't really care what goes on behind the scenes. Whether it's political machinations, or incompetence in software design giving rise to exploit hunter/exploiters, or sweatshop labor making the clothes that they wear or phone that they talk on, it's all different sides of the same coin.
People are raised — whether deliberately and with malice of forethought, through incompetence of sloppy thinking, or some combination of both — to just accept the world around them at face value and not rock the boat. If you grab the average person on the street and ask them why they accept Microsoft's incompetence and the exploitation-based malware, constant breaking of system stability, or whatever else, that average person will just shrug their shoulders and indicate, through some sort of mindset and corresponding choice of words, that "that's just how it is" and "yes, it's awful, but what can anybody really do about it?" and as I've said above, if you're up against that kind of mindset, you've already lost the debate, and whatever educational opportunity/teachable moment you might have had has now evaporated.
I don't see IBM, Google, or anybody else giving a d**n what desktop OS their customers use. I don't see them as having a vested interest, in that sense, in GNU+Linux. Besides, they're too busy trying to not lose customers to each other, or to a sea of other competitors, to try and moralize in the marketplace about the virtues of libre licensed, peer reviewable and community contributable open source code-based operating systems and programs. Besides, any such moralizing is effectively meaningless or, even worse, entirely hypocritical, if they didn't take a high ground and say their stuff will only work in GNU+Linux. Even in the food business, on the whole, restaurants would never try and tell customers you may only eat "healthy" food from them because they know they'd lose their customers, by and large, to any competitor which continued to sell less healthy (or even completely unhealthy) food which everyone was familiar with.
Incidentally, this is often the reason that government regulation and only government regulation can be a viable option, because then it forces everyone to play by the same rules, and gives them all the excuse that "Hey, it's not our choice."
What has to happen here if we, the GNU+Linux-using community, actually want to change the world and bring everyone around to our way of thinking, is to have a full, drop-in replacement platform ecosystem which is worth marketing, and a marketing campaign to push it. Oh, yeah, and we're going to need to have hardware vendors actually sell distro-equipped hardware. Again, people think of computers as appliances. Either the appliance ships with GNU+Linux, or it doesn't. Either the thing does what they want it to do and runs the software they want to run or are told they need to run, or it doesn't.
Let them stick to Windows! 
