I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.
The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.
This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn’t want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.
Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don’t care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.
Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00’s when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.
Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.
Consumers in general don’t care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don’t even care about the few “choices” that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less
Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don’t agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.
I don’t have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won’t ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.
I am happy with a few percent market share. I don’t need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.
We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming “mainstream,” it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.
