spoiler
I am personally against gatekeeping anything Including linux , but young naive me from 6 years ago felt this way, and I wanted to see if opinions had changed from back then
I asked this same question 6 years ago on Reddit just wanted to see if general opinion has changed now as Linux has arguably gotten way more mainstream
Edit: Progress meant 3rd party hardware and software support, innovation etc. I decided to rerun this question because of the new discourse surrounding LLM use in the kernel; the pretext being a smaller community would have easily taken a binary decision regarding the matter, for better or worse
by boxes I just mean, linux computers for those who just use a browser to go on the internet. Those users, they don’t have to adopt the Linux philosophy.
But for people who are actively coming to linux, I wish they would come with an appreciation for the ethos of FOSS.
I’m flattered you think I have something of value to say, but what I’ve learned in life is that you can’t convince people of anything unless they want to be convinced. And ego plays a big role in that.
If you go and even imply to someone, “you’re using computers wrong,” or “there is a better way,” depending on their relationship with you, their ego will kick in: what is this guy talking about, I’ve been using computers for x years and I have it do everything I want it to. Just nod along
I adopted Linux on my home PC about 12 years ago, but I could never get the “Linux box” in a state where I could replace my wife’s until Win11 came out. At the time, I noticed a lot of improvements that allowed a seamless transition and I was finally able to replace her Win10 install with a KDE setup. She barely noticed the difference. The only real challenge was her migration from Outlook to Thunderbird.
But I think the reality is that, apart from Linux enthusiasts, no one really cares for using FOSS or not. Most simply want their PC to work and not be a nuisance. And it seems that more and more, that is the case for Linux.