Speaking as one of the less-technically inclined HN users all I know is Linux has never been easier to install for even the slightly motivated and while there are lots of gaps, you really can run a lot of key tasks on FOSS without much fuss.
If someone wants to “break free” of Mac/Windows and regain some semblance of privacy and control, it’s never been easier. Not easy, to be clear. But compared to when I was in college (late 2000’s) it’s sooooo much easier.
Yeah to be clear I’d never say it’s “easy” and ready for mass adoption. But I also had 0 issues getting bazzite going on my PC I built with an AMD 9800x3d/9070 working out the gate. I played expedition 33 the day I finished building! Kind of remarkable given the GPU was only a month or two old. What’s striking was that I never had to open a terminal window or install a single driver. Some of the distros are near-turnkey at this point.
I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us.
To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?
Do vendors give you schematics for boards they make or RTL for asics? Where do you draw the line as to what is expected? From a hardware vendors perspective, firmware they give you which is locked down is simply an extension of the hardware that enables them to more cheaply iterate on it. Not a feature for customers to use to arbitrarily modify and add complexity to the test matrix and technical support for the vendor. Vendors who give away full configurability tend to see their costs rise rather than fall.
On installing Linux, I think it always has been relatively easy to do on previous generation hardware.
20 years ago if you didn't care about decent laptops, you'd easily find a mid-level desktop tower and it would mostly work. You'd be in pain if you wanted the best GPU or best hardware, but mid-tier stuff would work fine.
Nowadays you can get Linux very easily on ThinkPads or a mid-tier business laptop for instance. Or Framework. But it will be PITA on a Surface Pro, or the best Asus laptop.
I'm with you in that the market has matured so much mid-tier is now viable enough for most office or everyday life, trying to get top hardware isn't really needed. But there's still definitely a gap if your use case spills out in a more demanding area (games, VR, CAD etc.)