Comment by agoodusername63
Comment by agoodusername63 21 hours ago
It sounds to me like the biggest problem are the users.
There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
I really don’t know how you’re going to change that. I don’t think anybody can at this point now that Google and Microsoft are having extremely successful trial runs with fully managed systems.
> There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.
It's often beyond just sacrificing "any sort of convenience" - but rather "it's effectively impossible for someone who's not at least a compentent IT hobbyist to install this software".
> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.
You need to change the culture in free/open software. The current goal seems to be something like "as long as it works, and I can install it --no matter how convoluted or unreliable that process is-- then that's good enough". Mainstream users don't want to use the shell, or have to search internet forums for solutions, or use Docker, or whatever.
If you genuinely want FOSS to win, the goal should be to be better than the commercial alternatives: easier to install, more reliable, better more intuitive UIs, smaller, faster, more features, whatever.