(No longer quoting from the article) I couldn't agree more. One could argue till they're blue in the face that they didn't set out to do this, but if they had, it's unclear to me what they would have done differently.

It seems like we shouldn't even be calling it "personal computing" anymore. It's not personal, and it's hard to call what the user is doing "computing". It's corporate-directed consumption of corporate-produced media. The user figures into the equation only as a "consumer" to be manipulated into doing what the corporations that control "their" device want them to do.

@freakazoid Prime examples: Video game consoles, Amazon Echo and kin, Chromebooks

@kk Those are the worst, but all modern consumer "personal computing" devices are terrible, including a plain ol' desktop computer.

@kk I consider Linux just as bad/culpable, too. In many ways its development tools are less accessible than what you can get from Microsoft cheaply or free, and its communities tend to be more elitist.

@freakazoid Is Linux just as bad though? Maybe in a different way. It seems to be that free software communities have the tools to bring about personal computing, but not the social capital (lack of diversity and inclusiveness, elitism, etc.).

@kk It's bad in different ways. There has been little progress reducing the "jarring divide" between the CLI and GUI in Linux. Bash with its manpages isn't too bad, particularly when combined with Nano, but compare to, say, PowerShell, VB, and Notepad in the Windows world. And good luck writing a GUI app with Bash. In fact, in general it's a fairly big leap from any of the accessible & ubiquitous languages on Linux into writing a GUI app.

@kk In general, all the major platforms seem to treat the command line as a thing for power users, and the need to "drop to the command line" is seen as a failure. But PowerShell seems to be the thing that comes closest to bridging that gap. It's not new or particularly innovative, of course; there was already Rexx, developed at IBM and used as the primary scripting language in AmigaOS and OS/2. But Linux is stuck with Bash.

@kk Note that I'm focusing on defaults that are likely to be available to someone first booting their machine. I'm giving Linux a pass by allowing for the user to actually install it, since otherwise it's not even in the running through no fault of its own. Many distros are easy enough to install these days, and if I thought it was the right answer I'd say we just need to ship devices with preinstalled Linux. In fact if it WERE more usable we'd probably already see that.

@freakazoid Yeah, maybe if the term "Linux" wasn't so strongly associated with "power users" then people might be more interested in trying it. Otherwise, we'll see how long people will tolerate rights violations or at least shady practices from popular proprietary platforms before libre ones *have* to be ready.

@kk @freakazoid

The upside to Linux and FOSS is that it's at least *possible* to change the system yourself.

This is far from optimal but it opens a door that proprietary/closed systems don't allow.