@mgaruccio @atomicpoet The author did mention Android so she's not completely unaware. Her point is more about Linux not making that much headway on desktop PCs which is at least true. I think it's pretty difficult to try to say it can't work out for Mastodon because it didn't work in that case.

I do think the average person has not shown all that much concern for interoperability or openness when choosing which tools to use on their computer historically.

@73ms @atomicpoet except that’s also not true. About as many chromebooks shipped as macs last year, and no1 is saying macOS is “limited to a few hobbyists”.

Average users don’t care about openness in and of itself. But they do care about better moderation, choice of apps, and whatever the next awesome thing to ship is, which are enabled by the openness. Just like Chromebook’s and raspberry pi’s are enabled by Linux’s openness.

@73ms @mgaruccio In other words, Linux on the desktop is a big success. It's a success on servers, desktops, mobile—everywhere. In fact, it's the most successful OS of all time.

You can say it doesn't save users from megacorporations, but that's not its mission.

Not once in the GPL does it say, "no megacorporations allowed".

@atomicpoet @mgaruccio Well, like I said counting Chromebooks doesn't fundamentally change the picture. They may be somewhat successful but they certainly have not taken over the market.

A more important point is that just like I would not consider a popular Mastodon instance that does not federate and is run by Google to be a win for the fediverse, I don't really consider Android or Chromebooks to be that for Linux either. Chromebooks pretty much killed the cheap Linux laptop.

@73ms @mgaruccio Chromebooks never killed anything.

Before they came out, most people installed Linux themselves using a CD or USB stick. Which is what people still do.

If you want a pre-installed Linux, you can get it from Dell, Lenovo, or System76.

Again, Linux was never about "no megacorporations".

You're literally making that up.

@atomicpoet @mgaruccio Anecdotal, but back when Chromebooks were not really a thing I was able to buy low-end laptops with some variety (usually Ubuntu) of a Linux distro preinstalled and supported from a variety of vendors like HP, Dell, Acer. Their disappearance from the market seems to have coincided with Chromebooks appearing.

It seemed similar to how Linux found a footing on netbooks at first but then Microsoft worked to make Windows the only option.