The one much more important thing that OSS never did well is managing/making device drivers. I know it's not primarily OSS's fault, but it has made Linux on consumer devices unusable for me and for many others. Unusable or simply non-existant in the case of mobile devices.

And it's a huge shame if you look at the current historical situation, which is, I think, pretty dramatic.

We have a handful of huge, all-knowing corporate gatekeepers taking a ridiculously disproportionate cut of software developers' revenues and restricting what we are allowed to do with our devices.

We are suffering from collective amnesia as to the dangers of the authoritarian surveillance state.

We are struggling with a massive onslaught of organised crime trying to take over our data, our identities, our money and our democracies.

I'm not a computer security expert by any stretch, but it seems pretty clear to me that without controlling the end user device, there is basically no chance of ever being in control of your data.

OSS has failed where it matters most, where it's literally about freedom.

You could argue that it's not OSS that has failed but me not setting the right priorities. I don't deny that, but the choice really shouldn't be that stark.

My girlfriend is far more determined than I am. She does use Linux on her laptop.

But just in the last couple weeks this is what happened:

I had to scan documents for her on my Mac because her scanner driver isn't working properly, creating tiny, grainy images if it works at all.

When I wanted to close the lid on her laptop because we were heading out she shouted "STOP!! I need to switch graphics cards before shutting down or the computer won't boot".

She found her OpenVPN installation to be leaking DNS (again, after fixing it several times).

Her Chrome browser has stopped rendering fonts properly. There are small pixel artifacts, even lines, next to the letters. Before the previous dist-upgrade that wasn't the case but none of the point upgrades since then has fixed the problem (we know what causes this but the fix is tedious to apply and Firefox is working).

Her laptop is running hot. This has always been the case but when the nvidia card is active the heat goes through the roof (hence the constant manual graphics driver switching).

Many days have gone into trying to fix some of these things and some fixes have worked, temporarily, until the next dist-upgrade.

I just can't take this, so I'm withdrawing silently and a bit ashamed into my Apple walled garden.