Imagine if these power brokers didn't exist and a whole generation of children grew up on Linux rather than Mac/PC. Huge opportunity cost for society in my opinion.
I myself didn't really consider how I could use code to speed up mundane tasks until I was forced to copy files over from an embedded Linux system over bash. The introduction from "open up a terminal, and type these commands in, which does these things" to "now just put those commands in a file called script.sh and type ./script.sh, and it will do the thing automatically" was eye-opening, at 22 years old. Looking back, it's the exact same problem that resulted in a company I used to work for doing 100s of GB of data processing in Excel, because writing Excel macros was more accessible than writing a bash script to append two .csv files.
I think a lot of kids would probably really be attracted to it as well. Linux gives you control over your computing environment, in a world where children rarely have any autonomy. I don't think every one of them needs to grow up to be a professional developer, but computer literacy seems like a hugely valuable skill.
To me, it really comes down to empowerment of others. If you are not taught how the world works from first principles (in this case the world of computing), then you are forever relegated to live in someone else's world and live within their paradigm of thinking. In this case, the only justification is market capture for these Enterprises, which hasn't materially advanced society and societal issues as far as I can tell.
I mean, Linux specifically isn't really necessary for this. Back in the early-mid 00s, OS X got me into terminal usage and "real" programming via its free (as in beer), full-octane bundled dev tools and included Ruby installation.
In fact, at the point that I got into these things with OS X, I had already tinkered with a Linux variant (Yellow Dog) and had given up before getting too far because I didn't have the knowhow to make the OS as a whole work properly, and worse, the internet resources needed to fill this knowledge gap didn't make themselves obvious.
Yeah, this was over 15 years ago. Yellow Dog was basically Red Hat PowerPC edition, so imagine Red Hat circa 2002.
Things have certainly gotten easier since then though, no question.
I think it’s unfair hitting the Mac on this front though. Automator is an incredibly easy to use desktop automation tool, and of course you’ve got Bash, Ruby and Python right there just the same as on Linux. They have also invested heavily in work flow automation tooling for iOS.
I don’t understand this comment. What are you expecting Apple, Microsoft to do? They’re not charities, they make competing OS’s for profit. Why would anyone be waiting for them to bring Linux?
Since they're the ones who required NT-on-ARM device vendors to disable user control of secure boot, yes it is their job.
I believe this is both in line with free-market enterprise as well as core values such as individual liberty and property ownership. Anti-competitive and predatory practices should not be justified by people such as yourself under the guise of "competing for profit".
A similar thing happened with the city of Munich trying to convert their systems to Linux. The workers complained that OpenOffice/LibreOffice didn't work like their (most probably illegal) copies of Word and Excel at home and thus they couldn't work with it. When that didn't help, they complained about "missing software" and other strange reasons about why they absolutely couldn't work with Linux. So they rolled back to Windows and Office and started sending our tax money to Microsoft again. [1] (Also Microsoft promised to move their German HQ to Munich to bring wealth into town. But that's toooootally unrelated.)
At least, they're trying again... [2]
Point is, as long as 90% of all jobs and schools have you work in Windows, why should people start buying Linux PCs for themselves?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
Although that's less "Linux as a viable OS" and more "Google Chrome as a viable OS".
However, I don't think selling such machines to the general public will happen soon, because there's not much of a market for it. Most users hate it when the interface of a single application changes; switching operating systems is probably a non-starter.
There’s nothing whatsoever preventing the FOSS community coming up with better solutions, if they are capable of doing so, and taking away their main competitors doesn’t seem like a good way to incentivise competitive improvement. In fact we’ve been told repeatedly and often by FOSS advocates that open will inevitably beat closed anyway.
On the back end yes this has come to pass, but mainly because big corporations like AT&T, Intel and IBM have invested hundreds of millions, probably billions in Linux. Microsoft and Apple have also invested hundreds of millions, probably billions at this point, in their desktop platforms. The independent hacker community just can’t come close to that level of disciplined, organised, focused investment of effort.
Linux on ARM is another case in point. It takes a big company with huge resources like Google to get it done in a coherent, usable way.
We need to stop thinking about companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft as obstacles. They aren’t stopping the FOSS community from doing anything. They’re just bringing their own contributions to the table. Take Apple out of the picture and OSX, iOS and M1 Macs wouldn’t exist and FOSS would be exactly where it is now anyway.
In a lot of cases it makes money and people prefer it, but that doesn't equate to being good or being good for society.
If they want to get into programming and computer science then absolutely. But for the 98% of other walks of life I would give them a Mac so that the OS part of their day disappears into the background.
It's a bit like saying that people who use Android phones use Linux. Sure, the kernel may be Linux, but they don't use the desktop Linux that everyone refers to when they use the word "Linux" (bar a few exceptions)
Most game engines are supporting the metal api, or use vulkanVK as an abstraction layer.
Have you considered implementing an office full of linux desktops? With a team of designers? Product Engineers? Salespeople on the road constantly? I'd imagine if macOS has no benefits at all, IT managers everywhere would be switching to linux desktops. Why do you think this hasn't happened? especially since linux has no disadvantage compared to macOS?
You mean Mac/Windows, I think? Because PC surely can run Linux.