My understanding is that Mathematica is truly free on Pi; Raspberry doesn’t pay Wolfram and it does not increase end user price.
If you want examples of a walled garden, look at MacOS/iOS, Android (kind of), and arguably even the Linuxes (question of practicality).
Windows is also not a walled garden but to a lesser degree than Linux. It is far harder to get a "standard" build environment up for windows simply because Microsoft refuses to distribute the UCRT (or VSRedist) build libraries in a form that doesn't require manually digging through installer internals or setting up Visual Studio. It can be done for free & legally but it's a significant pain in the ass. Regardless of how annoying it is, there is no financial/legal barrier to building software for windows and you can trivially install 3rd party software or even execute it without installing.
Android I somewhat agree is a walled garden in practice (certain features are limited to gApp/play store apps only and setting up 3rd party play stores or apps is annoying) but by the simple fact that you can build apps for android or install them without any financial or legal barriers, it can't realistically be called a walled garden (maybe a hedge maze might be more accurate).
MacOS isn't entirely a walled garden despite getting pretty close (kinda like a worse dev/install experience from windows + *nix).
iOS however is 100% a walled garden.
Point being that out of every OS you mentioned, exactly 1 of them qualifies and the rest do not (despite having anti-user/anti-competitive practices)
By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.
Speaking of insane mind acrobatics, it’s like you’re arguing a parody of windows you read on slashdot twenty years ago and have never encountered it at all.
Kind of like old zen parable about how to control cows, give them a wide comfortable pasture and then they behave, and never question the fence in the distance.
lxd init # choose defaults except use "dir" for disk
lxc launch ubuntu:22.04 my-ubuntu # or any other distro
lxc exec my-ubuntu -- bash
Linux is far less of a walled garden in principle. And it seems a lot of people are assuming "walled garden" is a statement from developers perspective (no cost license or difficulty in developing for platform).
I think what you're saying though is that your choices and options are far easier and wider with windows as a regular user, than with Linux, and if so I see your point. I've been working with Unix at work happily for 25 years now, day in and out in the cli, yet I've always bounced trying Linux on desktop. It feels like a limited, difficult, thorny garden for most regular windows users :)
Calling the inherent difficulty of things a “walled garden” removes any meaning from the term. I’m bad at picking up human languages, I don’t know lots of programming languages, I don’t know anything about overland navigation, I’m bad on MacOS and I’ve never used an Amiga, so is most of the world a walled garden?
A walled garden isn't just about developer lock-in driven by financial incentives. As far as the end-user goes, if the choices provided outside of the garden are wholly impractical it might as well be walled in practice even if it's not in theory/principle.
Let's imagine for a minute that using Open Source or FOSS also implies feeding back into the ecosystem. "Normal users" should be feeding back into the ecosystem somehow which then implies some form of understanding of that ecosystem. It can be bug reports (which requires understanding enough to post a coherent bug report), bug fixes (which requires knowing a little more), project leadership (which requires a different skillset and perhaps technical knowledge), monetary contributions (which makes the software less "free")
My argument is, "Open Source doesn't get you past tanstaafl." The work to use it still needs to be done by someone. If you want to be a user of it and the thing you want to do isn't on the already-paved/easy-path then you need to get someone to pave that path for you or you need to understand how to do it yourself. That's the nature of the beast and has nothing to do with being a "walled garden."
Maybe we have been working with different packages or distros?
That’s not my experience with using third party repos and building third-party software from source on Linux. Heck, much of the time that I use Linux is fit software where I need to do the latter and it isn’t practical on Windows.
Your argument would be equivalent to me claiming that the closed source nature of the average Windows software makes the software itself a walled garden. Except in the case of a Linux distro you are entirely free to modify it in any way you want.
The fact that more things work out of the box without much effort and with a GUI on Windows does not make Linux distros walled gardens.
And pretending that Windows allows you to install and uninstall things at will without any side effects is just naive and makes me wonder if you've ever actually used Windows that much. I've had more problems with broken windows installations due to incompatibilities between different versions of Microsoft development tools and frameworks than I have ever had dealing with issues with building and installing software on Linux distributions.
Windows and Linux are just forests or farms, or however you want to expand the analogy. That somebody hasn’t cut a path for you doesn’t make them a walled garden. Different paths have been cut for each operating system, and people familiar with the particular paths on those systems will have an easier time navigating the terrain. But nobody has constructed a wall. A forest is “functionally” walled off only to the extent to which the person doesn’t know how to navigate. This is not a property of the system but the user.
A regular user wouldn’t even understand the things you just said let alone how to do them.
Disabling telemetry also seems like a wildly different problem that I’m not even sure regular users would care about.
I always giggle when someone says "regular" users use a GNU/Linux-Distro ;)
make && make install?
For all but the most trivial of software this step is likely to fail, and often fail big and cryptically. Then you get to figure out what packages to install from your distro's repos to fix all these errors. It's even more fun when that dependency was never packaged for your distro, because then you get to install that dependency from source and repeat this entire process.
Oh, and I hope there's never a security update for any software you install from outside of the repos, because you'll never remember to update it until you need a newer version for some other reason.
In my experience, the vast majority of the time the installation instructions list the necessary packages for at least Debian-style and Redhat-style distros. Build instructions for Windows tend to be much worse. though if the software supports Windows at all, you are slightly more likely to have an installer or at least precompiled binary because build tooling availability and build experience is so much worse on Windows.
[1] https://kolbi.cz/blog/2017/10/25/setuserfta-userchoice-hash-...
So putting protections in place to try and prevent that is ultimately a boon for most users.
It seems to be as easy as installing a driver and then... installing the apps in the distro. That makes it even easier than Wine IMO.
To me, it seemed perfectly reasonable to call it the Windows equivalent to Wine but :shrug:
The only thing walled off is the source code but nobody is referring to that.
I think people are associating walled garden with closed source. This is not a consistent association because there is one operating system that is, in actuality, a true walled garden where the term fits:
iOS is a walled garden.
The characterization of the term here is entirely different from windows or Linux.
Thus the parent is also correct about his point. If you use a Linux distro exclusively with a package manager. It is effectively as if you are in a walled garden. It is just like using the app store on macos exclusively.
Ooof. HN never ceases to amaze me.