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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

> The only benefits people tend to tout are intangibles like freedom and control

Which most users don't even understand: "What do you mean I don't have freedom if I use Mac/Windows? So what if you can change the source code, I'm not a programmer"

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Need to frame it correctly, monetary and safety, for example. "You have to buy a new PC when Microsoft decides to not update your Windows anymore and make the new version incompatible with your current PC. If you don't, your PC will be vulnerable to criminal hackers. With freedom and control you control the schedule, otherwise Microsoft does."

Normal people don’t care. That’s why there are still people running 7 or 8 and MS has been trying to convince them for a decade to upgrade, even giving 10 and 11 away.

“If you give up everything you were used to and learn something completely new that may not be quite as good for you as what you have and no one you know can help you with then in five years you might not be forced to do the thing you weren’t going to do anyway!” is not a winning argument.

You have to argue things that help them, NOW. If arguments about what’s better in the future worked everyone would have much much bigger savings accounts.

The one place they do seem to care a little is on Chromebooks, but perhaps that's because Google has been utterly shameless in many cases, turning those into paperweights after only 1-2 years. When it doesn't even last through the 4 years of high school they're issued for, it's starting to become bothersome.

If it beaks too fast that sticks in people memory. “I just bought this! What a piece of crap. I’m going back to Dell”. That will kill sales.

I had no idea chromebooks were like that.

Chromebooks receive 8 years of updates, 10 years for models released after 2021.

Funny you should bring up that argument. I had a media PC that was running Linux, and it worked great. Then there was big security vulnerability discovered in I think the SSL implementation, and I needed to update the OS because it was connected to the internet.

Except, the new version of the OS included a new version of the kernel. This version of the kernel had a long standing bug that prevented the kernel booting on my CPU/motherboard combination.

I ended up switching to Windows which just continued to work, and be updated, for years until I replaced the computer with an Intel NUC. Which I also couldn't install Linux on because there was no driver support.

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