this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lol. Dear consumers, please switch over to Linux :)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

A vision of the future if everyone is using Linux: to access service X you must use Linux distribution Y by company Z. Lockin achieved, commence the tracking and data harvesting.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Ok then, to the Linux fork I go...or whatever non-corporate OS replaces it as the standard FOSS.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't matter what fork you use. Only the one by company Z is allowed.

I don't understand why people can't see that. It's what we have now. They're are sites and services that won't work unless you use a specific OS already. You guys give corporations too much credit if you think it won't happen if only Linux is left, or at least the dominant OS.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In order for that to make sense for a company, there must be one dominant distribution or their software must be the truly one and only for that purpose. Otherwise they just loose market shares to other companies willing to serve all distributions.

It is possible in principle and of course the MBA bros will try to pull stunts like this. It will be much more difficult to execute successfully though and it will be much easier to challenge from an anti-trust aspect.

Everyone running a linux distro won't be a fairytale land, but it is still a huge step into the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Exactly.

The more likely scenario is that companies will force you to use flatpak or something, since that way they can containerize everything to be the same across distributions. If you look at the Steam surveys, SteamOS is the standout distribution, but that's only about 25% of users, and it's due to the Steam Deck's appeal. The next is Arch Linux (nobody would consider forcing users to use that), and the one after that is flatpak. Steam arguably only officially supports Ubuntu, and that's <10% or so of users.

So yeah, there's no way everyone switches to a single distro in the short term, and new users don't seem to overly prefer one over another (I see lots of new users switching to Fedora, Debian, and Mint, whereas in the past it was mostly Ubuntu).

So yeah, bring it companies. Force me to you flatpak you little devils. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Well just end up back here begging consumers to please use specific, non-corporate distribution forks of Linux rather than just Linux in general.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Seems easy to do, just ask everyone to boot a new Linux install when they want to use some service.

/s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Just like some colleges require you to boot into Windows to take tests? What's so hard to grasp? People like me who care about choice are not part of the general public who doesn't care. They just want to use service X. Anything that doesn't work with service X is "bad".