Why I left Pine64

The rest of the point aside, is the author is this harsh on Manjaro I must assume they actually aren't that familiar with Garuda. They're a jolly bunch and it looks great but the quality is severely lacking. It can be fun to play around with in a VM for inspiration and snag some snippets to your dotfiles but I wouldn't recommend it for anything mission-critical.

It's a cool experiment to push btrfs as the only root filesystem option but that's also something that's not for everyone.

Android, including AOSP, is not an operating system, because it doesn't enable the user to operate the device. It is a kiosk, because it enables the licensee to use the device, and limits utility to OEM, carrier and Google market requirements and business cases.

> >> It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity

> Why would you expect them to do anything different? Companies are driven by profit, not some sense of morality. OSS licenses allow them, even encourage them, to trade volunteer (aka free) labor in return for source code availability.

Apart from the fact that companies and corporations can act ethically despite driven by profits, I did not say I'm desillusioned with the corporations, but the FOSS community. Essentially it is us as users&developers who let this happen.

> >> which to me seem increasingly more about a way to make a profit of the FOSS trend by using volunteer work without any investment from their end.

> There's often serious investment from their end, but that's irrelevant. They absolutely want to leverage FOSS to make a profit. And that's explicitly allowed by OSS licenses.

Again I don't say that companies shouldn't make a profit, but when OSS started to become more mainstream many (including myself) believed that it would be a way to break the stranglehold of large monopolistic corporations on the software world and create an ecosystem of relatively small software companies that would customise OSS software for specific needs on a relatively even playing field. Instead what happened is that OSS might have accelerated the concentration of the software world, by making small jobs essentially unviable.

Regarding investment, I expect that FANGs still very much come out on top, just imagine what they had to pay in licencing cost for their datacentres if no oss operating systems existed. Also much of these investments are towards use cases with very little benefit for normal users.

> To put it another way, your disillusionment is because of a "bug" on your end, not on theirs. They are behaving exactly as OSS is designed. Your _expectation_ of their behavior is inaccurate, and so does not match reality. Not surpisingly this makes you sad :(

I think you misunderstand me, my disillusionment is with the idea what FOSS could have achieved (and people imagined) but didn't. I sometimes wonder if FOSS has made the world a better place, like many hoped it would. You might not care about it but I do.