Apple has locked me in the same cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Well at least Google Docs works just fine on Linux, I use it all the time, so I don't think that alone would be a deterrent to switch to Linux.

I don't work in law or accounting, and I can only speak to my own experiences, but I have generally thought that LibreOffice Writer is fine. Even back when it was OpenOffice, I edited and formatted a weekly newsletter in high school with it, and it never really bothered me. I admittedly don't use it a lot now, I'm one of those irritating LaTeX people. I've heard that OnlyOffice is better, but I haven't used it yet.

I definitely agree that LibreOffice Calc is considerably worse than Excel though. It works ok most of the time, but even the free online version of Excel is generally better.

I think that Krita is pretty competitive though. I don't work in art but I've talked to people who do and they've said Krita is pretty ok, and at least one person uses it for paid work. There's also Blender, which is (I think) being used for "real" movies now?

I would agree with you if computing devices were trivial aesthetic devices, instead of central to a lot of what we do.

I would agree with you if 1000 vendors of versatile computing tools put out 10,000 products with all kinds of uncorrelated options.

I would agree with you if even one vendor put out high-end quality, safe but ungated, customizable products for all form factors. (Safe out of the box, but all safeguards opt-out enabled.)

But neither wonderful extreme exists. Unfortunately, not even scaled down, bad caricatures, in a dark room, if you spend a mint, versions of that reality exist.

Instead, due to increasingly locked down devices, we are all left making tradeoffs we wish we didn’t have to make.

And not because guardrail opt-outs would be hard or costly to provide, but because manufacturers work hard to eliminate technically trivial opt-outs, or even any hero level effort opt-ours, and tell us they are doing this — for us!?!?

“We want you to be safe.” I don’t want to be safe. “No, we want you to be safe.” Help, let me out! “No, we want you to be safe.” Can my family and friends at least visit me? “No, not those family and friends. Would you like to see our menu of family and friend options? We want you to be safe.”

If each of us only chose devices on one dimension, it is likely everyone could find a product they like. But we choose devices to balance many concerns, and the artificially inflexible offerings can feel bleak. Because they are! (Both artificial & bleak).

This is essentially the reason open source software exists. Providing ungated alternatives - enabling self-serve specialization by customization - and keeping closed/gated software on its toes. But the real economic conundrums of open source are nothing compared to the *practical* economic conundrums of open hardware. And increasingly, wide appeal operating systems are low-level integrated with hardware defenses - for good reasons. But without opt-outs.

You got to be kidding.

Linux is great for developer, that's all.

Everyone else is confused about it.

I've been using Linux for a good 25 years. In that time, I've gone from having to tinker endlessly to get things working in a basic manner on a desktop machine, to running on a laptop with essentially no tinkering, and fewer issues cropping up than most of my Windows- and macOS-using friends complain about.

Sure, if you require a piece of software that can't run on Linux, then you're stuck wherever you are. Otherwise? ::shrug::

>they're not designed to work that way.

It would be more accurate to say that they are designed not to work that way. In modern times, every limited-purpose internet-connected gadget is actually a general-purpose computer that has been deliberately crippled.

The reason you can't run arbitrary software on "your" iPad is because they have locked it down so Apple owns the hardware, not you.