When it comes to hardware issues, older hardware I can understand as you have
no choice about what machine you have. Newer hardware at least can be checked
before purchasing, sites such as https://www.h-node.org/ are a great starting
point in figuring out what is compatible with a wholey free OS. I know that
when I get a new machine in a few years time that I will be checking all the
components out to ensure compatibility.
I do agree that most people do not know of their freedoms and do use
computers merely as tools but that is one of the issues. Education or at
least making people aware of the issues is the first big step. When ever I
have told people about free software I do not expect them to instantly jump
on board and love it, to be fair when you haven't been introducted to the
concept before it does come off extreme and almost nutty.
But all I ask for is that every time you are held back by another agreement
you are forced to "agree to", a format doesn't work and product is missing a
feature and needs the users to beg the developers for these aditions - I hope
those who are aware of the issues will at least be reminded that it doesn't
have to be this way. I mean companies now have entire services setup just to
have customers beg for features in a almost survivor gameshow like situation,
https://www.uservoice.com/ is a perfect example of this.
It has been said before, Free software is not a perfect solution but it is
easily the best we have.
Yes modifying software is out of the question for most people but at least it
is much more viable to be modifiable by those that can. It is much more
likely that the problems will be solved if there are 100 part time
programmers working on something than 10 paid programmers who are not
obligated to even bother with requests. The best part of free software is
that the programmers that make it are also the users.
It also isn't enitrely about just the code, documentation, art work,
promotion is all in the hands of the users - it is power rebalanced for
everyone. I'm forced to run Windows 7/8 at my work place and the amount of
issues that come up in astouningly bad. Both in enterprise and customer
software that simply cannot be fixed because the big companies hold all the
keys to even the simplest things. A simple example, the audio play back on a
2014 Windows Phone is significantly worst than the portable media player
running Rockbox from ThinkPenguin. I have seen many people using a
uservoice.com thing begging for this to be fixed, it is a sad situation to
observe.
I hope you do come back someday and I do appreciate the frustration but jsut
remmeber it is always getting better on this side of the fence. :)
