This is indeed the way. In my personal life I’m like 50-75% there: I run Linux on my primary computer, use Firefox and LibreWolf, self-host as much as possible, etc. But you’re right about the duopoly (triopoly, if that’s a word? If you consider MS, Google, and Apple as being the main gatekeepers to the average person’s technical experiences). As much as open-source and privacy-respecting alternatives have gotten vastly more accessible over the last decade or so, it still almost always requires effort and at least some technical knowledge on the part of the user. Sometimes at the end of the day I just want to chill out, so I pick my battles and approach this as a long-term, gradual process.

To your last point I’ll even admit that I’m part of the problem. In addition to some other roles I run IT for the small business I’ve worked for over the last decade+. About a year and a half ago the owners decided to retire and my family pooled our money to buy the business (a bunch of us had worked there a long time). Newly promoted to treasurer, I had the keys to the castle and could have used this as an opportunity to push for a paradigm switch in our IT to Linux. I didn’t though, because with all the other moving parts and major financial risks we were taking, it would have just been one more source of friction in an already -stressful time.

So, instead, I doubled down on the MS tax and moved us to MS365. The thing is, though, outside of two Windows-only apps (only one of which is mission-critical) 90% of what my users do is all browser-based and they probably wouldn’t even notice a difference in their OS. But, a) I didn’t want to waste the political capital when I had other priorities I wanted to push for with the new owners, and b) again - sticking with the status quo is just easier in the short term. The thought of teaching a new OS to a dozen non-technical admins and salespeople was just too much at a time when I was scrambling to make sure we could pay our bills. As the old adage goes, “no one gets fired for buying IBM.”

What makes this even more ridiculous is that, in part due to my lack of super-in-depth Windows admin knowledge, I ended up setting up a co-management agreement with an IT provider so I had a fallback option when my other duties kept me from responding to IT issues myself. The really crazy part, looking back, is that I regularly run into way more weird bugs on my Windows 11 work laptop than I do on my goddamn Arch desktop. Perhaps if I’d have just pushed for this back then, I’d have saved the company thousands of dollars in subscription fees - money which could have instead been spent on my main priority of raising wages. But, alas, the tech establishment is really good at marketing themselves as a turnkey solution (which really isn’t true).

Anyway, thank you all for coming to my Ted Talk.