>No, sorry. I agree that appealing to computer illiterate users is detrimental when taken too far, but I do not think this is an excuse to deny the general population encouragement to free themselves.

We agree on this. My point wasn't that bringing more people will be bad, it was that if you bring more people in the current state, it will be bad.

>When they enshittify it as they've already been doing, it will be harder for the RedHat/Microsoft cult to maintain an iron grip like what Windows allows.

Red Hat is already almost the only reason why Linux desktop is currently even working, but also almost the only reason why it sucks. When you look at almost any major project, they are maintaining it or involved in it. GCC is maintained mostly by Red Hat, glibc's maintainer is from Red Hat, Red Hat is also involved in iconv and coreutils. And that's just GNU projects. You then look at FreeDesktop projects and it's even more Red Hat. Mesa is quite a lot of Red Hat along with GPU companies, NetworkManager is almost exclusively Red Hat, GNOME is heavily sponsored by Red Hat. Point is, IBM can decide to kill Linux at any moment, if they wish to via Red Hat as a proxy. They are already the only absolute foundation of the whole "ecosystem".

But they are also by proxy the reason why Linux sucks. Wayland always was heavily pushed by Red Hat along with it's stupid sandboxing, portals and all that other crap that never works properly. Flatpak is heavily pushed by GNOME, ie. Red Hat.

>Just look at what happened to XOrg. Still not dead, infact people are more vocally against Wayland's creeping now than ever.

And those people are at the whims of Wayland devs. Any time some lunatic can decide to delete X11 support from mesa and it's not like anyone from the small community will be able to maintain that. Any time GNOME devs can decide that the next GTK version will be Wayland only and you aren't maintaining that heap of garbage either.

>The correct response is to bring new users over but inform them of the better options they have, that individual choice does not have to be scary and user friendliness does not mean mimicking a cell phone.

Do you know what the only correct way to convert someone to Linux is?

1. Be a normie
2. Only use a word processor and a web browser
3. Have someone that can be tech support at all times
4. Have someone deep into Linux install and configure Mint for you
5. Never, ever, visit any Linux-related forum or ask for help online

Also on the point of user-friendliness and why things worked better 10-15 years ago. 10 years ago, a user had an operating system, one package manager, one theme, one way to install applications. Today a user has to think about Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages, their OS package manager; whether they use PulseAudio or Pipewire (both break in different ways at random); whether they are using Wayland or not (Wayland is still broken in unique ways); whether they are running apps sandboxed without knowing, eg. Flatpaks/Snaps (apps randomly break, files the user wants to interact with aren't always visible due to sandboxing, apps don't usually respect system theme at all,...); what even is a portal and why doesn't it work,...