> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? I work with a lot of purists who run Linux on their desktops. I can tot

> What missing elements do you see in free software that we should be trying to patch? I work with a lot of purists who run Linux on their desktops. I can totally relate, and I have a lot admiration for how they have their principles and are willing to put in the work to uphold them. I frequently find myself in video conferences where someone can't get their audio to work, and, predictably, it's always one of those guys. I can equally-well relate to the frustration they must be feeling when that happens, and I remember it well from when I ran Linux on the desktop. I installed my first Linux on desktop when I was 12 years old (that's 25 years ago) and even developed some OSS for it a few years after that. I used Linux on desktop as a daily driver for work-related stuff ca 2005 - 2012 when I was an academic. And I do periodically try out new distros like elementary OS and so forth. I've been running Linux Mint on a laptop I use for trying out nonessential things. (It recently had to give way to QubesOS). The purist in me has always been at war with the pragmatist in me. When OS X and later WSL came out and gave you the option of running a Linux-like userland on top of a commercial-grade desktop, this established a truce. The obvious thing for me to do was to use OS X or Windows, and then install whatever software I wanted with no regard to whether it was open source or not, as long as the price tag was worth it for me. A price of zero for open source frequently leads to a great cost/benefit ratio, but with some things like InDesign, the price tag is just worth it for me for the functionality. And when things fall short of the standard of "it just works" then the true cost can quickly skyrocket, and I've often found this to be the case for open source. With regard to the software that I most deeply care about because it's most immediately connected to the software that I myself develop, it has always been clear that I wanted to stick with Linux and OSS. But we're talking terminal-stuff here, not GUIs, since I'm a software engineer who deals mostly with data and pure abstraction (like math, NLP, etc). It seems like recently the industry has turned a corner that is upsetting that truce. OS X and Windows, in terms of the corporate politics behind them, have just become too bad to bear, and I am expecting they will get even worse. So this is what is creating the motivation in me to look to the past of commercial software rather than its future, or the future of open source, for my daily computing needs.