If you want to "win" then you must think about your achievements. Focusing on where you're being screwed keeps you being screwed. In the last 20 years, Linux h

If you want to "win" then you must think about your achievements. Focusing on where you're being screwed keeps you being screwed. In the last 20 years, Linux has taken over many domains. First servers. The big win that made Linux impossible to ignore. Ten years later a major shift to the userland was mobile: there are half a billion Android devices sold. Not to mention embedded systems. Meanwhile, Linux has also become the way to build supercomputers: the world's fastest supercomputers these days mean assembling huge Tesla GPU racks to run Linux. While I do realize that secure boot can make Linux's life harder, I also realize that Linux per se isn't going anywhere or isn't attacked by Microsoft but general purpose computers are suffering from exhausted momentum. There are more and more devices that come with a preinstalled system, such as Android and iOS and the traditional desktop/laptop paradigm of buying hardware and installing whatever you want to run on it will continue to move into the marginal. I predict that eventually it's the programmers who will be the only ones who exercise tasks of so varying nature that they need a more complex interface, something like what I'm using now. Most of the rest of people can manage with mostly touching a screen to use applications that offer a set of predefined capabilities, occasionally hooking up a keyboard. The era of immutable operating systems with applications installable from a prefiltered app store is probably what actually works for most people. It's us programmers who long for the days when hardware was to be bought and software was to be written because we know that the lowest layer must always be there. For us, it was the very definition of a computer: programming hardware was all there ever was to computers. But most people don't need that. Most people are perfectly happy with an appliance. They don't want to install updates or manage their system, they just click the power button and immediately continue from where they left the last time. They want an application and they tap it and it gets installed without clicking through a dozen pages of a helper wizard or aptitude install commands. And appliances such as tablets and phones and touchscreen laptops deliver a much better experience for non-programmers. What we as programmers see as a bad thing is that programming will be removed farther from the end users. We all know how we started with playing games and ended up writing our own games because our computers allowed, and to an extent, suggested that. We would want to preserve that heritage to the future whizkids and future programmers. But that's still got a perspective bias: most people so far still haven't "found it" even if their computer would have allowed it. It's just us for which "finding it" was the revelation, and we know we would've "found it" anyway, somehow. Maybe they'll be selling a limited stock of programmer's computers in ten years that are fully programmable. There's definitely a market for those because you can't write the nice appliances without a real programmers' computer. Maybe my grandkids will receive one of my old programmer's workstations from my work place, and use that deprecated hardware to teach themselves programming and find it a thousand times more interesting than playing games on their phones, much like my predecessors managed to hook themselves up with cheap nighttime computing time in a mainframe at their father's workplace and abused those cycles to write games to entertain themselves.