The software in the screenshot doesn’t require you to use Discord, but that’s not good enough there.

Why stop there? Do the open source apps you’re advocating run on Windows or Nvidia drivers? You could get upset about them too, because they’re also one step removed from something closed source.

Then it sounds like all that’s left to do is get 150 million people to use them.

Nobody in this thread has forbidden anyone from doing anything. If you want a soapbox for your irrelevant opinions, start a blog.

I don’t know much about the gambling industry

You can stop there. You don’t know much about the gambling industry, defending them was just an opportunity to tell us your opinions on “some people”, none of whom are actually here.

Sounds more like you just don’t know anything about the gambling industry. They run rigged games in predatory ways. They happily let organised crime launder money for a cut. They fight regulations designed to reduce problem gambling.

Nevertheless, nobody here is “forcing their way of life on others and taking away their agency over their own lives”. They’re just acknowledging that casinos have a long history of being absolute cunts.

I think there’s a baseline that Linux developers need to take more seriously. The PopOS people are good reference, especially their upcoming DE.

Imagine you had a basic desktop; top bar, dock and desktop widgets.

Each of those is a different app and each app comes in 4 different flavors: “Fast but ugly”, “Pretty”, “Tinkerer’s dream” and “Well designed but under developed”.

Sounds great right? Just pick whichever ones you like best. But along the way, things that would be considered “requirements so basic we don’t even need to state them” are not met.

So you value pretty and get the pretty versions. But each of them was developed by a different team, each with different opinions about what “pretty” is. Your desktop doesn’t have a cohesive look with colours and fonts mismatched in a way that no monolithic project would ever tolerate.

So you grab one pretty app, and two tinkerer’s dream apps. You can make them match yourself! That’s the power of Linux. You put a week of work into bringing your desktop up to this default standard, fighting a mountain of faff along the way. Each app uses a different language for their code and configs. Each app supports different features. You find yourself wishing they followed the “well designed but underdeveloped” app, but it hasn’t had an update for years.

Finally, your desktop is ready for unixporn… as long as you don’t open your file browser.

While I broadly agree, I feel like the focus of these fragments is just scratching their own personal itch, rather than building an improvement. I quickly lose interest in “software that only values X” vs “software that only values Y”. I just want software that’s good.

Which is functionally identical to the last one you posted. Are you just doing the same joke in every format you can? Fuck the internet sucks now.

You don’t need the question mark. If something is for-profit (or can be used for profit) then sooner or later it will be enshittified.

They have teams of people whose entire job is figuring out ways to wring a few more cents from somebody. Put them at the helm of a company that’s stood for 1000 years and they’ll be thrilled at how easy it will be to use that name to sell plastic dogshit at a premium price.