It's important to grok why OS programming "has always been mostly a university thing" in contrast to, say... a business environment that wasn't monopolized by anti-competitive business practices and set back for decades as a result, or maybe a vibrant ecosystem we all grew up wanting to contribute toward and understand deeply with low barriers to entry and a supportive community.
The same could be said for understanding why "the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux" and various rounds of the DRM wars.
Microsoft shouldn't be blamed forever for deficits in free software and that's not an argument I'm trying to advance, but it would also be a mistake to overlook their historical influence on when and where certain barriers to tinkering emerged or persisted.
I think that's part of why this triggers a disgust response for some commenters.
Sure. I don't refute that Microsoft is, simplified, evil. That doesn't change the fact that people with positions in the Linux community don't really care about those things. I don't really see any move of note toward that either.
Even when Apple practically gave the Linux distributions an opportunity with the neglect of the Mac Pro. Here you had people who didn't like Windows, disgruntled with Apple, liked unix, wanted a powerful operating system and was overpaying for hardware.
OpenGL isn't that much harder on Linux than on Windows, so where the push for great OpenGL developer tools on Linux? Google and Mozilla gets a lot of credit for supporting open source, so why are there no decent bindings from their respective new languages to their respective 2d libraries (Go/Skia, Rust/Mozilla2d)?
There's kind of a macho attitude in open source that things should be hard. If you can't or don't want to fix it yourself it your own fault. It's great for the people that are happy with that and are invested in it, not so much for the rest of us.
The same could be said for understanding why "the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux" and various rounds of the DRM wars.
Microsoft shouldn't be blamed forever for deficits in free software and that's not an argument I'm trying to advance, but it would also be a mistake to overlook their historical influence on when and where certain barriers to tinkering emerged or persisted.
I think that's part of why this triggers a disgust response for some commenters.