@amerika @animeirl @teratology

> The antitrust suit against Microsoft ended up being a disaster.

Which one?

> In my view, what holds FOSS back is trust issues.

This presumes that they're making a decision. You ever go to the store (back when people got in a car and went to an actual store) and overhear some boomer exasperated that they bought their kid an empty NES "and you have to buy the game?! This thing was two hundred dollars and it doesn't already have the games on it?" They all threw away their computers and got new computers because the new ones came with Windows 98. If you want to pick up adoption, you have to give them something they want and it has to come out of the box ready to go. Normies run Linux all the time, Android is the most popular Linux distro ever created. Android comes out of the box running Linux. It's not even a matter of trust, they don't know how to change their own oil, they don't like to think that it exists because it's not a thing they care about. They use the computer to send a spreadsheet to their boss, and at best, Linux lets them send a spreadsheet to their boss. So they don't have a reason to care and they have plenty of reasons to avoid thinking about it.

> People trust stuff that makes it into the #M5M or is sold in big box stores,

Yes; Microsoft incentivizes the manufactures to ship with Windows and incentivizes the retailers to ship with Windows, and they provide negative incentives to allowing anything else on the shelves. The hardware isn't going to be much cheaper: the companies already paid Microsoft to get "WHQL certified" and you can't really write that on the box.

I don't know how to make people care, that's the issue, so I try to just have a nice environment, little Plan 9 cluster, little CRUX and Slackware boxes.

> do not claim that LibreOffice is good.

It's not just good, it's great: at the cost of waiting for some unholy JVM situation to drag its fat ass off my disk and get into my RAM, I can sort of view most of the words that are in a document without having to get a Windows machine.

That stuff all happens in the browser now, though: people just use Google Dox or maybe their company sprang for Office365. That all works fine on Linux. I suspect that most of them wouldn't know the difference: they sit down, they click on Chrome, Canonical shoves a bunch of ads in their face instead of Microsoft shoving a bunch of ads in their face.