@lanodan @sampo @hj Good point about VLC. That pretty much embodies what I'm saying, because while it's hardly a flashy piece of software it's valued for its simplicity, lightweight nature and the knowledge that you're not installing malware. I think you're right, proprietary competition gave up, and it's because they shot themselves in the foot by trying to make watching videos a Proprietary Experience™ and people got sick of it.

That's the kind of penetrability I'm talking about. This reddit thread is a good example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1elmlvy/best_webbased_youtube_video_downloader/

It's comment after comment of people saying "try THIS site, it's not THAT bad" and other people saying "It's down" or "It watermarks" or "It doesn't do long videos" or whatever over and over again. Then down at the bottom you have this exchange between people who understand software well and know how to use docker where they bypassed all the struggle instantly.

Imagine if the person had been able to say "You can use metube" without any additional context, and clicking on its github page presented you with binaries, including a Windows one. The whole thread would have been over. None of these people would ever have used garbageware to download videos again. Many of them would probably have had this as their first taste of the technologically liberated side of the internet. But it's all dead in the cradle because normal people don't know how to compile, or what docker is, or what a tarball is, or any of this shit.

It's so frustrating, it would only take a little push. XMPP is a great example because all it would really take is for someone to port Conversations to desktop. But whoever made it only cared about deveoping an Android client, and everyone else is content fumbling because it's what they do all day every day when fannying about with linux anyway.