The comment you are responding to explicitly says no alternatives are good and disclaimed any idea that they were telling people to use something different. They shouldn't have had to make that disclaimer, but apparently it didn't even work.

This part of the comment did not exist when I replied....

Clarification: After many years of desensitization to this practice since the first iPhone, it is neither "a secret" nor "scandalous", but it is still disappointing. Moreover, I am not advocating any other mobile OS simply by making a comment about iOS. In fact, none of the "smartphones" being sold today are satisfactory to me as portable computers when compared with the control I get using an open source OS with i386, amd64 or even a development board.

Depending on when scarface replied, that last paragraph did not exist in the original post.