My point is that if the world's #1 computing platform only has that choice then we lose the ability to get some kinds of innovation driven by the few percent that care and have the time to tinker. And HN has a much larger proportion of the kinds of people that will want to do that innovation or at least value that it's possible. We wouldn't have gotten Linux if Linus couldn't develop on his hardware.
But maybe we've just been spoiled with mass-market general-purpose hardware up to now and this is the new normal. I shudder to think that but maybe it's true. At this point I don't think I'd much care for a smartphone if I didn't need it for work. And it's the stuff of nightmares for me particularly if that was also the case on the PC/laptop side of things.
I agree that it's rather horrifying what we settled for these days. The world to me is a lot darker compared to my student years back in 1997 to 2001 when I played Quake3 for days on end, without sleep, with only WC and food breaks -- and when I was coding my heart and brains out on things I believed could shape the future world.
These are the times I'll dearly remember until the end of my life. And nowadays almost nobody seems to be wanting to make things better. It's saddening and extremely discouraging. I get it and I agree with your overall premise.
What I was mostly saying is that those of us who had wide-eyed naive optimism for the future and were there when the internet started gaining steam are now anywhere between 30 to 50 and we can only dream of the ages past when we could do the things you described without any other worries.
In the end, I am just pointing out that these past life phases are long gone and aren't likely coming back for the most of us. And I'll say it again: I have a big respect for those who still manage to truly innovate and disrupt.
I agree and identify with this. The reason I point these things out here is that the kinds of people actually doing the leg work on these platforms are on the site. And in some cases if they did a few things differently (e.g., upstream the drivers much earlier in the SoC bringup) then maybe we could actually fix this. I'm not nearly as pessimistic about the situation as you :)
It's not about if I can buy a cheap FreeNAS rig -- an i5 CPU and 10-year old motherboard with 16-32GB of DDR2/DDR3 RAM -- and gradually add WD Gold hard drives to it. It's not about if I can use Syncthing and a command-line password manager. It's not about if I can use PostmarketOS or LineageOS and thus only buy Android-enabled devices (yay Linux freedom?).
I can do all that. But it requires more manual management. And I just don't have the time and energy for it.
It's strange to me to imply that the HN crowd are some sort of world-changers that never have financial struggles and live in beach houses a la Iron Man style with 3x independent gigabit fiber links and 500 sq.m. of home labs that rival Mythbusters' space -- and are constantly busy disrupting an area.
Truth is, even though in principle you are correct -- and even though I really would like to only use free [as in freedom and not a free beer] hardware and software -- the reality is that we all have jobs to do. And most of us actually love the people we live with and would want to spend a chunk of our free time with them. We all would love to get a normal amount of sleep and invest in the knowledge necessary to get proper nutrition because we're literally a hugely complex chemical compound and we better put the right chemicals inside of us...
...etc. etc to infinity., I can go on all day and night but I am pretty certain you got the point.
The HN crowd is certainly much more aware than many other crowds. Doesn't automatically imply they have the means to change a lot of things. Trust me, I'd like to live like Tony Stark and invent a ton of stuff that can change the world -- that includes his house and a lab -- but I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that I'll very likely stop at having 7-10 profitable consultancies and/or lifestyle businesses that will give me a peace of mind even after retirement.
Life is short and many of us don't want to work 24/7. More power to the people who can maintain a good living AND be inventors and disrupters. I have big respect for them.