> What is the alternative for average consumers ? Chrome books ?

GNU/Linux! Any mainstream beginner friendly GNU/Linux distribution like Linux Mint or Ubuntu will be descent enough for average consumers. Unless you are heavily dependent on Adobe softwares(even then, you can consider dual boot), they are now much more elegant than windows. Getting quality support from forums is actually much easier with GNU/Linux. Last time when I had a problem with Windows 10, where everything saved to C:/ would disappear after restart, I was unable to get any useful support from their forums. On the other had, most problems I encounter while using a linux distribution is just a search away! I'm currently using Arch linux(before that I used Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora etc...), and my less technically inclined family uses Elementary OS. Try a linux distribution like Linux Mint or Kubuntu. It's worth the time!

Yes, personally I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows. But the problem is that many organizations I deal with are reinforcing Microsoft dominance by e.g. emailing me PDFs that only Acroread can open. If I want to fight these issues, I may need to resort to name dropping (Google, Apple) and other tactics.

> emailing me PDFs that only Acroread can open

Please post any examples of those to the evince project as a bug report.

They're literally everywhere. I pulled this one off the top of my head:

https://www.aoc.cat/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/sol_cert_pers...

Okular 1.8.2 says the document contains XFA forms and it's not yet supported. This is the first time I ever even heard of this. <https://enwp.org/XFA> says the technology is already deprecated.

I have used Okular many times for PDFs with embedded forms (no apparent special name). I think you should notify the originator of the unusable PDFs that they should redo the file with regular embedded forms so that they work in most PDF readers.

In my experience these are PDFs that embed JavaScript. I don't think there is much of an appetite for building yet another JS interpreter into the desktop...

As much as I love all that Linux offers and working with it, the culture isn't there for Linux to be mainstream, and it's not even about feature parity or user-friendliness anymore. It's that the minimum standard offered by Microsoft, Google, and Apple is quite good and many of the annoyances that folks who do have a preference on OSes and such are not bothersome in the least bit to your average user.

The problem with positioning Linux as an alternative to Windows/MacOS is that there is a very real alternative (and has been for some time) of just not having a Desktop OS at all; do everything mobile. It might be strange for some people here, but Mobile-only is a very common and real choice made nowadays, and Android/iOS make this a pretty darn comfortable option. While the advertising and telemetry and crapware is even worse on Mobile, this leads to the other part of the issue where, based on my experience, the average user is completely attuned to and just accepts the advertising without question. 10 second ads randomly played as part of an App is just seen as normal; the barrage of randomly placed animated banners, auto-play videos that scroll with you, over-zealous sign-up requirements are absolutely the norm now as the big players have made this a reality, and many people just do not think twice about such practices. Youtube, popular news sites, and other such things have normalized these practices and now it's not even a concern for many people.

I've had this conversation with many people even directly in IT/Development related fields and I'm sure I come off as a Stallmanite-esque nutcase when I voice my frustrations about Google, for example. I purposefully avoid Chrome because of its awful auto-updater tactics on MacOS which basically took pages from malware authors on how to ensure the service is always alive and present on your OS. When I explained this decision to colleagues, the response was confusion more than anything, and wondering why I even wanted to stop this. (Neverminding their frustration with Google when it changed the login handling for its services)

Linux as an alternative __does__ exist, but this is only if you care enough to want to seek an alternative in the first place. Putting aside the monstrous mountain of issues with the non-Linux OSes, it's never been a better time to be a Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android user. The OSes are stable as heck, cross-compatibility is very good for virtually whatever program/application you want, the OSes run great on virtually all hardware with no configuration. The only consideration most of the time is tiny personal preferences. And best of all, for 3 of 4 of the OSes above, you don't pay a single cent (directly) for any of them. Windows holds out, but I cannot imagine this lasting much longer either.

With all of the above considered, the question just becomes "why would any of the mythical 'average consumer' even want to consider Linux in the first place?" As depressing as this may sound (and defeatist), as long as it gets them to Facebook and Youtube (and Instagram/whatever other social media they want), why would they care what does it and/or what that OS is doing?

> I purposefully avoid Chrome because of its awful auto-updater tactics on MacOS which basically took pages from malware authors on how to ensure the service is always alive and present on your OS. When I explained this decision to colleagues, the response was confusion more than anything, and wondering why I even wanted to stop this.

I've noticed that on Windows as soon as Chrome appeared: they implemented a lot of malware-like concepts for the installation and updates even then. It never seemed right to me. And I still avoid Chrome as much as I can.

> the question just becomes "why would any of the mythical 'average consumer' even want to consider Linux in the first place?" As depressing as this may sound (and defeatist), as long as it gets them to Facebook and Youtube (and Instagram/whatever other social media they want), why would they care what does it and/or what that OS is doing?

My own issues: as much as I like Linux for programming, whenever I try to use Linux "just" to play videos on some non-gaming machine (and I've never bought gaming-only computers, and I'm sure an "average" user doesn't too), I still see significant problems compared with using Windows for the same task on the same machine. For various reasons it seems this joke still holds, even when removing "flash":

https://xkcd.com/619/

And my experience was even that those windowing environments promoted as "less demanding" aren't showing the videos better: they re maybe less demanding in some other aspects... but the videos which play smoothly on cheaper hardware is still a goal that is somehow hard to reach. My experience is similar to those I've had with music playing on Linuxes some decades ago, where every peace of the setup then worked against me simply being able to play (yes I've even tried modifying and rebuilding the drivers at these times...)

> the average user is completely attuned to and just accepts the advertising without question. 10 second ads randomly played as part of an App is just seen as normal; the barrage of randomly placed animated banners, auto-play videos that scroll with you, over-zealous sign-up requirements are absolutely the norm now as the big players have made this a reality,

This is pavlovian conditioning at it's finest, yotube users know they need to wait a few second of ads before they can press <<skip>> button, they know they need to accept EULA and a few pages TOS, Privacy Policy and whatever before they can use the damn thing. Slowly but surely people learn that the number of choices they have are limited and they simply have to bow down to the digital feodalism of today.

> I'm currently using Arch

Thank you for telling, how would anyone know otherwise.

Can you recommend good laptop that come with Linux installed?

Choice is greatly diminished compared with ten years ago. I'm satisfied with http://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

I currently use a ThinkPad, which came pre-installed with Windows. I wiped out windows and installed Linux. Then there are some Dell XPS laptops that comes with Linux installed.

Which thinkpad model?

Chromebooks have the same problem; they’re backed by an advertising & stalking company - the laptop is just the carrot on the stick; the main objective is to gather data and waste your time with ads.

The only alternative is Apple; they’re not perfect and have done some scummy things (see the right to repair, etc) but their whole marketing has been based around privacy and I can’t see them screwing that up as it’s pretty much the only advantage they’ve got at this point (their other qualities have faded away - UX is worse and worse, hardware is subpar, etc).

Apple is not as invasive as Microsoft, but macOS has this preference: https://imgur.com/a/VhQec0O

"Advertising in Apple Apps: View the information used by Apple to deliver more relevant ads to you in Apple News, Stocks and the iOS App Store. Your personal data is not provided to third parties."

Apparently, you will see ads in their newest apps: News and Stocks apps (and ads for other apps in App Store).

If you have oped out, as in your case and mine, the answer is none of your information will be used in this way. It's one setting, it's a complete opt out and you get prominently asked at install time. I've really not got any problem with that.

I don't want any advertising in the software I buy.

> you get prominently asked at install time

Do you? I know the iOS setup wizard asks for analytics, but I don't recall it ever asking whether you want to turn on "limit ad tracking".

I was pretty sure it did, but if not that's even better. I didn't set this manually and it's off, so presumably that's just the default setting.

Personally I don't have a problem with ads: They have subsidized many cool things over the years. Newspapers is one. Open source software written or supported by Google is another.

I'm personally also ok with tracking provided there is a reasonable regulatory framework e.g. GDPR. But I do sympathize with people uncomfortable with all forms of tracking.

Apple products are expensive and will only become more so if everyone tries to buy it.

The problem with ads (there are many problems, but in this context this one is the most relevant) is that it's inherently incompatible with productivity. Ads waste your time and try to influence you or make you buy things instead of doing whatever you initially planned to do. This means ad-supported tools try to maximise ad viewing time ("engagement" as they call it), so it's in their best interest to make the tool less efficient so you spend more time on it.

I want my operating system and other critical tools to work for me by saving me time, not against me by wasting my time so I get the opportunity to see more ads.

Imagine if you were a plumber, would you use a wrench that has a built-in screen and makes you watch a 30-second ad before it actually allows you to unscrew a pipe? And then periodically beeps while in your toolbox so that you have to take it out and stay "engaged"? No - any sane person would say "this is crap" and throw it in the garbage. Why should it be any different for IT tools?

The GDPR has yet to do anything regarding tracking because it's not being enforced at all - Google and Facebook's entire business models are based on violating the GDPR and yet they are still around. The regulation has some good ideas including around consent and dark patterns (tracking must be opt-in, should not be misleading, etc) but it has yet to be enforced despite there being millions of sites blatantly violating it.

> Apple products are expensive and will only become more so if everyone tries to buy it.

That would be the market at work. Maybe when the prices rise even more Microsoft will realise just how much money they're leaving on the table and go back to making good software?

> What is the alternative for average consumers ? Chrome books ?

The answer is obvious if you care about what the article is about. It's Linux. ChromeBooks are controlled by Google whose entire business is ads, so they can't be trusted either.

For average people with money - macOS. If they don't have money they need to become better than average with computers and learn Linux, or they will be preyed upon like cattle because of the lax US customer protections.

MS didn't use their OS to get word processing and compilers. There was plenty of competition in the 80s and early 90s. MS by almost every measure had the best products in those categories.

That's bullshit. What Microsoft did is bundle Office with all computers, at no cost. They used their monopoly position in operating systems to crush wordprocessing and spreadsheet companies by bundling a free alternative that would read the competitor's file formats. Competitors, with no other source of revenue, died. Once they were dead, Office was no longer free.

This is a classic example of how a company with a monopoly position in one product uses that power to create a monopoly position in other products.

bullshit on your bs. Which products were better? WordPerfect was certainly not better. Borland was better in the dos days but didn't keep up. I also never saw a computer that came with free office. it's always been an addon and always been separate from Windows .

And still does.

Chrome books are definetly worse when it comes to tracking!

It's sad that besides Linux, there arent that many options anymore...

Imagine the tracking that happens on phone, compared to desktop.