Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.

Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though.

(No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)

Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.

The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.

Except many of those contributions never land upstream.

Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros.

Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.

> Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.

What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?

Most of their stuff isn't GPL anyway, hence why drivers are mostly in userspace.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at how much does land upstream. Linux moves at an incredible pace.

Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.

Yet it is still a mess to support laptops, because everything still needs to be reverse engineered instead of landing into upstream.

My laptops have been running fine for years.

What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot.

Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.

There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).

And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.

> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately

Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]