Ask Lemmy
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Operating systems are niche nerd stuff. Your average iPhone user doesn’t know what iOS is. Most Android users don’t know they’re Android users - “I have a Samsung” or, worse, “this is my iPhone” (it clearly is not).
The market for alternative mobile OSes is basically software developers and tech/privacy nerds. It’s not an enormous market and it’s full of customers that see through the usual profit-generating enshittification that plays well in the mass market. There’s not that many of us and we’re fickle bitches.
I worked at "Big Box Orange Counter Retail" for many years. Us nerds, us who actively choose linux, know how to build computers, hell even know what a terminal is, are the vast minority. It can feel like the opposite. Lemmy and Mastodon are heavily tech related, Reddit was too, and we build ourselves into echo chambers where we assume everyone has a specific level, but we are a teeny tiny fraction.
Linux was ~1% of the Steam survey for decades. That's 1% of PC gamers, PC users who have Steam installed. It was a tiny fraction of a fraction. We're now at 5%, which is great, but that's still a tiny fraction of total users across all desktops. On top of that, a huge chunk is thanks to Valve for pre-installing a linux distro and going with that as the default. Us who installed Linux as a primary PC and game on it are a very tiny percentage.
Then, to add mobile operating systems into the mix, the percentage is even smaller. We are a part of a part of a percent on mobile. It's why things like locking down Android doesn't concern them. They know we'll switch, they don't care. We're an edge case to them, a rounding error. What they can say is that 99.999% of people are now locked in.
Computers are second nature to us Lemmy nerds, so it's easy to forget the average person probably only knows Python for simple programmes and one or two scripting languages.
Normies don't even know what clipboard is. I was gobsmacked I don't even know how to explain it as plainly as possible.
But also found out apparently MacOS doesn't have a clipboard? At least when I was frantically searching online when someone said they copies something earlier and want to paste and give me to it
Mac OS has a clipboard.
Glad to be wrong on that.
Now I’m just imagining someone confidently lying to you about that because they have no idea what a clipboard is
The fuck are you talking about? The FIRST thing that comes up when I search “Macos clipboard” or “Mac clipboard” or even “Mac clipboard” is Apple’s official page on THE CLIPBOARD
“where does text go when I copy on Mac” makes me go all the way to the SECOND result before clipboard is mentioned.
You’re shitting on “normies” and you don’t even know how to search the internet?
That and an actively hostile hardware environment to open source dev in the aarch world.
OS' on x86 are also a nerdy niche, yet Linux numbers are growing by the day, even seeing large vendors moving to first part support. None of this is allowed to exist in the mobile market exclusively for the profit margins of a few companies.
Side note imagine how cool it would be in a world without that enshitification, old phones could be recycled for 90% of pi projects, with better specs than the most expensive pi.