I have specifically used FreeBSD for uses only I wanted and didn't even have a DE at all because it was to run headless. That's "user friendliness" in a sense, but for not many users. I mean the kind of MacOS/Windows "user friendliness" where 90% of users get at least something satisfactory, not "ha ha, this does EXACTLY what I want and fuck you peasants."
Yes, you're seriously limited to distros you might not otherwise use. The list of strict no-systemd distros is short and many are sporadically maintained at best. Devuan is literally one of a half dozen at most without serious issues.
Facebook, et. al. have certainly worked hard to ensure that such is the only reason to have a personal computer
Was there some entertainingly assmad drama about the XFree86 -> X.org transition that would be worth digging through old mailing list archives in search of?
I would read a well written OP of vintage open source autism. Like the console wars in the 90's but with bigger vocabularies.
What, you don't like getting fullscreen ads (that don't have an X button but instead a secret maze of options you have to go through) arbitrarily when you turn on your computer?
There was to some extent, but I don't remember anything particularly entertaining. Mostly just passive-aggresive bickering. There might have been more intersting stuff in the internal lists of the core team - but I don't they they've ever been made public.
Yeah, "user friendliness" has been overloaded to mean a tightly managed experience that assumes the user is a drunk retard, while in reality this sort of design is hostile, designed around the absolute dregs that don't want to learn new skills to use the computer, if you ask me. Giving means and affordances to set up experience as desired increases complexity, but ultimately leaves choice in the user's hand. I think that's a much friendlier design philosophy. (There's something to the sentiment that complexity is scary or bad, because it isn't an advantage, it is a tax you pay. But that complexity can be reduced by paternalism is a false promise.)
Not to mention how they're quite content to use complexity like this when it comes to making money at the user's expense.
I would say it more strongly than that, though, because in my experience windows is actively hostile to the user. How often on windows do you need to edit the registry just to get your computer to behave in a sane way? How often do you update your computer and find random settings are reset inexplicably? How often is an essential feature soft gate kept behind a "show advanced" button? How often are you forced to restart in the middle of a task?*
That is literally the opposite of user-friendly.
Gabe the Hutt worshippers are so fucking idiotic.
The only intuitive (ie. user-friendly) interface is the nipple, and even that's debatable. https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html
This, basically. Keith Packard more or less faced the same dilemma Enrico Weigelt is facing today, with precisely the same result: Wanting to build a new fork not controlled by obstructive retards, he was summarily booted. However, on first reading at least, the resulting discussion was more or less civil (even the shit on Slashdot). No fireworks here.
That's because Steam is a store you fucking melvin. Obviously if you launch the Xbox store you'd expect ads but clearly that's not what anyone is talking about you peanut. Meanwhile Steam OS, the equivalent of Windows, doesn't spam you with shit all over every menu let alone full screen boot ads.
