Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.
That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.
You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.
These kinds of things are the first things that come to mind when people start going all “Linux is ready for $blah” because while I can figure out how to deal with these issues, they’re invariably the first things I get phone calls from my non-IT-career friends about when they switch to Linux.
Windows changes insane amounts of interface whatnot on the regular, users can usually figure THAT out, finally, no matter what OS they’re using.
It’s the stuff that just works out of the box on windows or Mac but doesn’t on Linux that’s at issue, and it’s what will continue to halt widespread adoption at the casual user level, unfortunately.
The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)
TPM.
The ability to play multiplayer games that rely on anti-cheat ( seriously, make Linux a hit with the fortnite crowd and the upcoming generation will think of windows as boomerware )
The ability to use an HDMI cable at full speed. (It’s the leading A/V cable standard and the only one some people understand. )
Then there’s the stuff I’m unsure of the current status of but that I know was a problem once upon a time: Online banking, online doctor stuff, encrypted emails from mainstream providers, you know, anything that could qualify as “every day stuff” that works out of the box on windows and yet sometimes requires complicated (for grandma) setup on Linux.
Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.
I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.
I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)
New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!