Tumble me weeds hasn’t borked my main rigs or ‘family & friends’ puters in like 5 years. So overall I had less work compared to updating all them Debians once or twice in the same period.

(Oh, no wait, I did have one smol issue with a KDE widget or something like that.)

Also every rolling-release is a semi-rolling-release if you update once weekly or even monthly.

Yes, good points, but what can make financial sense doesn’t need to make economical sense.

Perhaps in such events we can transition to smaller, maybe RISK-V boards with components from various manufacturers.

But yes, I too keep hoping consumers would speak up & stop bs practices. Then again, if we kill a consumer industry you can’t just bring it back in a year, and megacorps can weather in the meantime by offering consumers short-term incentives if they make the switch. It’s how all the personal data collection by private corps started, why eg Google had free services (and no ads) & yet was already being valued in the billions.

Goodbye local Windows with Linux having a 3% market share means entirely different market & society too, regardless of our Linux desktops that can’t get new parts.

After 20 years when your CPUs, RAMs, and at least SSDs don’t work anymore, and the PC supply never came back - how are you going to show/trick the government that you are a patriot that uses & supports one of the three big USA private AIs?

Enough capital can reshape even a somewhat free market into a non-free one - if we, the demand, have basically no other choice (except revolt, but we forgot/got that erased from our consciousness) we usually just try to survive.

The mythos about how things are getting better for each generation of humans is false.