I fail to see how a world with iPads and Chromebooks replacing the traditional PC is any better. Instead of the unhealthy fixation on Microsoft, concentrating on user and developer freedoms regardless of vendor is better.
The year was 2004. Windows Vista and iPhone were 3 years away, iPod mini was 1 year away.
Also, Chromebook is not that bad, is it? Chrome OS is almost fully free (I am not sure about the details and the difference between Chromium OS and Chrome OS though). Much better than Windows XP back then.
Your data is less free on someone else's disk than on your own disk. That's really what you're getting at. But that isn't OS-dependent. You can just as well manage to Facebook yourself all up using Windows. Meanwhile you can use Chrome OS to access network services on your own personal server and not use any cloud vendor at all.
What you're really complaining about is the lack of good, easy to use personal servers, which makes the unavailability of client-local storage encourage you to be dependent on cloud vendors. But that's a separate issue from an OS that somewhat sensibly discourages you from keeping important and possibly sensitive files on a non-redundant portable device which is easily damaged or stolen and has no automatic backups.
I know attention spans and principles tend to morph into some crazy shit in the perception of those who are not as blessed with them, but this one I haven't heard before.
But the zero-sum ideology espoused by many open source advocates is grating. There isn't a war, there's just the computers that people use. People are lazy and don't think much about the implications of the tech they use. Impassioned rants against the current dominant tech don't actually change anything, they're just cathartic preaching to the choir.
If people don't think about the implications of their choices, then that's not the fault of rants, and anything you might suggest to change the situation can all be done while ranting. As Weizenbaum said in an interview I listened to a while ago (I tried to find it in written form but no luck so far), computers and all technology can be used to make people more free, or less so. That however requires awareness, which is the opposite of marketing and euphemisms. If not even the people who (supposedly) know what is going on speak up, the people who have little clue regarding these matters have simply no chance. And that people are lazy does not excuse any of it, anyway... a lot of horrible (or "just" banal and sad stuff) happened and happens because people are lazy, lazyness is quite the invisible killer that way.
