No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the
real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system),
nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I assume on Google's orders), and eventually developed into a good enough version of Chrome, shedding all of its users along the way. The
Linux desktop is doing better than Firefox now.
The advantage to Free Software is that you don't have to change everything with Windows, Apple, Adobe, or Google demand you do (unless they grab control of a FOSS project, like in Firefox's case.) There are a number of writers who recommend Linux and Free software only for that reason - that once you get a workflow going, you don't want to change it according to corporate whims.
> practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window
This can be a problem. But it will be less of a problem with LLMs. We need to encourage amateur (and proficient) Linux adopters and users to lean on AI to deal with anything giving them problems. I had an LLM walk me through updating a .deb package in MATE to match HEAD upstream, and to do it in a way that would be replaced when Debian updated the package itself. This is something I've been carefully avoiding learning for a decade, and if I had taken the effort to try to learn, it would be weeks of research and I'd have messed up the system multiple times along the way. Instead, after a few false starts, I did it and gained the knowledge to do it again.
