Forgive me for extensive quoting (and skipping to the end) but it rings a bell.
> In closing, here’s a thought to consider. It’s something I’ve learned during my adult life. There are those who want to take from you, and to control you, and their greatest weapon is not intimidation and fear; it is ease, and comfort. Ease of living, ease of use, ease of grasping a point or identifying a threat. Convenience and simplicity have been weaponised. In the face of that, for most people the idea of there being nobility in hardship is absurd. That doesn’t mean it isn’t functionally true; the idea will just never spread beyond the minority who are able to endure hardship by choice, in service of principle. And you’d better believe they’re a minority.
> Instead, it must also be ease which is its own counter weapon. People won’t switch away from convenience until the alternative — and the process — is also convenient. The era of weaponised price is waning, ushering in the age of weaponised inertia and comfort. I think that most people, at least in the West, are now bordering upon being incapable of choosing to do a hard thing except in extremis. But there are still those who will choose to do a hard thing in order to make that thing easy in future, for themselves and for others. And they’re called software developers.
> If you’re one of those, maybe you can help a bit more than most people can. Do something to free others from closed platforms and apps. ... (suggestions) ...
Old timers will remember that creating your own web site in HTML and using cgi-bin and friends to serve it was absolutely for geeks only. Not to mention getting cycles on someone else's server.
Various platforms arose that did all the hosting and threading/formatting ... you know their names: AOL, Facebook and so on. But at a "price" in the attention economy, now the surveillance economy/surveillance state.
I had the privilege/fun of being at Sun when they bought Cobalt. Here was a "home server" (for small businesses, classrooms, libraries) that had the potential to be a real home server, perhaps with a tunnel to outside. There also is a Freedom Box Project [0] [1] [2] that does the job (and survives). See references for details.
The obvious potential for secure communications, plus having a great deal of open source software, is a Big Deal. I used to run a moodle on my desktop/laptop just to store project documentation. What a bonanza. Interactive docs before Microsoft's github spy operation. Installed with XAMPP in no time at all.
THE PROBLEM
People won't use stuff that's complicated or which needs support.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S LESS!
People use Apple and Microsoft operating systems written in part by AI and of devastatingly bad quality. [3] And support? Most people are lost in space without a geek neighbor to help diagnose and find fixes WHEN THEY EXIST.
So, the problem, as noted in the OP, is ease of use and support. My brother, the least techie person on earth, got tired of each Microsoft patch breaking his hardware drivers, which had to be reinstalled. So, he ended up with a Dell desktop with Ubuntu installed and supported. After some questions on equivalent apps that he uses every day (a handful, like most people), he hasn't asked for any help in many years.
I have had ideas for really increased functionality for such a freedom box, and will pursue them. Don't forget, prior to Cobalt, Sun was pushing an indestructible system booting off CDROM, early TAILS [4] in a way.
The time for powerful, easy to use, supported and secure systems for the average beleaguered users is YESTERDAY.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox
[1] https://www.freedombox.org/
[2] https://linuxmind.dev/2025/09/04/complete-os-guide-freedombo...
[3] Apple 'runs on Anthropic,' says Mark Gurman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858380 3 points, 1 comment (mine)
