etrotta

I feel like this misses the point of why people say Linux is for programmers pretty hard. It is not really about writing code, just about being tech-savvy and properly knowing your way around computers, which OP may as well know better than a lot of programmers.

Cherry-picking a lot, but I cannot imagine saying this to a normal biased person would make them any more likely to consider Linux:

I am not a programmer, but I studied computer science in college

For the past eight years, I’ve been a tech writer

Sure, being tech-savvy helps—which, by the way, is equally valid for Windows and macOS—but it’s not necessary. Linux doesn’t demand technical aptitude or computer science knowledge for normal day-to-day use cases.

It is important to recognize it still demands a lot more technical aptitude to find and understand information about how it works, how to it set up and how to customize compared to Windows or Mac, which come preinstalled and hold your hand through the setup process.

It isn’t anything out of this world, but does require more effort than proprietary commercial software and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Great article besides that though, and this wouldn’t really be an issue if it weren’t for that being the headline.

You realize that they are only able to pay for “what’s historically been free” because of advertisements right? Google might be able to sustain Youtube even without ads because they have other revenue sources, but the vast majority of their revenue are from advertisements, and it would be a massive loss of money to keep Youtube up without it generating ad revenue. Hosting videos is one of the most expensive things a website can do. If we are to ever hope for other companies to compete with Youtube, we should expect for it to not be free. All that said, Google can still go fuck themselves though - I cannot possibly endorse their methods.