Specs:
Yeah okay, that makes a lot of sense and isn’t as extreme as I thought the original post to be. I suppose that for me, I used to push Linux way too hard on my friends and when I saw what I was doing, I hard pivoted away from pushing it to hardly even mentioning it unless it comes up in conversation.
But clearly there’s a very agreeable and respectful middle ground where you can bring it up as a legitimate tool to solve a very real problem for people putting up with the woes of Windows 11.
That’s a fair way of doing it I think, and I think you’re right in that I did have a negative bias towards “converting” as I tended to imagine something more extreme akin to a cult.
Convert 30 people to a free operating system
This is a detraction from the point of this post, but I wanted to express my feelings on this anyway.
I don’t feel great about that suggestion because Linux (anecdotally) has a serious problem of fanboyism and the community is notorious for driving people away from Linux because they’re too pushy. I feel that veganism has the same issue.
Sure, you might do this in a more constructive way like up cycling or refurbishing old machines to run Linux and donating them out to people in need, thus introducing them to the world of Linux and normalising an alternative OS - but is that “converting” them?
If you are converting people, then you must have them also ditch Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android with Play Services. That, to me, is unreasonable and not the approach the Linux community should be taking.
For me, I tend to show, not tell. I’ll use Linux casually as I would any other system, and if anyone asks me about it or expresses interest, I’ll answer their questions honestly. If they do want to move to Linux, I’ll help them where I can, but I wait for them to want to do it.
This is the only official word from Volkswagen in the whole article. To me, this reads less as “We are blocking GrapheneOS users” and instead “GrapheneOS is not something we give any official support” which I think is a key distinction.
It’s not clear what’s different in the update that doesn’t work with GrapheneOS, whether it’s an API call that doesn’t work or if they’ve implemented the Play Integrity API - but I think this article is a bit sensationalist and everyone’s reacted only to the headline.