What? That you look down on most Americans because you assume they don’t have college degrees?

Gentlebeings, let us all not waste our time with notions of "straw men" and "stereotypes." Or with "each other, personally."

None of this has anything to do with "Microsoft locking hardware." Just drag yourself away from this precipice and let the topic once-again fizzle out for another half-decade. "There is no point in it ..."

However...
...posts like this display your ideals and feelings very clearly.

As you may know by now, I am of the view that people, worldwide, are being deceived into the notion that they must own a "smart device", in order to have access to the WWW every single second and that it is acceptable, or even absolutely necessary, to publish their private lives on the WWW for all to peruse and to "follow", in a voyeuristic manner, the private lives and doings of others.

This is actually nothing new, just a different and much more potent medium. We the "masses" as you call us, have been deceived by television for decades, before that cinema newsreels, before and still to this day, news paper propaganda and weasel words.

Microsoft, Google and others are the forefront of the technology corporations providing the infrastructure for this. This has resulted in a new generation of computer user who are really appliance users, who use said appliance to connect to the WWW as means of "social networking", entertainment, shopping, etc, etc.

Though you may see ChromeOS and Android as "Linux distributions" they are not, in the same way that macOS is not a *BSD.

Using GPL or BSD style licenced code, does not automatically give "entry" and recognition to what is just a de facto standard, or in fact nothing more than a "label" anyway. But a "Linux distribution" (or what is really a GNU/Linux distribution) however is seen by the majority of users as a person or group, putting together a Linux kernel and GNU userland into a usable OS and providing it, freely, to others to use and modify as they see fit.

It is plain to see that ChromeOS and Android do not fit this category. It's also plain to see that the devices they are installed on are locked down and the user locked in and prevented from installing another OS. They are also a mess of proprietary blob drivers and firmware, so getting another OS to install is a long shot anyway.

Some Linux users moaned incessantly about efforts to lock down hardware, by e.g. MS, yet google with Android and ChromeOS do just that and are still gleefully recognised by some as "Linux distributions"!? Double standards?

Cisco routers, TomTom, Amazon kindle, etc were often criticised for dumping users of older devices in the brown stuff and leaving them with no support, no upgrade path - except to buy new hardware. google and to be more precise, the smartphone OEMs do the same thing...

However the "masses" are still compelled to own these devices and may of these "masses" are more intelligent than you and I, they have simply resolved themselves to conform and fit in to society and use the tools that they believe they need for work, keeping in touch with family, etc. The "masses" may not make an informed decision when buying a device which is just a tool or a toy and which they have little interest in - this doe not equate to "stupid, uneducated, brainwashed, ignorant". Do you make the same ethical decisions when choosing a bank, car, coffee, food, clothing, etc or when buying from certain retailers?

To a degree, yes. Apart from when I am ignorant of the situation. To a mortgage adviser I may be part of the ignorant masses. I do not refer to any specific group of people when I state that the masses are willfully ignorant and stupid -- I refer to us all.
Go to any forum (internet or otherwise) where something is discussed by enthusiasts and you will find that anything aimed at "the masses" tends to be inferior to those who care.
The point being that Linux as it is is "fragmented" and "overly complicated" with "too many choices" because for a good many enthusiasts those are not bad things.
Whether Android and Chrome OS are or are not "Linux" is a moot point -I they represent the wants of "the masses" for "lowest common denominator" use. Does that mean they are useless? No. Does it mean that those who understand their limitations will never choose them? No. Does it mean that they are not what an enthusiast wants to use all the time? Yes!

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5686936
mr.macintosh, why are you making this an issue about nationalities? that totally sprang from your own forehead.

cynwulf, thank you for disagreeing with 273 while having the same country code in your sidebar. sigh of relief.

I’m not making it about nationalities. If I’m making it about anything, it's ego and politics. Though, I realize my comment about 273 moving to Canada if Trump won and the “basket of delplorables” comment were a little out of line. I was just trying to say that a person can’t go saying that "the majority of people are stupid, uneducated, brainwashed, ignorant and have short memory spans”. I was just pointing out the elitism in 273’s statement, along with what I perceived to be his political leaning.

Fair enough, but perhaps not how it came across...

We don't need to go to a forum to work that one out.

It's not just the "masses" making these claims, but some of the industry / free software developers as well. Do they believe it? Who knows, do they just say whatever their paymasters require them to say? Maybe, or maybe a mix of the two. We can all delude ourselves into believing in or going along with something if we have to. You may sit at work, nod through the meetings, and reel off the same old b/s and then go home and see it all for what it is, or you may suck it all up. It can be hard to tell. Business speak and "marketing" has made it into free software circles, we used to have straight talking developers like Torvalds and de Raadt - now we have fake passive-aggressive niceness and sugar coated nonsense and lots of extra people who don't develop much but know how to use powerpoint to impress the IBM, HP, AMD, Oracle, Samsung, Cisco, facebook, whatever reps sitting on the board.

They use the Linux kernel. Whether they're distributions is debatable? It's not "moot", it's a perfectly valid question. I'm not into self delusion or mass delusion. We can celebrate the commercial success of "Linux" in embedded platforms if we wish. But that doesn't make those products "[GNU]/Linux distributions" or automatically eliminate the concerns with those products.

Android is what Shuttleworth had been trying to achieve, without fully realising it. While he was still playing games at being a Linux distribution and playing the whole "African themed, freedom from MS, Linux" card, a bigger and better player swooped in and stole it from under his nose and now he has a Linux distribution...

The 'buntu forums was awash with those who wanted "easier" at any cost and demanded "works out of the box" / "like windows" with minimal effort and complained as consumers when they didn't feel they were getting it - despite paying/contributing zero.

As I've said before, Linux got "popular" ( <---! ). In competing with the big proprietary OS vendors, it has only aped them, repeated their mistakes and left the people who abandoned those, or users who adopted it for its *nix like nature, with "problems" - while handing the "masses" something which is arguably worse than windows, locked down, restrictive, poorly supported and loaded with spyware...

Such is life.

Are you talking about Ubuntu? I’ve been using Ubuntu for months, and I haven’t run into any restrictions. What spyware? What information does Ubuntu send back to Canonical?

Yes for all the above. Spending money is just like voting.

By the way, I am not talking here about formal education level, wealth or anything like that. Watch people anywhere for long enough and you regularly see just how idiotic people as a whole are. Remind yourself why you buy a particular brand or watch a particular TV show. We're all brainwashed and wilfully ignorant.
Though I will allow myself the arrogance of attempting to learn and attempting to find the better way rather than the easiest way. I know others do too as I meet them every day.
Edit: For example of my previous statement:

In other words, I’m right on the mark.

You've obviously got some chip on your shoulder and are pinning your boogey-man on me.
What you posted couldn't be much further from the truth if you tried.

The conclusions I have stated are the only ones I can draw from your posts.

OK folks. Please try to use these forums for friendly debates.

I googled "UEFI hacking" and got 256,000 results
then I googled golden key and found this
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c9...c52c639f0641b4
I also found a description of how to defeat secure boot from within windoze
https://fossbytes.com/enable-disable...-windows-8-10/

the truth is out there google it