This is a lie that often gets repeated over and over, but I have firsthand anecdotal experience of how this is not true. My mother has no formal education and when she was given an Android she struggled to do basic things. Once she got an iPhone it was night and day and an entire world was opened to her and she was able to use and discover her phone with almost no handholding.
That has still not changed with the latest Android updates. Yes the home screen might look "similar" but once you get past that first surface layer interaction, to people like her the Android system and UX design language are a mishmash of incoherent ideas and visions whereas on an Apple device things work as she would intuitively expect consistently regardless of the app she's using or what she's trying to do with her phone.
GPA, letters of rec, honors, and personal essays are all subject to the inherent privilege richer students and students in stable households have. Got to do something cool over the summer because your parents can afford to give you that luxury? Teacher writes you a letter of rec because they connect with you more. Have a stable household? GPA goes up and you take honors classes because your focus is uninterrupted.
I was the kid who every year when asked what they did for summer said "nothing". I was the kid who missed homework assignments because of yet another argument or separation between parents at home last night where I played peacemaker. On my personal essays I had to lie and make up experiences I had never had because we simply did not have the money for a vacation or takeout.
GPAs, letters of rec, honors only prove that a student has a safe and secure environment and they are able to excel over a long term. That is a reflection of privilege.
For those of us who grew up in poor and broken households, standardized testing is the only chance for us to get a better life. Everyone who speaks out against it does so from a position of privilege because they have 0 idea what it's like to grow up in that type of environment.
That's an ostensibly incorrect POV to take. This is government doing what it does best: legislating things they don't understand to score cheap votes, not to solve actual problems.
Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I move around to?
I signed up for your job in a certain location and a certain date. That doesn't entitle you to keep track of where I am the rest of my life. As long as I'm able to be reached at the initially agreed upon location, regardless of how I maintain that communications channel, I never agreed to let you dictate where I live and move to and frankly nobody has that right.
Or is my body my choice just a convenient catchphrase for one topic only?
So India is a population of over 1B, and the US+UK is about 400m.
Why should I assume I know better what the solution is for the problems plaguing a country in a completely different part of the world housing 1/8th the world population while living in the comforts of a 1st world country? Is the CEO advocating for genocide?
Or perhaps we should get off our high horse and shouldn't judge other people for things we cannot possibly understand anything about?
I too am privacy conscious. I run adblockers, I use a VPN, I use a MacOS firewall and every connection has to be explicitly allowed.
I teach my partner how to do the same. That's about the extent I can do. If you want to go further such as pay for a temp phone or VPN using gift cards or get a 2nd internet connection to the house that's setup with a perfectly firewalled router, you can do so and that is your prerogative. But when your actions affect someone else's quality of life and you take away their decision to do so, that IMO is active sabotage.
I've tried Fedora, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Linux Mint. They all have issues you won't discover in the initial honeymoon stages but will randomly discover issues like sleep mode not working consistently, wifi disconnecting, second monitor not working, battery draining, etc.
If your hardware combination works with 0 issues, consider yourself lucky, but if you plan to upgrade your hardware you need to set aside hours of your time just in case you have issues.
If you're making any sort of serious $$ with your machine and Linux is not a hard requirement, good luck making that investment of time worth it.
I know that if I have an issue with Windows a quick Google search and I can find a solution within minutes. But I don't think I will ever return to debugging for hours why my 2nd monitor with an AMD card refused to work after my Ubuntu desktop went to sleep.
I would cal it valuing my time. I don't want to spend an hour or two a day learning something new when I've already invested in learning something that solves my problems good enough.
Can I have gripes about the quirks and how some things could be better? Sure. Is it worth throwing the baby with the bathwater and learning something entirely new? Highly unlikely.
That's a discussion because by and large those two choices are equal with minute differences in perceived social status and comfort, but the fundamental function is the same.
On the other hand if I'm spending 2 minutes debugging why my microphone isn't working or why my 2nd monitor blinks out when my computer goes to sleep, that is a waste of my time. If I can figure out any general Windows or MacOS software in 5 minutes but need to read a manpage or ask my partner how to do some trivial piece of work or why I can't edit a document my coworker sent but everyone else can, you are intentionally sabotaging my life with your decisions.
There's many things that are up for negotiation and consideration in a relationship, but wasting someone's time for the sake of some self righteous quest for privacy (that argument is moot btw, considering that you have now encouraged your partner to take risky actions such as finding new software and finding new ways of doing things without a "it just works" approach) crosses a line.
If you use a cellphone, have a WiFi router, don't use a VPN with no records at the router level, or are located within a city, you already don't have privacy no matter how much you personally believe you do.
Source: I work a lot with adtech and my partner works in a personal identification business
Linux has been around for 30 years and still has not acquired any significant consumer share.
Yet you've decided that the best solution for her is an OS that requires debugging miscellaneous hardware and driver issues and runs a mishmash of software with no consistent UI language.
As opposed to MacOS and Windows which just work, used throughout the world on a daily basis by the majority of the world, and have tangible results in terms of productivity benefit.
Honestly I think there are bigger underlying issues here, like listening to your partner and understanding their needs instead of forcing your opinion on someone who doesn't want it.
That's really not a fair comparison. There are plenty of people who are elderly or dealing with disc injuries where they are prone to losing their grip or slipping a phone when moving about, picking it out of their pocket, etc.
While you may be in good health, it's important to remember not everyone is the same and some people are dealing with a variety of issues.
That has still not changed with the latest Android updates. Yes the home screen might look "similar" but once you get past that first surface layer interaction, to people like her the Android system and UX design language are a mishmash of incoherent ideas and visions whereas on an Apple device things work as she would intuitively expect consistently regardless of the app she's using or what she's trying to do with her phone.