Where do people get ideas like this? In what world does this make sense?
You have several choices:
1. Work with a supplier and sign a contract guaranteeing support for whatever period of time you want at a mutually agreeable price
2. Host your own stack to depend on and support it for however long you want
3. Accept that you're paying for a service and that it can go away at any time.
Companies aren't obligated to support things forever and they aren't obligated to open them up when they no longer feel it's worth supporting them. Claiming they should is absurd.
This sentence has no meaning in a modern context. The US government has declared bike lanes to be "DEI". Everything is political.
"Choice" doesn't work. Everyone is under information and attention span overload. There isn't time to research what goes into the food you eat much less everything else going on in your life.
You make them get the results and guidance in writing, and if they forgot to get it in writing, you have them contact the provider and get it in writing. You don't send a tape recorder.
I'm tired of having this debate over and over. I still use Linux devices regularly at work and have a T420S and various RPi-like devices that run it, so it's not like I'm going off memories of 2010. I owned a Framework Laptop (designed to run Linux) and got rid of it in no small part because the battery life was so much worse on Linux than it was in Windows. I've worked at Google who (circa 2019) had an incredible team of IT specialists and specifically selected hardware and still struggled to get Bluetooth on Linux to work reliably for everyone.
I don't want to have to carefully pick hardware for compatibility. I want first class support for pen and touch. I value thin, light, and long battery over the ability to run a custom bootloader.
In medicine, it's a regular trick to find some new patentable formulation or tweak to switch to manufacturing shortly before the original patents expire, so that you continue to have a patent-protected product.
It would not surprise me if something similar was happening here: HP's current cartridges have at least one piece that is under active patent protection and they don't manufacture any designs that have no patent protection. I don't know enough to state that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
How can we reconcile "viewed fewer than 200 times since 2010" with the absurd number of crawlers overloading the entire internet from every AI company out there?
I've been programming computers and tinkering with all sorts of hardware for more than 30 years. I first used FreeBSD in.....2001? and Linux not long after that. I've programmed OS code, I've grudgingly written VHDL, I've assembled a sound card for the Apple II I still have running - all this to say that I believe I'm in your tiny few.
And I'm so tired. Tired of having to debug all the things. Tired of having to pay attention to them. Tired of setting them up "just once" and then months later having to reverse engineer my own work because something failed.
So I don't. I leave nearly all my devices stock. I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. And I don't want personalized hardware with any electronics in it (bespoke wooden objects, those I love and make).
Many games are held online. In person, computers get smaller all the time (and there are bathroom breaks etc.). The history of trying to cheat at chess, casino games, and more with concealed computers is far too large a topic for one reply.
On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
You are dramatically underestimating the cost of manufacturing, stocking, and distributing an entirely different SKU and probably also dramatically overestimating the number of users of alternative keyboard layouts in the world.
Put another way: I am absolutely certain that more users would get a Mac with a Dvorak layout by mistake and want to return it than would actually purchase and keep one.
That happens with Veracrypt as well. I have plenty of friends and family who can't remember their WiFi password without remembering where it was written down, and they use that far more often than an encryption recovery code.
In fleets users wouldn't even be setting up their own code.
I've installed Windows thousands of times on dozens, probably hundreds of systems - long ago I even worked on the Windows team and was installing it every day - and in the last 20 years (yes, I ran Vista Ultimate in 2006) I've had to deal with Bitlocker recovery prompts perhaps 20 times - not 20 times per machine, 20 times across all of them.
Veracrypt is more difficult to set up - whether on one machine or a fleet. Bitlocker is a few buttons in the UI, configurable via Group Policy, and so much more.