The reality is that nobody wants the alternative. Another commenter was replying to you pitching a mobile debian version, and went on to explain that said mobile debian version isn't usable ... and that's probably because the size of the community of people actually interested in it is so vanishingly tiny that they can't sustain development.
It's like watching the stillborn OpenPandora or GP2x, and discovering that "devices bought almost exclusively to pirate SNES/SEGA games" have no devs writing games for their market because ... well ... you know ...
———
Woke: using OSS as a dev model because it's inherently more efficient/effective and leads to better software
Broke: using OSS because "muh rights".
The app store is a condom (or a covid mask). It's not all about "you"; it doesn't matter a damned sight if YOU are careful, or if YOU are responsible. Other people can make god-awful decisions that screw you over, and you have no power to stop them. Or rather: the app store IS your power to stop them.
I can't count the number of times I've seen windows users get duped by phishing that gives a bad actor root access. If that's your family member, that's YOUR problem; it doesn't matter if you were super careful — if your 18 year old son fucks up because he just didn't realize he was getting hacked, well — you're liable. That's what regulations are about; just like the FDA, just everything else.
I like having a platform where there is no fear. Same reason I like vaccines, same reason I like food safety regulations, etc. It's about network effects.
———
The worst thing about all this stuff is: when tragedies like this happened back in the day (and I remember, clearly, friends having their drives get wiped by script kiddies) — you suffer in silence. You sob and cry about whatever happened to you, and try to "raise awareness" in the open-source community about how maybe we should do something better, and nobody listens.
A lot of this stuff in the OSS community reminds me of gun nuts and school shootings; people wring their hands when a personal tragedy happens, the solution is right in front of them should they dare to actually adopt it, but they refuse to adopt it because it's ideologically untenable. So they just pretend the problem never happened until it personally hits their own family — and the worst thing is watching their friends, around them, engage in the same denial.
The two "real consequences" are losing your data (drive wipes, randomware, etc), and financial fraud (someone getting your CC number or bank access). I personally know people who've been hit by this. It's heartwrenching when it happens.
The real dark bit there is that if someone else posts something publicly, but your own stuff is "obscured" in some way, they may be able to (falsely) claim prior art, as the original author.
Amongst other things, hosting something on github is a public ledger of authorship.
From my observation point as a gamer who plays a lot of strategy games, he did actually come up with something quite novel (when it was new). However, what he built is now extremely common in the strategy genre - practically every game out there is doing exactly what he's describing. They all independently invented similar solutions to the same problems.
He genuinely just seems to be unaware that these other games exist, which really doesn't surprise me because there's so much stuff out there, and because the strategy genre's become (with a few high-profile exceptions) a sort of under-the-radar AA-grade experience, where people are putting out solid games with good presentation value, but they're not carpet-bombing the world with marketing, or trying to sell them at Walmart. I'm an avid gamer and there are entire genres, with multi-million dollar titles in them that I'm mostly (or completely) oblivious to.
There are just a lot of games that, despite having production quality that beats the pants off a lot of 90s/00s games, no longer bother doing "push" advertising that intrudes into your life, because it's just no longer economical to do.
Yeah, I was having a long discussion about this with a friend, and this is precisely where the misconception lies.
The problem with the 32->64 transition (or x86->ARM) doesn't lie with active businesses failing to "get with the program" and update their software - it lies with abandonware. With software that's been put out either by defunct companies or sometimes literally deceased programmers.
In some niches, this sort of stuff is really, really common - generally this is the case if there's a really stable API for building things, like VST plugins, and if the niche in question has a lot of failed businesses. A lot of times in the pro audio space, a musician will spend a large part of their career "collecting" a ton of little one-off sound libraries and fx plugins, because these are the only way they can get the computer to produce that exact kind of sound they're looking for. This collection slowly builds up over the course of, say, a decade - just like a graphic designer would collect fonts.
The difference is that unlike fonts, which last had their "greet the reaper" moment back when bitmap fonts got scrapped in the mid-90s (despite OpenType becoming a thing, TrueType fonts from the 90s still work fine, some 30 years later), any audio plugins that aren't compatible with the cpu architecture die out. And that's just really brutal to a working musician.
You can't get an update to most of those because there's a ton of attrition in that industry; lots of small-time plugin makers realize pretty fast that it's a very difficult place to make any kind of ROI, so they quit after a few years.
--
Games are in a really similar place - they're a business slaughterhouse where most companies that attempt to make something discover they're not going to cover the initial investment, so after the game's produced it typically gets a couple of years of barebones support, and then gets abandoned - or the company just croaks. Any kind of rewrite is completely out of the question. The tragedy is that most of these games are pretty good and fun, they're just not economically viable.
I love apple moving the tech forward, but we desperately need a better emulation solution, and/or we've got to get the industry off of coding for bare metal.