> how much user-hostile most of mainstream software products have become, and how much people are willing to tolerate that

Yeah. Software isn't about us users anymore. It's about corporations, their needs, their profits, their rights, their platforms, their everything. We're just incidental. It's getting worse every year and it feels like there's no end in sight.

Stallman warned everyone about this and very few people cared. Free software exists to combat this but there's increasingly no point since the hardware itself is becoming hostile. What's the point of free software if we can't run it?

I just feel so hopeless about all this. Computers had such potential. To see them reduced to advertising appliances is just sad.