I think we, as tech activists and enthusiasts, need to stop fighting so-called 'foot-gun' features and things we think are dangerous for users - since that's kind of what got us into this mess in the first place. The overly-paternalistic attitude of software like iOS, MacOS, and Windows, combined with capitalism's obvious lust for money, resulted in things like being unable to manually install apps from files, or not have a microsoft/apple account connected to the internet, or locking what should be a basic setting behind a registery edit, all justified by the fact that, in the wrong hands, such features could be catastrophic. And yeah - they could be.
The fact that a feature could be catastrophic also means that it's powerful, and thus that it should be exposed to the user, if in a controlled manner. By hiding everything away until apps automatically open and operating systems update when you restart, these companies make users of their software and devices passive consumers, not users of tools. No drill prevents you from drilling in the wrong place or with the wrong bit on the wrong material, and no saw prevents you from cutting your piece too short - and I think we can all agree that they shouldn't. Not only because there are legitimate reasons for that (Such as using wood bits on really soft plexiglass cuz you didn't have the right bit). but also because you own the tool and it should be your mistake to make.
This doesn't mean making a product deliberately obtuse or difficult to use, it means making it logical, powerful, and transparent. A package manager that allows you to update at will with sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper update at any time for any reason, that allows you to negotiate complexities of updates and conflicts is actually easier to use than a windows update that breaks your drivers and software and leaves you having to navigate through Windows' obtuse 'safe mode restart' menu, provided you have a bit of knowledge. And yes, you can make mistakes, of course you can - but systems should allow users to develop that knowledge, allow them to make mistakes, allow them to fail and allow them to recover. I know people who stumble through using a PC every time, bouncing into rubber walls, and they get so frustrated when their PC doesn't let them do something stupid. They'll never understand why the PC won't let them do something stupid, because they've never had a chance to build up that intuition. Baby Linux User me failed a lot, and relied on web forums and reddit a lot, and now I have the Magical Ability to solve problems before they even occur. The thing that kicked me off windows, when my janky regedit setup to change the font alongside rainmaker finally broke with the Nvidia drivers, never happens on Linux - because I don't have to change the font through janky regedit setups, nor do I have to use a shitty 3rd party app for desktop widgets, nor do I have to deal with a weird proprietary app to install drivers.
It's more intuitive, more user friendly precisely because it lets down the guardrails and lets you fuck up. Yes, you can accidentally set the font to all blank characters. I did this on my first i3 setup. Yes, you can accidentally install AMD instead of Nvidia drivers. But when you are done, you have not only 'set up' a system that works, you have all the tools to maintain it. And because of that, when one of the things in your stack breaks - when the devs of Manjaro outed themselves as TERFs or had a corruption scandal - you can just switch. You aren't stuck to an OS or an app or a driver or a package, because you understand roughly how those work. I'm not a genius who knows how kernels work or how a package manager really operates under the hood, I'm just a user (for the most part, I have written a custom launcher in C# and QML for KDE, and have contributed to the KDE desktop), but I am also not a slave whose knowledge is stuck within one ecosystem.
This, in my opinion, is a lot of why we have such awful tech monopolies these days. When 'The Internet' is just Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, and Amazon, even seeing a bare IP is scary, let alone actually hosting a website independent of these rubber guardrails or going to one - I have a friend who refuses to go to any website they don't recognize (even if it's like. newegg and completely secured) because they're worried it's a 'virus'. They're stuck within the rubber guardrails, just like the people who don't know where to shop BUT Amazon or don't know where to watch movies BUT Netflix. Extend this to OS's, phones, TVs, every little tiny thing in our lives that people are 'locked-in' to, and you can see how these rubber guardrails, this sheer capitalism and paternalism masked as 'user friendliness' is so utterly profitable. Computers need to be less user friendly and more user-controlled.
