My intention is not to dismiss the blog's argument about using Linux but my experience running an Ubuntu LTS in my main computer has been straightforward, easy and as problem-free as one could expect. I'm sure other Linux distros offer a similar experience.
I get that every person is different, so what works for someone might be dysfunctional for someone else. But I wonder if there's a growing tendency to over-emphasise things that aren't "perfect" or the perceived friction caused by different ways to approach or solve things.
Perhaps it's my own personal bias but the same way I like using Ubuntu, I think Windows is fine, as well as MacOs. They're fine the same way many other products I use are. Often, I struggle to find big differences between the stuff I use. I mean, I can see the differences (often small, rarely big), but I'm the same guy. I'm not that special.
While I agree with your suggestion (that's what I've doing for years), I'm not sure the "almost not effort" point is helpful or realistic when it comes to a huge majority of users.
Apart from people who are knowledgeable or at least curious enough to search for alternative options, I suspect many people don't even know what a domain is or that they could register one for them to use. The jump from "why pay for email if Gmail/Outlook is free?" to "register a personal domain and use it for your emails" is too big.
I don't have the ideal solution but what I've suggested to friends and relatives is they should consider paying for their personal email accounts. Most of them don't care but some do and, as a result, at least try to understand what they want or need and are willing to pay for.
I'm not surprised that the article has that vibe and that you noticed it. Works in Progress, the magazine that published the article, is notorious for having a preference for market-oriented solutions, "laissez faire" policies and neoliberalism. They are open about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
It is practically the same, you're beholden to all the laws of the European Union without having a say in them. Kind of like Puerto Rico, which is still considered a US State despite having no votes in congress.
The best book I've ever read isn't the best book I've read but one that connects me with a particular moment: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.
It was the start of summer school holidays back in the late 1980s, in my teenage years. I went to my local library and, because I didn't know what I wanted to read, I decided to pick one book blindly from the fiction section. I didn't know what book I had borrowed until I got home. I had never heard about Bulgakov or that particular novel. I had no easy way to know who that writer was or if the book was good or not. I was tempted to return it. But I didn't.
I read the book over several weeks of a particularly boring (and lonely) summer. I enjoyed reading it although I didn't love it. Looking back, I suppose that book gave me something I needed in a completely random way.
The fact that, as you say, "it's just a military base" is the consequence of the forced eviction of the local population (around 1,500 people) in 1968 by the US and the UK.
That’s not a lot of people. More people probably lost their homes to Hurricane Helene just this past couple of weeks. And the average Mauritian wasn’t even born in 1968.
Saigon fell in 1975. Millions of people fled the country in fear for their lives or gave up their children, with hundreds of thousands dying in the process. The fall of South Vietnam was a humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale, and basically no one cares about it anymore. And you’re expecting me to care about 1500 people being peacefully resettled from one island to another? All of this handwringing is a disingenuous excuse to vilify Britain and the West in general from the very same people who sympathize and make excuses for the Vietnamese communists even to this day.
Edit:
If we were holding a consistent standard here, we would have to say that the Vietnamese government should withdraw from illegally occupied South Vietnam and return it to the people who were violently displaced in 1975. Nobody advocates for this. Vietnam has somewhat liberalized into the kind of country that doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore and the refugees of 1975 and their descendants have built new lives in the countries they ended up in, including the United States. This sort of revanchism causes more problems than it solves, and there’s no obvious limit to it. Should Turkey return Constantinople to the Greeks? If we want to learn anything from history, it shouldn’t be a catalog of ancestral grudges to be settled; it should be that holding onto these grudges achieves nothing.
I get that every person is different, so what works for someone might be dysfunctional for someone else. But I wonder if there's a growing tendency to over-emphasise things that aren't "perfect" or the perceived friction caused by different ways to approach or solve things.
Perhaps it's my own personal bias but the same way I like using Ubuntu, I think Windows is fine, as well as MacOs. They're fine the same way many other products I use are. Often, I struggle to find big differences between the stuff I use. I mean, I can see the differences (often small, rarely big), but I'm the same guy. I'm not that special.