>Linux users often choose Linux because they want to be in control of their data and devices, cloud services are about giving control of that away to companies.
You may have been able to get away with that kind of broad generalization a decade ago (actually mo -- that's not true, AWS and Canonical's push to cloud started MORE than a decade ago. Google too. Let's call it 15 years ago), but that is certainly not the case now.
And frankly, I think putting Linux users in a box where only FOSS drivers are allowed (even though Nvidia GPUs are doing much of the best work for CUDA) and to use it you have to be lock-step with an ideology that very few people will ever be able to be "pure" enough to follow completely (assuming they want to follow that ideology in the first place), does the Linux ecosystem a major disservice.
I would posit that the vast majority of developers and end-users who access and use Linux on a daily basis are doing it at least in part through a cloud service -- whether its a cheap VPS or a large cluster of machines.
*Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure. These are my thoughts and do not represent those of others. I primarily use a Mac but have been playing with/arguing about Linux for 20 years -- going back to when I was 15 years old. I also use WSL on Windows.
I have mixed feelings about closed-source blobs tainting my kernel. AMD did a terrific job open-sourcing their driver stack. I use Nvidia for deep learning out of necessity but I resent it, as I'm completely locked into X11 because they can't be assed to implement GBM. Nvidia has also gotten a stranglehold over the DL and HPC markets with CUDA, causing a chicken-and-egg problem where OpenCL isn't well supported because none of the cards that require it have serious power, and it's not worth AMD putting lots of money into the HPC market because it's locked into CUDA.
NVidia needs Linux more than Linux needs NVidia (imagine competing on HPC while running Windows-only!) And yet, they contribute nothing to the kernel and stymie efforts towards unified standards like GBM.
it's shades of DirectX all over again. that's the problem with tainting.
Well we are talking about using Linux on a desktop machine exclusively, only then a demand for a non-cloud version of MS Office would make sense, I think. This subset of people are probably more likely to care about control of their data that just some people that dual-boot or use linux on their android phone.
You may have been able to get away with that kind of broad generalization a decade ago (actually mo -- that's not true, AWS and Canonical's push to cloud started MORE than a decade ago. Google too. Let's call it 15 years ago), but that is certainly not the case now.
And frankly, I think putting Linux users in a box where only FOSS drivers are allowed (even though Nvidia GPUs are doing much of the best work for CUDA) and to use it you have to be lock-step with an ideology that very few people will ever be able to be "pure" enough to follow completely (assuming they want to follow that ideology in the first place), does the Linux ecosystem a major disservice.
I would posit that the vast majority of developers and end-users who access and use Linux on a daily basis are doing it at least in part through a cloud service -- whether its a cheap VPS or a large cluster of machines.
*Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure. These are my thoughts and do not represent those of others. I primarily use a Mac but have been playing with/arguing about Linux for 20 years -- going back to when I was 15 years old. I also use WSL on Windows.