I’ll bite. I’m not necessarily the new generation, but I understand the viewpoint you’re arguing against.

I am the on the more technical side, making me the help desk for friends and family. For the vast majority of people, the safest and easiest thing to hand them is a chromebook. If they want more capability or better hardware, then they will step up into OS X or windows.

They don’t care about the UX until they have to care about the UX because it’s not working the way it was intended. Then they want to fix it back to the way it was (unhide icons or the task bar). They don’t grasp how computers should work, and while I’ve tried explaining, it just doesn’t take. So they remember how to get to email by clicking icons.

99% of people for casual use would just be confused if you dropped them into a command line. There’s a reason things weren’t as popular before we made advances like we have today.

So - for the vast majority of users - an upgrade is an annoyance and downtime that is there during the 10-30 minutes a day they may need the machine (not the 10-30 minutes they are taking a break from the machine). They don’t understand, and don’t care about, the security updates.

Apple and Microsoft and Samsung and Google have no obligation to you, an edge customer, to create a lot more opportunities to screw things up for the vast majority of users who would just get confused. They have no obligation to enable users to perform illegal activity on their hardware. And they can put whatever they want to in the user agreement for their hardware and software. Your option as a consumer is to not buy it. You can complain about it, but that ship has sailed, as the vast majority of users don’t even understand the complaint and the potential implication.

But no. If you want a UX that’s fully configurable and secure and has privacy protections in place and places emphasis on security over convenience, a private, cloud focused, company like Google or Microsoft or Apple is not the right tree to be barking up.

It's not broken at all... At least not for me, being a user for several decades now. I use it at work while billing quite a lot of money so if it was breaking, I would have a massive problem. :)

I would say this though - the machine you run it on matters. The hardware matters. Some hardware runs great, other hardware will give you problems. This is due to driver support either being good or bad, not Linux itself, but the distinction is meaningless for the user.

Use a thinkpad, with Pop OS, to get you started. It will just work.

It is sarcasm. But obviously I communicated this poorly. Linux actually is more comfortable for development. macOS is broken by design. MacOS X in the old times was a dream to work on. But now with all "privacy" features from Apple - anything is a problem, and the quality of software from Cupertino is lowest ever.