I agree that the school environment should be more motivating, but there's no way to compete with apps and games designed to be addictive, even adults have trouble avoiding their phones at work.
Oppression breeds rebellion, why relying on a software you have zero control over, that the company that owns it respects you so litle that they pre install adware and spyware, learn to use Linux or BSD, you don't have to use it all the time, but learn the basics, understand how this machine you use so much works, seize that litle piece of freedom back, and even if you choose to use windows again, after knowing more of how things work, you will be more able to force it in working your way.
Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.
The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it's completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don't touch X directly and won't touch Wayland either.
Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.
Back when IE was on top and Firefox was the best browser, firefox started to put a lot of bad updates, then chrome came, it was faster and firefox started to lose its marketshare, for while firefox only peformed well on linux, by the time quantum came out and it's performance was good on windows again, Chrome was already the new IE, but Google is way better at managing this leadership it than Microsoft ever was, the only technical problem it has is devouring RAM.
In my opinion, gecko being so tied to the browser is also a problem. There's a ton of browsers using Blink, that gives google a lot of control over how the web will evolve. Having other browsers using gecko that aren't Firefox forks would be great.
It's not only supply and demand, on some countries there's more empty houses than homeless people, rich people and banks rather leave the houses empty than lower rent or price, governments should step in and tax empty houses.
Marketing, and the fact that phones are now super boring, everything is web based, there's no more cool apps, everything is just a frontend for some web service, or a damn webview.
The historical feature gap between Androids and iPhones is mostly gone, and since the tech doesn't matter anymore, marketing can go a long way.
The article is also very us centric, in places where cost matters more, the iPhone is seen as a status symbol, just like every other thing that costs a lot for no reason.
I dont really like android. Symbian and even windows phones performed better on inferior hardware. Their weird lifecycle seems to me wasteful and blurs the line between what's running or not. It only became stable once hardware got way better. It's a shame that every other option failed. because the only thing worse than android is an apple controlled environment.
No one should be forced to go to war, trying everything they can to escape it is understandable, the only bad thing is that this is something that only the rich can do, but in their place i would do the same.
Well, Apple uses a Unix like OS, that have a lot of nice things in common with Linux.