The fact that it’s immutable isn’t necessarily good for people new to Linux. If something does go wrong, or the user wants to change something significant, most of what they read online about how to do that will not work like many other distros.
For experienced users, sure, there probably isn’t much difference.
I was probably 10 when my best friend (at the time) and I would play Super Contra on the NES for hours. We loved everything about it. We’d get as far as we could. We’d give each other lives. We could sing the soundtrack. When it was game over, we just restarted it.
Those days were simple and beautiful. I don’t think another game could give me anything like that experience, since it wasn’t really entirely about the game.
Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:
Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.
Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.
Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.
In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.
Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.
I think the issue is a bit more nuanced. Graphics have gotten so good that it is relatively easy to get character animations which sit in the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is bad. You can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics everywhere, but if your characters are in the uncanny valley, the overall aesthetic is more similar to a game which didn’t have the photorealism at all.
In the past, the goalpost was at a different spot, so putting all the resources towards realism still wouldn’t get you into the valley, and everyone just thought it looked great.
What they don’t do is make money hand over fist without the need to design more product, as happens with subscription-based, game-as-a-service multiplayer titles. Some companies don’t want to make good games. They just want to make good money.