Adopting a GNU or a Penguin in an Era of Mass Surveillance, War, and Worse
THE gradual trot towards BSD and GNU/Linux is both measurable and very much real. Over a decade ago the 'free' UNIXes had already consolidated their dominance at the back and Android became the world's dominant operating system (for the client side, not counting tiny devices with microprocessors) several years ago, mostly or at least partly at Microsoft's expense (Windows continues to shrink and resources for maintaining it are lacking due to mass layoffs).
As I am typing this, I am surrounded by 10 monitors, 12 mousing devices, and 7 keyboards. All of them run on GNU/Linux and the machine I currently type this on has had an uptime of nearly one year.
In technical terms, GNU/Linux is way ahead of the competition. In legal terms, it empowers the users a lot more than Apple and Microsoft "consumers" can imagine.
Right now we see faster adoption of GNU/Linux in developing economies and countries that are wary of US dominance (or subjected to sanctions). In the future, however, the tides will change and more people (even in richer and more privileged countries) will recognise the advantages of adopting a freedom-respecting platform. Western regimes keep passing more and more oppressive laws; sometimes the only way to bypass such oppression is purely technical, i.e. choosing technical solutions to overcome superficial obstacles (ciphers with back doors, for instance, cannot be truly imposed on Free/libre messaging software).
The list of 'excuses' for not using a free/libre platform (such as BSD and GNU/Linux) is getting shorter each year. █