>It's not about us older folk, but the computing environment itself.

Whether you like it or not, the computing environment of today is a product of the labor and financial participation of older folk of the past. Google, Facebook and Microsoft weren't built by Zoomers. Everyone contributed to the current state of things, either direct thought labor and fiance or indirectly by just using the products.

>We're heading into a world of centralized control where your personal computer is mostly a "thin client" for a bunch of online services

And who built those online services?

People make it sound like Azure, AWS, Facebook, X, etc were just snapped into existence one day by Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, and aren't decades of labor by hundreds of thousands of workers who voluntarily did this in exchange for cash.

> This is in contrast to the 1990-2010 era where software was generally "buy once use forever" and general purpose, open hardware was the norm. You could hook your homemade server up to the internet with a minimum of fuss and start running a service or forum or website or whatever.

I know, but how does remanenceing help here? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube same how you can't turn back housing affordability back to how it was in 1995, or bring back those lucrative union manufacturing jobs that could support a family from just bolting bumpers to a Chevy on an assembly line.

Those are all one-time things of the past now, never to return again in the same form. You have to work with the cards you've been dealt today, not moan about how much better the past was since that doesn't help anyone.