This reminds me of Louis Rossman's Clippy rant. No, Clippy wasn't "just there to help". He represented not the end of some bygone era, but the beginning of the current one: in which operating systems attempt to get ahead of the user and shape their behavior to the vendor's needs, rather than simply doing what the user commands.

Similarly, Windows XP represented the beginning of the current, telemetry-encrusted, handholdy, locky-downy era in computing, not the idyllic past. It was the first Windows to feature product activation, and to send vital data about your system back to Microsoft for license enforcement purposes. When I read that news, I noped out of Windows pretty much for good.

It was also released in the era when Microsoft started seriously talking about Trustworthy Computing, whose fruition is the very problem the author laments. The only reasons why Windows back then wasn't even more locked down is because of backwards compatibility concerns, and with the DOJ breathing hotly down their necks they could ill afford the backlash if they tried. But the XP-era Palladium initiative is just now coming into reality, and may be in full force in Windows 12, which will doubtless require a signed code path from boot loader through application code.

There's also the issue that in the past, most Linux users had exposure to Unix, even if it was just their collegiate shell account, and so had some passing knowledge of Unix culture and values. People who weren't up to speed on this culture were richly rewarded for being at least willing to learn. These days, most Linux users come from a background of exclusively using Windows or (the non-Unixy bits of) macOS, are disappointed when Linux doesn't look and behave exactly like those, and if they be developers, feel the need to Change Fucking Everything so that it does. This perfectly explains GNOME. It's deeply embedded in GNOME's DNA. The founding document of GNOME is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", where the definition of "not suck" is literally "look and behave exactly like Windows". So we're already well into a culture of least-common-denominator-ism, even in the open source world, for ~20y and counting.

I dunno, maybe that last bit is a bit too "old man yells at cloud". But the 90s hit way different in computing, even compared to the immediately following decade. (Linux was legitimately cyberpunk. Instead of the anodyne, if not exactly welcoming, blue splash screen of Windows, we were greeted by the text-mode chatter of dozens of kernel and user-mode systems, each line having been written by some human whose name you could find by examining the source code or its history. The voices of the street finding its own uses for newly-cheap PCs.)

I think the turning point was literally when we started booting into Windows. Before that, you had DOS, which is basically a program launcher and collection of system utilities. You could even run Windows from DOS by typing "win" (which ran "win.com"). You knew everything that was running on your computer, from the drivers you installed in CONFIG.SYS to the TSRs loaded in AUTOEXEC.BAT.

But then people started putting "win" at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT, which is a personal choice, okay. And then Microsoft shipped Windows 95 and inverted the control structure. The computer then ran whatever Microsoft wanted it to run, and you could get a terminal "window" to run DOS commands. But you had ceded control of your computer to Microsoft and the gods of complexity.

Oh, and if the author thought that modding Half-Life by changing a couple images around was creative freedom, his mind will be blown by 80s home computers, which booted directly into BASIC. Growing up, I learned that a computer is to be programmed as a pencil is to be written with, from machines whose first act upon power-on was to cry out to be programmed. Since 32-bit Windows, computers haven't even shipped with BASIC in a meaningful sense. Computing, for most people, boiled down to "using applications"—word processor, spreadsheet, browser. We've only just dumbed these down even more, including shortening the term to "apps".